Why Does The Link Page Have A PR Zero?

Writen by Andrew Williams

For beginners, link exchange campaigns can be a minefield of problems. For example, here is a question I was asked:

“Hi Andy, I have noticed that a lot of sites that request a link exchange from me may have a PR 5 or 6 on their home page and when I click through to the links page there is a PR 0. This is very disappointing and I don’t exchange with them. Should I reconsider this practice or am I right in thinking they are doing something to prevent PR from passing to their links pages? Best Regards, Troy”

There are many things to consider when exchanging links.

The above question asks whether you should consider linking to a PR 5 site when the links page is a PR 0.

What are your thoughts on that?

The question you should ask yourself is “Why does the homepage have a PR5 and the links page a PR0?”.

There can be a few different reasons for this.

Reason #1 – the links page is new and has not had a PR assigned to it in the Google toolbar (that does not mean it has no PR, just that the toolbar has not been updated to reflect its PR).

This case is easy to spot. Look at the URL of the links page. Then go to the homepage and View the source of the homepage in a text editor (from the View Menu in Explorer, select Source).

Do a search of the source for the links page filename. e.g. if the links page is called links.html, search the source code for links.html.

If you find a link on the homepage to the links page, chances are the links page is new and has not had time to be assigned a PR in the toolbar yet. In this case, I would consider the link to this site.

You could also go to the Way Back Machine: http://www.archive.org/ ..and type in the links page URL. If the Way Back Machine has no record of it, it may be new (though it is possible to prevent the WBM from caching your site).

Now, before we move on, check that link to the links page in the source again. Make sure that there is no dynamic linking going on. While it is not always easy to spot, the introduction of the “nofollow” tag in recent months, has meant that many non-techie webmasters have been able to create dynamic links, quickly, easily, and without much technical knowledge. If you see the word “nofollow” in the link HTML pointing to the links page, then this webmaster is not passing PR to the links page. In fact, worse than that is the fact that the search engines wont even find and index the links page.

This is a case of one webmaster trying to cheat you out of PR. Don’t link to them.

Reason #2 – Links page is not being linked to, or is linked to using a dynamic link.

If you do not find a link to the links page on the homepage of the site, or the link uses one of the forms of dynamic linking, then I would not recommend you link to that site. The links page will get no PR, and wont even be found by the search engines, so you get no benefit. It is possible the links page does have a link pointing to it from another page, but let’s look at that as a separate issue.

Reason #3 – links page is buried deep in the navigation of the website. Some webmasters bury the link to their links page deep within their site, so that the only way a search engine spider will find the links page is by following 3 or 4 links from the homepage. When this is done, very little (if any) PR flows to the links page. Again, I would not link to a site like this. You wont get much benefit.

Reason #4 – Multiple links pages bury the page your link is found on.

On some websites, there are so many reciprocal partners, that links are often split across 10s (or even 100s) of pages. For a search engine spider to find the page you are on, it would require following link after link on these links pages until it reaches yours. Again, by the time it gets there, very little (if any) PR will have flowed to the page your link is one.

For points #3 & #4, my advice is simple. Start at the homepage, and see how many clicks it takes you to navigate to the page your link is on. If it is more than 2 clicks away, think carefully about exchanging links. You may not get much out of the deal.

Reason #5 – a sneaky one here. Check for a robots.txt file on the site that is requesting the link exchange. If there is one, make sure that there is no command that disallows the spiders from accessing the links page. This is a technique that will prevent the search engines spiders from visiting the links page, so no PR, and no benefit, is passed to your site. This is a definite one to avoid.

Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter.

Link Swapping – How to Win the Website Marketing Game in 3 Easy Steps

Writen by Michael Turner

If you are a webmaster, chances are one of your main concerns is the ranking of your website with the major search engines. Since you are concerned with this, you are probably involved in acquiring links to your websites on the Internet to further increase the link popularity or your site. The reason gaining links to your website is important is because many of the large and popular search engines focus on the amount of links there are to your site when they begin ranking your site. The more links you have, the higher your website will rank. So, if you are not familiar with how to increase your marketing by acquiring links then you need to learn. Fortunately, it is not difficult and will not take a lot of effort, but you will need to be open minded, patient, and always play fair. Consider the following suggestions when you are beginning your link swapping or reciprocal linking campaign.

