Hotlinking Images for SEO

Michel Telendro tells me it has become a search engine optimization practice (black to gray-hat, I assume) of hotlinking images from other servers... to rank your own site well in Google Image search results.

How does that work? Well, you might have noticed that Google Images doesn’t just return pages from where a picture originates; for instance, querying Google Images for site:google.com, Google among other results shows a page from bbs.mydriver.com... which simply includes a JPG from somewhere at groups-beta.google.com. When you click-through to that page, it will then not be the origin site’s ads that will be displayed, of course, but the ads of MyDrivers.com, even though they likely don’t own the pic.

Michel, who tried this out, says “I do one of this hotlinking with one flickr image in a new domain (3 weeks, no backlinks) and in one week I was ranking #3 for that keyword in [Google Images].”
Case in point – do an image search for paris in Spanish Google, and of the top 5 results, all but 1 are hotlinking the image. Even when you do a Google web search, thanks to the direct image results box on top of the web results, a hot linker ranks top for paris. Michel says, “I think there are zillions of examples...”



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Why Online PR is Important

As SEO becomes increasingly more competitive, business-to-business (B2B) companies can gain significant competitive advantage and amplify SEO campaign results through disciplined and consistent use of online PR. But, for many B2B companies, online PR has not yet become part of their everyday marketing vernacular. Larger companies and PR agencies are even sometimes reluctant to venture outside of their traditional comfort zones into the lesser known world of online PR. Those companies that fail to implement online PR strategies as part of their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns are missing out on an increasingly popular and effective way to gain market visibility and motivate website visitors.
If your company already has a strong traditional (offline) PR program in place, you should be looking to extend your leverage. And if for either budgetary or bandwidth reasons your company has failed to implement any type of PR strategy at all, you should be jumping at the chance to test drive a new strategy with long-lasting benefits at relatively low cost. What’s even better is that an online PR campaign can be easily managed and built upon over time.
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SEO Worth $5 Million?

Mike Mann is a prominent internet entrepreneur who sold BuyDomains company a few years ago for more than $65 million. His latest tech venture is just that, a venture capital firm based in Washington D.C. which goes by the name of WashingtonVC. Yesterday Mann announced the purchase of SEO.com by WashingtonVC for $5 million as well as the formation of an SEO firm led by Dave Bascom. The company is formerly known as Web Targeted, search engine optimization company located in Utah. Jay mentions this new domain will give them a huge advantage over the fierce competition of Search Engine Optimizers.
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Webmaster Claims Spider Entered Contract In Suit

The Web and artificial intelligence have brought about some surreal, science fiction like questions. The most recent mind-bending concept is whether or not robots can enter into contracts – that is, is a Web crawler implicitly entering a contract posted on a website announcing copyright conditions?
A little while back, we explored the idea that RSS, as an automatic distribution agent, could imply permission to republish. But that involves two human parties, essentially, with a technical agent in between.
A court battle in Colorado, however, focuses on claims brought by Suzanne Shell against the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which holds in searchable perpetuity pages that appear on the Web, for future historical reference.
Shell owns the website www.profane-justice, devoted to providing information and support for people who feel they've been unlawfully targeted by state agents (like police or child services organizations) or unfairly accused of child abuse.
A notice appears on the site stating that users copying or distributing the content on the site automatically agree to the terms of a contract. Failure to abide carries a fee of $5,000 per page copied; $250,000 per occurrence of unauthorized use, and a charge of $50,000 for each occurrence of failure to pay, plus costs and triple damages.
There was no mechanism in place on the site (such as in the robots.txt file) to prevent Internet Archive's robot from scanning, copying, and storing the pages on Shell's website. She discovered that the Wayback Machine had reproduced the contents of her website about 87 times in five years, "and displayed her entire website to the public daily during that period."

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Webmaster and Small Business Resolutions

Webmasters Resolutions:
1. Prune Those RSS Feeds Large feeds are slow to load, its time to prune those RSS feeds and remove the old contents. Dated feed items can be archived as an HTML web page, but should be removed from the actual feed, to ensure that it loads quickly.
2. Update Copyright Notices Make an effort to update the copyright notice on your website. A current date will reassure customers that your online storefront is active.
3. Update Meta Tags Each and every web page on a website should contain a unique title and description. Update and optimize meta tags to avoid excessive use of keywords. Meta tags should be accurate and concise without redundancy and recurring words.
4. House Cleaning Update old links and remove any links that are no longer valid. HTML is a markup language and without constant maintenance it is easy to have a page with an unclosed tag. While some web browsers make allowances for poorly formed HTML, it is important to realize that not all do. Therefore, it is crucial that you take a look at the HTML behind the web page and make sure that it is properly formed.
5. Try Something New Pick a technology, be it podcasting, RSS, or social bookmarking. Resolve to try or resolve to learn something new. Businesses stagnate without innovation. Be creative and willing to experiment a little.
Small Business Resolutions:
1. Have a Plan Small businesses often rely on just a handful of individuals and few small businesses have contingency plans if key individuals are unavailable for any length of time. Cross train employees and document procedures so that your business will survive regardless of the circumstances.
2. Prepare a Budget for 2007 and Stick to It. Determine where and how you intend to spend your business' hard earned cash in the coming year. Too many small businesses fail to follow a business plan. Build a budget and stick to it.
3. Define Yourself As a small business it is important to know your strengths and weaknesses. Identify your strengths and reinforce those strengths in your communication with your customers or potential customers. Be aware of any weaknesses or deficiencies in your small business, and do not over commit. Use this knowledge to stay competitive with other businesses.
4. Use Metrics It is difficult to know what works and what does not if you are not tracking metrics. Measure the results of advertising campaigns, track website visitors and use metrics to determine what works for your business.
5. Communicate Communicate with your customers more. Few small businesses understand the value of communication, or realize what they can learn from past, current and potential customers. Communicate and you might learn important information about your business. The unique perspective an outsider can provide about how they are using or product, or what interested them about your business is invaluable.
Resolutions are easier made than kept. In 2007, consider paring down your list and focusing on resolutions that are attainable and will help your bottom line.

