The Context Machine

This is the year that search engine optimization finally went mainstream, and is now a common exercise applied by firms seeking to promote their website. However, only a few years ago, search engine optimization was judged to be a dark art. And these days, how affairs have changed: now SEO necessitates a larger group of talents in ethical areas : composing compelling content, marketing a website via social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and even link baiting (via composing fantastic or controversial content that acquires links from other sites).

Bing, Google, Yahoo! and other search engines have also grown to be far more advanced than simply measuring backlinks to decide rankings : they can view for how many minutes people browse your website for, the number of web pages they view, and broadly how much of an interesting resource your site is.

And even so, of course links are still primary to determine rankings, and because of this you must make your site a special resource that people want to link to.

But if you cannot wait months to rank, you can apply Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. What is Pay Per Click? This is a scheme where businesses bid a particular sum of money for every time the advertisement is clicked on. The sum one bids for depends on the keywords that activate the displaying of your advertisement in the search engines. Keywords are primary to the targeting of the individuals that click on your ads, and so PPC is a fantastic means to find out which keywords convert to sales and which don’t. When you are armed with such data, you can then target those keywords in your SEO effort as well!

We recommend you employ a business that provides a search engine positioning service first, and gain knowledge and experience from their strategies. That way you’re not merely putting your website in the hands of professionals, you can also acquire knowledge from them too. In addition, you should make sure you hire an SEO form who are local to you. Just type in some keywords such as seo + your city, for instance seo nottingham. Why a company in your location? Search engine marketing is a really detailed skill and so it’s a good idea to have a close partnership your SEO business you take on, and there’s no better way than in the flesh group meetings to discuss the finer points.

When you do Google searches, one has to think about exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Google is a massive system of links and bad links and routing links that can easily get people lost in the shuffle. One think that you can try to is just feel your way through the common stuff that is in there. You could look at all the rings and bracelets and other previous diamonds and ruby’s and emeralds but one think you need to be on the lookout for is how they represent you as a person. You can’t just simple search for these items and expect the search results to come back and fill you with exactly what you were looking for now can you? The answer is a resounding no.

Being smart about looking for custom designed jewelry or filigree engagement rings is first order of business. These things are expensive and sought after items and you don’t want to be caught with a sense of trying to hard to find the right item. For example, custom filigree engagement diamond rings are so hot these days that jewelry shops around the country are selling out of them. The demand is too much to handle. They have to turn to the Internet to sell the precious filigree engagement rings properly.

Welcome to part two in this search engine optimization series. In part one we covered the importance and tactics for choosing the keywords and keyword phrases that will provide the highest ROI for your optimization efforts. In part two we will discuss how to properly write content for high search engine positioning.

Content is the key to search engine rankings. While there are numerous factors involved with the search engine algorithms, content remains a constant in stable rankings for a number of important reasons.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

Keyword Selection (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/keywords.htm)

Content

Site Structure

Optimization

Internal Linking

Human Testing

Submissions

Link Building

Monitoring

The Extras

Step Two - The Importance Of Content

There are many aspects of your content that are of key importance to your search engine rankings and for a variety of reasons. That said, they can be broken down into their three main benefits. The three main things you should be targeting with your content are:

Unique and well-written. The search engine spiders are looking for unique content and your visitors are looking for well-written content.

With articles come links.

With quality content comes even more links.

As long as you keep these three main purposes in mind while you are deciding what you want on your website and how it should be worded, you will fill this area nicely.

Unique & Well-Written Content

The importance of unique and well written content cannot be overstated. This is the backbone and purpose of your website’s existence and it deserves the time it will take to create. When you are considering what content you want on your site (or what content should be on your site if this is part of SEO or a redesign) you will want to make a few considerations.

What does your audience want to find?

Will you have to do additional research?

Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

What Does Your Audience Want To Find?

Assessing your potential visitors wants does not require a crystal ball. If you have completed and spent quality hours on Step One of this series, fully researching your keywords, you are already well on your way. Delving into those keywords you will often find hints that will push you in the right direction.

If you have an acne site and you have found a number of people searching for “acne treatment” and “natural acne treatment” and have thus chosen these as your targeted keyword phrases you already understand your visitors current situation and more importantly, their desire. Similarly, if you are a real estate agent and have chosen “los angeles real estate” as your phrase you know more than simply characters strung together and dropped into a search box. You know that you are dealing with people wishing to purchase or sell a home in Los Angeles. In both scenarios you know what your visitors want and, assuming you are already successful in your industry, you know what you have to do to convert that desire into a client.