-Similar Market

The first thing you need to do is find web pages that target a similar market as your website does. It does not have to be the exact market, but a derivative of that market will work as well because you can spread your links out among a variety of different sub-markets and get really great coverage. Regardless, identify the markets you are shooting for and then you will be ready to look for the sites that target these markets.

-Quality Sites

Now that you know the types of markets you want to attract, you will be able to choose websites that are not in direct competition with you and still attract the same types of visitors. Do some research on the sites available and only choose the sites that have high rankings in the search engines and are quality sites that will reflect the quality of your site as well. If you have links to your site on poorly designed websites that are not very popular you will not get much traffic from these.

-Personal Contact

You have your target websites nailed down and now all you have to do is contact them. The best thing to do in this situation is send them a personal e-mail. Avoid using a software program in this case, as you really want to personalize your note to them as much as possible. The reason for this is people are more likely to respond to a real person and the extra time it takes you to write the email shows that getting a link from them is important to you. So, send an e-mail saying you have added a link to their site on your website and ask them politely to add a link back to yours. Also, provide all of the information they might possibly need so adding your link will be easy and take as little time as possible. When you contact people in this manner, you are significantly more likely to gain links. This will take more time and effort, but it also has a higher payoff as well.

Michael Turner shows you exactly how to increase web site traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it today at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Steps for Search Engine Optimization – Placing Keywords, Part I

Writen by Partha Bhattacharya

Experts who deal in SEO (search engine optimization) are of the opinion that in order to rank well in SERPs’ (search engine result pages), each webpage of your site must include 2 to 3 keywords (rather keyphrases) spread ‘evenly’ over the page. This will enable search engines to understand the importance of those keywords vis-

Why White Hat SEO Wins Over Black Hat SEO Every Time

Writen by Rob Oresteen

I don’t care about the moral or un-moral implications that seem to travel the web these days about what is right or what is wrong as far as internet marketing. The web is the web. We are lucky to have it. In a free culture, we will always have the seedy, less-desirable elements that float our way. Such is freedom.

When it comes to bad behavior on the net, overwhelmingly it is spam that annoys most of us. We really don’t feel like deleting unwanted messages from our in boxes on a daily basis. We are also tired managing (or is it managing us?) our spam filters. Spam filters are a good try, but they too waste our time when we have to dig through the spam folder to find Aunt Millie’s invitation to Easter.

To me the only things that are “bad behavior” on the net are as follows:

1. Email spam.

2. Comment spam on someone’s blog.

3. Cloaked or stealth pages that re-direct to a porn site or a financial scam site.

What do these have in common? They all affect a human being. We have to take time to delete spam in our inbox, spam off our blogs, and hopefully, not have our 14 year old daughters directed to some porn site when they thought they were getting the latest must-have for AOL’s instant messenger.

If I could employ a black hat strategy that would net me $100,000 a month selling worthwhile and honest products, I’d do it all day long and smile all the way to the bank. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few people (relatively speaking), black hat strategies tend to work for a while, then seem to be ineffective once Google and the other search engines catch on and neuter it’s methods.

Remember keyword stuffing in the meta tags back a few years ago? That worked for a while. Common sense should have told us that if you can stuff 100 keywords in your page, so can the guy across town. You both have the “same” or similar page according to Google.

If keyword stuffing worked today I would do it. I don’t care what a purist may say. It’s my page and if Google wants to pick it up and rank it, so be it. No one has a right to tell me how to design and populate my web pages. But like most methods used to trick the search engines, they end up being detected and weeded out of the system. I’m not saying cloaked pages don’t work – they do. It is entirely possible to fool the spider bots. However, Google knows this and look at suspect pages with a real live human. Game over for your domain.

My point is I haven’t adopted a self-richeous philosophy about what is right or wrong for the Web. That’s for each of us to figure out. I think black hat techniques eventually help white hat techniques. As Google and the others get wise to new tricks and methods used to fool their spiders, it ultimately makes white hat methods all the more relevant and long lasting for those who employ them.

What is White Hat?

Links. And more links. I know some of you keyword density guys (and gals) may shiver at that thought, but my page with just a smiley face on it will out rank your “tweaked” page if I have enough inbound links.

I was fortunate to speak with Leslie Rohde of OptiLink Software a few weeks ago. After answering a few of my SEO questions and elaborating on a few of his own, he offered the same conclusion: he could get a page to rank with enough links just as long as it has a “title” on it!

Here are a few facts to consider.

The World Wide Web was conceived and built on – surprise – linking. Doh!

When Google’s founders wrote their white paper on Search, they believed then and still do today that ultimately links, pointing to a particular web page, are the best way to determine that pages’ relevancy and importance to the web at large.

We should take a clue.

Here are typical White Hat strategies to get ranked in the major search engines.

1. Determine what keyword(s) your web page needs to rank for. This is done with keyword research with a program like Ad Words Analyzer by Jeff Alderson or Overture’s keyword tool. Find out what keywords are being searched the most each month in Google and Yahoo, then try to optimize for them (or the less competitive terms if it makes sense).

2. Get 100’s of links with the anchor text as the clickable link. For example, if I want to rate better for the term “golf tournament”, I would ask other websites to link to my page with the term “Golf Tournament”. It may seem too simple but that is the SEO landscape today.

3. Once a links campaign is in place and is actively growing, web masters understand that on-page factors such as the title, H1 tags, internal linking with keywords as or part of the linking text, and good content with natural occurrences of the keyword(s) will help the page become more relevant to Google.

4. A “link to us” page. This is a great time saver for the web master and should be employed on any web site that wants to grow its linking base automatically.

5. Repeat the above often.

There are many ideas about how to get ranked and stay ranked in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Some are right on; some are way off or just plain false. If you are starting from scratch and embarking on a SEO campaign for your web site, “Google” the following people and follow their lead:

Michael Campbell
Brad Fallon
Leslie Rohde
Brad Callon
Jeff Alderson
John Reese

If you are to hire an SEO consultant, be sure that his or her philosophy includes a vigorous linking campaign for your web site. I know it doesn’t sound sexy as “special pages” or modifying all your pages to “attract” search engines, or that they will submit to 500 directories, etc. All that stuff is good as long as they are not doing any thing the search engines frown on. However, that in itself is not enough to get your page on the first page of Google and stay there. Enough links will.

Rob Oresteen is a web consultant based in the Chicago area. http://www.blogsforbucks.com

© 2006 Rob Oresteen

The Modern Day Search Engine

Writen by T.B. Collins

The first task most netizens do when they log on to the internet is to visit their favorite search engine to find information on various topics. Over the past few years the search engine has evolved to do more than list available websites on an entered subject. The modern day search engine has tools to help the user accomplish a vast array of everyday task.

Search engine is a common term to describe a tool used to find relevant webpages on an entered subject. But, there are actually two types of search engines, the indexers like Google and Alta Vista that actually search the internet based on keywords, and the directories like Yahoo and Exactseek which provides a list of sites based on predefined categories. These two types of search engines provide the bulk of searches requested by users.

These engines help the user find everything from small sites like RecoveryPets.Com, who specialize in the global recovery of lost pets, located at http://www.recoverypets.com, or larger sites like WebMD who provide medical information for patients and doctors, and their website is http://www.webmd.com. But, these are just the basic services that these engines provide, and the everyday web surfer relies on the more advance features to successfully navigate the web.

Directories such as Yahoo that offer services for every age group of surfer, from chat groups to their find people services aimed at helping the surfer locate people they have not been in contact with for awhile. They also provide discussion groups to relate ideas with others that may share the surfers interest, and mail free mail services so that everyone on the internet can have a email address.

Indexers like Google provides their uses with a vast array of tools also, and the most used of these is their groups section that enable others to share ideas on different subjects and topics. The newest of these services offered by this indexer is Froogle, which is an online merchant center that allows users to find various products listed within their service, and finally is their images that allow you to enter a search term and view only the images of the term entered.

These search engines are user friendly so that the most novice of internet users can successfully navigate the web, and the most savvy internet surfers can use their advance features to accomplish the task they set out to do. Even though these are the most known search engines, there are thousands of smaller engines that are user specific on everything from family to travel planning, it is up to you to support these engines so that they can continue bring us the services we use.

Although this is just a small listing of the services provided by search engines, and every engine is different, we suggest that a wide variety of engines be visited to find out the services they provide. As is evident the modern day search engine has evolved greatly from just a site listing service, and with time they will be able to bring searchers more services that aid the everyday netizen in the quest to navigate the internet more efficiently.

Thaddeus Collins is the owner of RecoveryPets.Com and they specialize in the global recovery of lost pets using a unique tracking number. For more information visit http://www.recoverypets.com

Why Google Sitemaps is a Win-Win Situation for Webmasters

Writen by Philip Nicosia

The process of informing search engines about new pages in your website or about new websites in your care can be quite a time consuming task. The submissions process is just way too much trouble for its own good that even the search engines have realized that it is a path not worth pursuing and completely stopped using this method a long time ago.