Now what has to be done is to create solid, compelling content that will both grab your visitor’s attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. This is not the same as selling to them when you have the opportunity to speak to them face-to-face. You are working without the benefit of watching their expressions, speaking to them about their objections, or even understanding whether they are looking for information for a friend or if it is they themselves who require your services.

This leaves you with a lot of room for content. In the online environment you have to deal with every question before they ask it, and make every person feel that you can help them even though you’ve never met.

What does your audience want to find? They want to find a solution to their problem. How do you provide that? By supplying them answers to the questions that they don’t have the opportunity to ask and may not want to give you their email address to find out. FAQ pages are good but often used as sales pages, which is fine so long as you are still providing good content that your visitor isn’t reading as “sales” but rather “solutions”. Perhaps create pages of replies to emails you have received. Perhaps place a related “fact of the day” on your homepage with a link to an archive of facts related to your industry, product and/or business. You might even want to add a blog to your site. Regardless, give your visitor the answers they’re looking for and keep this information updated as you get new information and you will stand a much better chance of keeping that person surfing through your website. The longer you can keep them on your site, the greater the chance that you will build trust and once you’ve got that, you can help them with the solution to their problem.

Will you have to do additional research?

For many business owners the gut instinct to this question is”no”. Of course not, you are an expert right? Well you may be, and so is Professor Stephen Hawking (http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.html), however my bet would be he still does his research.

No matter how much you know there is always more out there and your visitors are probably well aware of that. If you fail to address all their questions, your visitors may very well leave your site in search of the answer. Once they’ve left your site it becomes other webmasters who now have the opportunity to present the benefits of their products or services.

Find all the information that you can and make sure that you include as much as possible on your site. The additional benefit in doing this is that constant new information on your website will not only keep visitors coming back to find new information but the search engines spiders too. If your site changes often the spiders will pick up on this and will visit you more often. While this by itself will not improve your rankings it does give you an advantage. The more often search engine spiders visit your website the faster changes you make will be picked up. The faster these changes are picked up the quicker you will be able to react to drops in rankings. If you know the spiders visit your site every second day and you drop from #8 to #12 you know that with proper tweaking to your content you may be able to recover that loss in as little as two days.

Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

When you need a doctor do you read a book entitled “Heart Surgery For Dummies” and buy yourself a very sharp knife. Of course you don’t and while your website may not be quite as important as your heart, it is how your company is being perceived online. This perception can be the make-or-break of all your online marketing efforts.

If you are committed to attaining high rankings, to making money online and/or promoting your business through your website, shouldn’t you also be committed to insuring that your conversions are maximized. High search engine positioning is important but so too is converting those visitors once they get to your site. You may be an expert in your field but if that field isn’t writing, and you don’t have a writer on staff, be certain to at least consider hiring one to make sure that your website is conveying the message you want in verbiage that your visitors will understand. Assuming you choose your writer well you will not only have a well-written site but you will also gain the advantage of having an outsider, who is more likely to write for people who aren’t experts, creating your content.

If you feel that you are qualified to write your own content (which you may very well be) be sure to have it proofread by someone from the outside. Find someone (ideally plural) from within your target market and demographic, and have them go through your content giving suggestions and criticism. Don’t take it personally, every change they recommend is earning you extra money. Whether you implement the changes or not you are learning something new about what people will want and expect to see on your site.

With Articles Come Links

Writing content is not just an exercise for your own website. We all know that inbound links to your site help rankings. Additionally, if those links can be ones that provide genuine targeted traffic you’re doing very well.

There are a number of methods for driving traffic to your site with paid advertising, PPC, etc. however one of the most cost-effective methods is to publish articles. Article writing is no simple task however the rewards can be enormous. Articles server two great purposes:

Increased Link Popularity - When you write an article and submit it to other website to post, they will generally link to your website from the page the article is on. Here’s a completely legitimate, relevant, and quality link to your site.

Exposure & Credibility - The added credibility that article writing lends to your business coupled with the added benefit of the visitors who come to your site directly from your article are invaluable.

When it comes to article writing there is little in the way of more effective advertising. You will have to find sources to publish those articles on, but once you’ve done this time-consuming task you can reuse the same list for future articles.

Get those articles on a number of quality resource sites and enjoy watching your stats and your rankings improve.