There have been many innovations presented since then as a way of simplifying the submission process and eliminate most of the drudgery that has been associated with this task. With the development Google Sitemaps, the process has indeed been a big help to many webmasters and business owners. In fact, many people contend that Google Sitemaps is probably the most important development on the internet since the RSS, blogs and ping.

RSS, blog and ping had actually been used by webmasters as tools in informing search engines about new additions to their websites even though this function was not the primary purpose of the aforementioned innovations. Of course, Google Sitemaps is so much faster and easier to use compared to the said systems and this is the reason why it has risen in popularity and is now acknowledged as the most effective way of updating a website to search engines. In fact, this new innovation of using sitemaps for the search engine submission process has become a very vital part of operating a website and a webmaster can ignore it at his own risk.

There may still be some sceptics who may still not believe that a sitemap method of submitting new web pages or new content to a website is very effective. One reason why using the sitemap method like Google Sitemaps is that the technology was developed from the ground up with solely one primary goal, which is to alert and direct the Google search engine spiders to the web pages that you have specified. All the other methods are considered as indirect and submissions to search engines are not their primary purpose either.

Clearly, using Google sitemaps provides a win-win situation for webmasters and online business owners.

First, Google sitemaps limits the huge waste of the resources needed to crawl web site that have not changed. The technology allows webmasters to inform Google which pages have changed or if there are new content added to a website and then direct Google’s spiders directly to those pertinent pages.

Google Sitemaps also radically speeds up the process of discovery and addition of pages to Google’s web site index. This can only be achieved if you use the technology and nothing else.

Google Sitemaps offers a level of usability that is different from conventional sitemaps because it offers a directory of all the web pages in the web site that the webmaster or online business owner wants the search engine to visit.

Without the assistance of sitemaps like Google’s, it may become hard for a web page to be found by the search engine crawlers. There is even a chance that the page may not be found at all.

XML-Sitemaps.com provides a free online Google Sitemaps generator which will also help you find and fix broken links.

Valid HTML code is crucial to Search Engine Optimization

Writen by Roseanne Van Langenberg

Why valid HTML code is crucial to your web site’s search engine optimization efforts and subsequent high rankings:

Many webmasters and newcomers to web page design overlook a crucial aspect of web site promotion: the validity of the HTML code.

What is valid HTML code?

Most web pages are written in HTML, and as for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and each document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.

Like any language, HTML constantly changes. As HTML has become a relative complex language, it’s very easy to make mistakes … and we do know by now the favorable weight the new MSN.com beta search engine places on proper coding practise.

HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code. Why is valid HTML code important to search engine optimization and your whole marketing effort?

Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find the content on the page, and there ends your seo efforts and quest for high rankings of that page.

Search engine crawler programs obey HTML standards. They only can index your web site if it is compliant to the HTML standard. If there’s a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might lose what they’ve collected so far because of the error.

Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason your web page cannot be found in search engines.

If you don’t close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.

How can you check the validity of your HTML code? Fortunately, there are free services that allow you to check and fix the validity of your HTML code.

The search engine optimization community’s HTML validator is the W3C HTML Validator.

It is the service that checks HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.

To correct the errors outlined by the W3C validator enter the address of your web page at the Netmechanic in-valid HTML repair page where you have the option of automatically fixing the errors on that page. This Netmechanic resource does have a demo evaluation mode which enables self-application of the referenced alterations.

Although not all HTML errors will cause problems for your search engine rankings, some of them can keep web spiders from indexing your web pages and spoil your search engine optimization efforts.

Valid HTML code makes it easier for search engine spiders to index your site so you should make sure that at least the biggest mistakes in your HTML code are corrected.

.. run your web pages through the W3C validator, make the recommended alterations and the new MSN.com beta search should reward your efforts with a top ranking .. the MSN search engine places a high value on proper coding practise.

Entire article available at: Valid HTML code crucial to SEO

Copyright 2005 Marketing Defined. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced in its entirety, with no alterations. The Resource boxes, live URL’s and Author Bio must be included.

Roseanne van Langenberg is a Marketing Consultant and Publisher from Melbourne, Australia. Roseanne shares her findings on legitimate back-door search engine optimization and internet marketing techniques, for online blogs, which earned her a No. 1 listing at the new MSN search engine, at the Marketing Defined seo and internet marketing Blog.

Website Optimization through Good Code

Writen by Shawn Snarski

To understand why good code is important, you need to understand how it gets used. The easiest way to check the code on a site is to fire up your browser and enter the URL. If it looks good in the browser you are all set, right? Wrong. Chances are that you use one browser to verify that the site works, but what about a different browser? Does it look equally good in IE and Firefox? And here is where many fall out… Turn off images and javascript in your browser… this is what the search engines see when they visit your site.

If you are ready to drop money into SEO or spend hours and days, weeks, months reading up on SEO to be competitive enough on your own… take the time to adjust your browser settings and actually see what they see. Can you follow links from page to page, does your site make sense? Even this is not the full extent of what can be done to test code, but if you make it this far and still have a usable, informative, entertaining website, then the search engines at least have a chance to see your site as you intended.

If your site fails these tests, then before you pursue the search engines as a means of promotion, you will need to fix your code. If you fail this set of tests, then your keywords, your links, and whatever else you do to ‘optimize’ your site is flawed.

At the very least, good code is the kind of code that allows simple navigation on your site regardless of images and javascript (flash is a graphical language and counts as an image/multimedia). At best, good code is efficient and follows the “less is more” principle.

Less is More

The robots exclusion standard is exactly that… an exclusion. Many webmasters use the meta robots tag to tell spiders to go ahead and index their page and to follow the links that are on it. This is what spiders do naturally anyway. Eliminating this tag when using it to allow spiders will save you some code that does not really need to be loading in browsers at all and spiders assume to be the case anyway.

Another sign of unoptimized code is the use of the font tag in HTML. This and many other tags can be replaced by a single external CSS stylesheet that applies to your entire website. This external sheet gets stored in the browsers cache which means that it only needs to load once for your entire website. How much smaller would your files be if you removed all of your font tags?

Optimizing your code may mean more than just HTML factors. If you use server side code such as ASP or PHP and especially if you are using a database driven website, long lists may bog down your pages and push otherwise quick pages to a 60 second load time or more. This is a sure sign that your quick and peppy (empty) website has some underlying issues now that your internet empire is growing.

Your Empire Grows

By being online and interested in marketing your site, you will come to learn that “content is king”. Naturally your website will grow as you seek to promote it and keep it as a useful resource on the web. Good code for growth would need to be highly configurable and uniform throughout your pages.

Good code will allow you to remove sections of your site to place them into external files. As your site grows and new sections are added or removed, your navigation will change. The easiest way to manage this over several hundred pages is to be able to use a single file and include it into your pages using a server side language like PHP or ASP. This way, you can change the links in one file, upload it, and all of your pages will show the new navigation menu. The same may hold true for the footer and header sections of your pages which can change often.

With good coding, possibilities open up that are not available to poorly coded sites that work good on one browser, or several. Updates become easier, search spiders have an easier time of getting through your site, your pages load faster which keeps your visitors happier which keeps them at your site longer…

Shawn Snarski is the owner of Comptrio.com which specializes in the optimization of code and AutoMapIt Sitemaps which uses spider technology. Being on both sides of this issue has led to a better understanding of how spiders and websites interact and how to optimize websites for visitors, servers, and spiders.

Why Search Engines Cannot Answer All Your Queries?

Writen by Partha Bhattacharya

Do you search with an embedded syntax? If you do, you’ll be able to mine valuable information from search engine repositories. Let me take an example. Suppose you’re looking for non-reciprocal link-givers for your web pages. What will be your search syntax? It may be something like “Suggest a link” +”keyword”. If you are looking for links for the keyword phrase “clay art”, your search query will be “Suggest a link” +”clay art”.

Now, I am not a search syntax expert. I’ve learnt the above technique from Bill Hartzer’s article here. Bill provides good suggestions on how to look for potential link partners.

What becomes apparent is that if you are not a search expert, you stand to loose out on valuable information from search engines. Many of us suffer from this disadvantage despite search engines’ help, such as this one from Google.

While reflecting on this some time back, I started to realize that it is indeed less than often that I am really able to unearth solid relevant information from search engines. There are 2 main issues here. First is our ability or inability to squeeze out information from search engines. The second is search engine’s ability or inability to provide relevant information in response to your query. Listed below are some obvious hindrances that I’ve faced in my ’search experience’. Readers are welcome to offer their experience.