With Quality Content Comes Even More Links

Yet another benefit that derives from having a website with great content and writing articles is that, with time, your website itself will become a resource. If you provide great information that other people will find useful people will link to it naturally.

With so much emphasis in recent times on reciprocal linking some might think this is the only way to get links at all. Believe it or not there are still webmasters out there who will link to sites for no other reason than they feel their visitors will be interested in it’s content.

Build a good site with quality content, keep it easily navigated and create sections for specific areas (articles for example) and you will find that people will link to your site and may even link to specific articles or your articles index. Perhaps then your articles index is a good page to target an additional keyword phrase.

Next Week

Next week in part three we will be covering site structure and the importance it plays in your rankings and in visitor experience. This will cover getting a spider through your site while also giving your visitors an easy path to the pages you want them on.

About The Author

Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines.

info@beanstalk-inc.com

When it comes to internet marketing, traditional web site optimization (SEO) still stands as the holy grail, but an increasing number of small and medium sized business owners, facing the prospect of high SEO fees, are just now beginning to turn to an alternative promotional method that is generating consistent and quantifiable results at a fraction of the cost.
The cost of SEO, at least when it comes to highly competitive keyword phrases, is prohibitive for all but those with deep pockets.

“Matt Hocken, of Interactive Marketing, Inc., estimates that one can expect to pay upwards of $50,000 - $100,000 a year to secure top ten Google placement for a highly competitive keyword phrase like ‘life insurance’ or ‘debt consolidation’ and that’s obviously out of the question for the small to medium sized business,” Ron Scott, Fast Track SEOP’s senior publicist reports.

Even the cost for placement using less popular keyword phrases can be high.

“A Houston publicist recently paid $5,000 to get her website optimized for a small number of obscure keyword phrases that Overture reports are cumulatively generating fewer than 200 inquiries a month. Not told that 50-75% of those searches are being routinely conducted by webmasters, SEOs, and website owners checking the current status of their websites, she’s now wondering if she’ll ever recoup the expense,” Scott says.

So what’s the alternative? Pop-ups? Pop unders? Banner ads? Email? Not hardly.

Unlike an organic search engine optimization program that can take months and even years to start showing results, internet press releases start generating interest the day they are published.

“A properly optimized and distributed press release will typically generate 50,000 - 100,000 actual reads the first week it goes on line,” says Scott.

According to Scott, unlike traditional press releases, 98% of all internet press releases are read by consumers and B2B prospects.

“Originally, press releases were the exclusive domain of the Fortune 500 and were directed to the mass media, but not any more. Small and medium sized businesses have discovered that they can deliver their messages directly to a broad (national or international) or highly targeted (local or regional) audience on the internet and, thereby, eliminate the tedious process of media placement,” he says.

Scott points out that the value of an internet press release promotional strategy doesn’t stop there.

“Press releases can also be optimized for organic search which enables those who find their newly published websites residing in Google purgatory, the opportunity to secure top ten rankings in a week or less,” Scott says.

To illustrate the value of the internet marketing strategy, Scott points to a release he prepared and distributed on behalf of a little known manufacturer in New Zealand.

“The first 30 calendar days, it generated 133,686 reads, drove over 25,000 visitors to their website, and generated 100s of inquiries from B2B prospects all over the world,” he says. “Since that sampling taken at the beginning of June, the release has generated an additional 42,443 reads and a commensurate level of traffic and inquiries.
“It’s the gift that keeps giving,” he says.

Has traditional web site optimization outlived its usefulness?

“For most of our clients it has,” Scott says.

To introduce business owners to the comparative value of an internet, press release promotional strategy, Fast Track SEOP offers free, online introductory webinars four days a week. The company, a full-service internet public relations firm, has developed an online training program that enables business owners to manage their press release promotional campaigns in-house. To learn more visit http://www.fasttrackrankingandplacement.com

As a small business owner, I’m always thinking of ways to attract more customers. I’m a contractor who started working in this area not long ago. One of my customers is a computer whiz who offered to design a website for me in exchange for some home repair. That was my first involvement in the world of e-commerce. It proved to be a good idea; I had the computer guy post photos of some of my projects and a list of my services, as well as some comments by satisfied customers. Those things have been bringing in more and more new customers. Not only that, I got more interested in doing internet business for my own supply needs; I found out I could search for order a lot of my supplies anytime online instead of calling around for them. I also get in touch with some of my subcontractors by e-mail these days.