1. Search engines produce results based on search terms. If your search term doesn’t match that of a product’s website you ought to see, it’ll altogether elude your attention.
2. Search results are in fact prioritized web pages. Since a webpage does not describe the full website, it is often possible that though you’ve arrived at the right website, yet you’re unaware that your information is available in another webpage. You may probably give the page a miss.
3. Even if the ‘most-suitable’ product’s webpage does find its way in your search results, it may be embedded deep inside the results that appear. It’s hopeless to sift some 260,000 results or more to get your pick.
4. Search engines are constantly in a flux, altering its algorithm now and again to remain in reckoning for maximum usage by surfers, thereby affecting search results. What are there today, are gone tomorrow.
5. Many web pages are not optimized for top search results. After all, how many keywords/keyphrases can one optimize for? And then, once begun, one has to cling on to it, lest others ’snatch’ the prized positions. Clearly, for many, such exercise is time-consuming and costly.
6. All search engines are not equally popular everywhere. If Google is numero uno in US, many in continental Europe prefer MSN. Besides, many websites opt for PPC ads or other online ads in various lesser-known search engines and directories. Therefore to find your best deal, you need to extensively search at many places, which clearly is not a practical solution.
7. In places where internet awareness is high, mass emailing, classified ads, press releases, etc. are some of the preferred promotion techniques for many, instead of search engine marketing.
8. To economize cost vis-

The Truth About Search Engine Optimization

Writen by Bobbie Grennier

While the basics of Search Engine Optimization or SEO are pretty much textbook, it isn’t the textbooks that you’re competing with, it’s the competition … who within the most competative markets make it almost impossible to get to that search engine position of being number one. Discovering the Truth about Search Engine Optimization will require an analysis of every factor of optimization.

Professional SEO

Profession Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more than simply understanding the goal of a website. The real SEO Professional, or real ‘Search Engine Optimizer’, will do extensive query-based keyword research because they know professional optimization needs a strong keyword foundation.

SEO professionals ask the all important question … Who is the “target audience” or the “target market” … and then, they work to create a website that brings their content to that audience through the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves:

-Optimizing every page’s page titles, meta tags, attributes, anchor text and more.

- Theming of the primary domain, sub-domains and supporting web properties (such as blogs, forums and companion websites).

- Content is king … and paramount to good optimization.

- Search engine friendly GUI navigation (internal linking strategy). – A must have ‘inbound link’ building strategy (external links coming in).

The professional SEO (search engine optimization) knows that if you want to be found in the top of the search results for a competitive keyword term, you have to cover all your search engine optimization basics and more. That means both, exceptional website on-page and external off-page SEO, as well as a fully comprehensive link strategy.

Professional SEO Company

Any Professional SEO worth hiring understands that effective SEO (search engine optimization) constant continuing education because the search engine algorithms and the rules search engines use to position a web page within the search engine results page (serp) are always changing. The search engine most challenging to the SEO professional is Google. Here’s Google’s tips on things to look for in an SEO company:

- Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue.

- No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

- Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do. – You should never have to link to an SEO.

- Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

- Choose wisely.

- Be sure to understand where the money goes.

- Talk to many SEOs, and ask other SEOs if they would recommend the firm you’re considering.

- Make sure you’re protected legally.

- Professional SEO Strategy and Conversion

The truly Professional SEO and Search Engine Optimization Company understands that there are other considerations to be kept in mind.

For example, a website must not only be optimized for search engine spider algorithms, but it also has to remain optimized for the visitor as well. Ranking number one in all the major search engines is what gets the visitors to your website, but then the website must convert those visitors into actual sales.

Professional SEO is like Royalty

If content is king, then website design is queen. The combination of the two, if done correctly, will produce results for both your search engine rankings and your revenue. While keyword location, weight (absolute and relative), density, proximity, frequency, keyword targeting … is a important part of the puzzle, how the code for the website is created and the linking strategies are equally considered royalty in the world of the professional optimizer. The knowledge of how best to accomplish that is always changing and that’s why a real SEO professional who is on top of the trends, can be worth gold to the success of your business.

About the Author: Bobbie Grennier is an SEO copywriter and SEO web site writer at http://www.SEO-Writing.com. She publishes several blogs, but you’re most likely to be interested in her Webmaster Blog at webmaster.typepad.com. Visit her web sites http://www.wild-wolf.com or http://www.wildwolf.ws for more SEO information or FREE reprint articles.