Cell phones and computers have really made it easier for us to do business. Just a landline isn’t enough because a contractor is out on job sites so much. I’ve been doing construction all my working life; it’s only been pretty recently that I’ve gotten involved with computers, since I never had that much interest in going to school or doing hi-tech stuff. But the internet has changed that for lots of people. We can all benefit from it.

Google… one of the Internets MOST powerful search engines recently announced a new FREE service that makes it easier for you to improve your websites coverage within Googles index through its NEW collaborative crawling system.

On the down side though, Google does not ‘Guarantee’ immediate inclusion, But, is still good news for those of you who have just finished building a website and are ready to submit to the top search engines.

So, what’s this NEW service called that Google just released?

It’s called “Google Sitemaps”.

The real cool thing about “Google Sitemaps” IS it accepts RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds with the .XML extension as one of the accepted formats for submitting your websites Sitemap for inclusion in Googles index.

This is just one of the four formats Google accepts and is the one that I’m going to use for the rest of this article to show you how to generate your own .XML sitemap of your website for inclusion in Google.

It’s real easy to do so don’t worry about it being to complicated.

So, with that said, lets go to Step #1.

Step #1. Sign up for “Google Sitemaps”.

This step is easy, simply follow the link provide below and sign up for a Free account. It should only take you a few minutes to do, then once your done, come back here and go to Step #2.

Go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Step #2. Generate your .XML sitemap.

In this step your going to generate a .XML sitemap for your website using a Free online sitemap generator.

This Free online generator will build you a sitemap up to 500 pages. If you have a larger website with thousands of webpages you’ll have to use a paid service and/or software to generate yours.

Go to: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Enter your required information on the form provided.

Step #3. Upload your generated .XML sitemap to your server.

Once your generated sitemap is finished(your generated .XML file should be called site.xml.gz) it’s now time to upload it to your server using your FTP(File Transfer Protocol) program.

This is very important that you do this before submitting it to Google Sitemaps for inclusion.

Step #4. Submit your NEW .XML sitemap to “Google Sitemaps”.

Now that you have generated your “Sitemap” for your website and uploaded it to your server all you have to do now is to go to “Google Sitemaps” and submit your sitemap URL.

(ex. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz)

That’s it.

Now, depending on Google, your sitemap should get downloaded within the next 24 hours, so be sure to check and see that it did and that there wasn’t any problems or errors.

Also, your going to want to be able to track your indexed webpages within the search engines, especially Google, so you can see how things are going, so I’ll leave you with one last resource that will do this for you.

Go to: http://www.uptimebot.com

All you have to do is enter your URL and click “GO”.

The results page will list the results from Google and 9 other popular search engines.

Well, there you have it… “4 Quick and EASY Steps To Getting Your Website IN Through Googles ‘Back Door’”.

Want to get MORE ‘Insider’ marketing Secrets on How-To drive HUGE amounts of Laser Targeted Traffic to your website? Then you need to subscribe to Cory Threlfall’s ezine called… The Internet Wonders eZine at — internet marketing

PageRank - an exclusive technology developed by Google which can have a major impact on the success of your website. This article will attempt to explain the concept of PageRank and how your ranking can be improved without spending any money at all.

How is PageRank beneficial?
Google refers to the technology as a way of evaluating the usefulness, importance, and quality of a website. The PR of a webpage can mean different things for different people.

For a webmaster, a high PR is a sign of accomplishment. It shows that your website is moving in the right direction and has the potential to become successful. PageRank also directly effects your Google search engine listings. Acquiring a higher PR than your competition could mean more traffic for you, and less traffic for your competitors.

Visitors to your website probably won’t care about the page’s rank (most surfers have no idea what PageRank is). However, visitors who understand PageRank may use your PR as a sign of how credible your content is. Would you rather use the information from a website with 0 PR or a website with 5 PR and hundreds of other websites linking to it?

How is PageRank determined?
PageRank is basically determined by backlinks. A backlink is when another page links to your page. For every page that links to you, that page is “voting” for you. The more votes you get, the better your PageRank will be.

However, it gets more complicated than that because some votes weigh more heavily than others. The weight of the vote is determined by the PageRank of the page linking to you. This means that a couple links from pages with high PR could be more beneficial than hundreds of links from pages with low PR. But it gets even more complicated - each page can only transfer so much PageRank. The set amount of PR that the page can transfer must be split up between each “vote” that the page gives out. This means that a PR 7 page could actually give out as much weight per vote as a PR 3 page if it had too many outgoing links.

How can I improve my PageRank?
There are many different methods to obtain quality backlinks to your website. You will find that some methods work better than others depending on the subject and popularity of your site.

Directories
Submitting your website to directories is one of the best ways to increase your PageRank and even get some traffic at the same time. But submitting your site to just a few directories won’t be good enough. You need to sit down and spend the necessary time to submit your site to a large amount of directories. This may seem like a painstakingly long process, but you’ll be glad you did it when you notice results. I have taken the time to make a large list of free directories with high PageRank which you visit here. Although directories with low PR may seem like a waste of time, you should submit your site to them too because it still helps and they could eventually become a high PR site which charges money to submit to.

Link Exchanges
A very common practice to improve your PageRank is a link exchange. This is simply where two people link to the other person’s website. It’s best that you only link exchange with someone who has at least as much PR as you and the subject of the two websites are similar. If you receive a link from a website with a subject which has nothing to do with yours, you’ll find that very little if any PR will actually be transferred to you.

Forum Signatures
If you are an active user on a forum or message board, it would be wise to put a link to your website in your signature. This could help improve your PageRank if the forum has a high PR, it could help improve your traffic from the forum members seeing your signature, and your site could get spidered more often because it is linking to a forum (forums generally have a lot of new content every day and search engines love new content).

Buy Advertising
Although it isn’t the best of choices, many webmasters will buy text link ads on websites with high PR. Although this can be effective, it can be very expensive and only a temporary thing. If you purchase text links for just a couple months, after the months are over you won’t have the backlinks which were giving you the “votes” you needed to keep your PageRank. So you have now spent a large amount of money on text links, but in the end you’re right back where you started.

Articles
This is a method which not many people know about. Basically, you write articles about the subjects you know a lot about. You then let other people use these articles as long as they provide a link back to your site. If you wrote a quality article, you’ll find many websites will want to use it, thus giving you plenty of backlinks. This method can work well with anything which you develope and give away for free such as scripts, web design, etc.

Stay On Google’s Good Side
The most important thing to remember when trying to increase your PageRank is to not cheat and to always follow the rules. The people which run Google aren’t fools and they have many ways of catching cheaters. Don’t even think about using any of the “link farms” or trying to hide keywords on your pages. If caught, you may not get unbanned for many months.

Make A Quality Website
If you have a quality website which your visitors enjoy going to, then you will receive backlinks without having to do anything. Websites will link to you with the intention of informing people of a helpful resource, or showing off a cool new website they found, or any other reason other than trying to increase your PageRank. If you build it, backlinks will come…

This article is from PRchecker.net
Instantly check the Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, indexed pages, and backlinks of any web page! Also has detailed articles on webmaster issues such as improving PageRank.

Google shows you visitor stats .

As strange it may sound but google is now showing you stats for your site .

These include :

Terms for which your site shows in search results ,

Terms for which people clicked and actually visited your site ,

Number of times google visited your site ,

The information google has about your site ,

Number of pages it has indexed ,

If you have a site map , then when was it last downloaded .

Pages which google was not able to crawl ,

Why google was not able to crawl .

How to see these stats ?

Create a free google account . If you have a gmail account , you can use that email ID and password to login . Login at

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Once you are there , you will be shown the sites which you have added in your account . If you have not added any sites yet , then click “ADD” and enter the URl of your site . To see stats you will have to verify that you are the site owner . Click the verify site link next to the URL . Google will askyou to upload a blank html file to your root directory . Then click verify button . If google finds that file in your root , then your site is verified .

Now you can see all the stats for that site of yours. Click the link of the site in your google account . The next page has links to the following .

Sitemap ,

Crawl ,

index,

errors,

In addition there are also the terms listed for which your site is included in search results.

To see information about your site you can choose the appropriate link . Clicking crawl will show you how many times google has crawled your site etc. If you want to get your site indexed faster , submit a sitemap from the same google account . A sitemap looks like the one at http://www.ad4business.com/sitemap.html .

That one is for human visitors . Google wants a XML version something like

http://www.ad4business.com/sitemap.xml .

The html version is created using the free html sitemap generater at http://www.ad4business.com . It takes just three steps to create an html sitemap and you have the freedom of adding your own templet to the map also.

Submitting a sitemap will help google crawl your site faster and get it indexed faster.

Keep checking your google account to see the terms for which your site is ranking in search results.

Best of luck for your site.