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How Google Webmaster Creates Query Stats, Now Weekly Updates

Vanessa Fox announced at the Google Webmaster Central blog that the query stats from within the statistics section of Google Webmaster Central will be now updated weekly, instead of every few weeks. The updates are most likely to occur each Monday but no specific time was mentioned. There are more details on how Google calculates the query stats in Vanessa's post.

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Bug in Google's "site:" Function

I daily check the Site: and Link: function on Google to see if any of my sites are improving in Google. Today I checked my site www.peugeotforums.com and got weird results. The entire page text was being cached. I printscreened the results, does anyone know if this is negative or positive and why this might of happened. It seems to be temporary. But nonetheless is very interesting, has anyone else experienced this?



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Off Page Search Engine Optimization

by Mark Flavin
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a science of sorts that would enable you to ensure a favorably prominent position for your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). And since 80% of your traffic would come from the search engines, SEO methods take on a critical importance in the success of your online endeavor.There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page. This article will tackle the latter.Off page SEO is all about the things you could to get a high page rank (PR) for your website after it has already gone live. These are the things which you actually execute outside the pages of your website, hence the name of this type of SEO.What are these steps?Well, all of them are concerned with building your link popularity. Your link popularity represents the number of back links your website has. To check you website’s current link popularity, head over to www.linkpopularity.com and use the free tool that can be found there. The higher your link popularity, the higher your PR will be.Building your link popularity involves increasing the number of websites that will link to yours. This is easier said than done. It’s not a matter of getting reciprocal links like “you link to me and I’ll link to yours.” Google, in particular, despise reciprocal linking. You have to get unilateral links to your website.The best way to do this is by ensuring that you have unique, highly informative content. Really, this is the number one strategy to invite websites to link to yours. But your content in the realm of on page SEO, and it is assumed that you have made all efforts to ensure great content.What are the other ways by which you could build your link popularity? Try the following techniques:• Article marketing. There are thousands of article directories on the Internet. You could submit articles to these websites. For every submission, you will be allotted a resource box where you could introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Now, some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours would go a long way in increasing your own page rank. Additionally, if you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are article directory submission services available. Seek them out. For as low as $25, they could submit your articles to as many as 200 directories.• Forum marketing. There are online communities dedicated to the subject that your website is serving. Seek them out, then join them. You’d be allotted a signature box, which would appear in your every post. In your signature box, you could leave a link to your website. Then post as many significant messages as you could. For every post you will make, you’d have a page linking to your website.• Advertise at www.craigslist.com. Now here’s a novel strategy. The website www.craigslist.com is a well known classifieds website with a PR7 score. A PR7 score is rarely high! To have a link in a website like this would give a tremendous boost to your own website. Simply go to that site and choose the category that your pages belong to, then post your advertisement, with your link of course. It doesn’t matter that no one would get to read it. What matters is that the search engine spiders would find your website as they would come from a PR7 site.• Look for partners who are willing to include your list in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php.• Try triangular linking. Google despises reciprocal linking, but triangular linking is one way of going around this limitation. Look for two or more webmasters who are willing to give it a shot. Webmaster A could post a link to Webmaster B’s website in his own pages. Webmaster B can post a link to Webmaster C’s website in his own pages. And webmaster C can post a link to Webmaster A’s website in his own pages. It may enforce the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to figure this out ... yet.
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SECRETS TO PROMOTING SITES WITH ARTICLES

Publishing articles on the Internet is a tremendous way to increase the number of inbound links to your site. As articles are assimilated into search engine indexes, they also begin to act as landing pages generating traffic for your site. Whenever possible, you should publish articles to promote your site.

Article Content

The content of your articles should be directed to the most basic elements of your product or service. Whenever possible, try to write “how to” or “introduction to” articles. Topics like these will garner the biggest interest and be picked up by other sites. Articles that cover finer points of a subject work as well, but you should expect a smaller readership.

Article Tone

Your articles should be packed with information, not sales pitches. When writing articles, one tends to concentrate on how to get potential readers to visit your site. This approach is a mistake. You have to think of both the readers AND webmasters that will be looking for articles.

Image you are a Webmaster that needs content for your site. You go to one of the article directories looking for material to add to your site. Are you going to select articles that are sales pitches designed to take your visitors to another site? No. You are going to select articles that provide your visitors with some valuable information. Don’t write sales pitches!

Links

Articles are a great way to quickly build the link counts for sites. The search engines universally appear to like them, a rare event these days. So, what’s the best strategy for using links in your articles?

HTML v. Text Links

With some depositories, you have the opportunity to place html code in your bylines. This, of course, lets you avoid typing out the URLs for your site pages, but should you? I would encourage you to type out the URLS for one reason. It is important to make it as easy as possible for Webmasters to republish your article on their site. Don’t make them figure out the domains of your hyperlinked text, particularly sub-domains.

In Closing

I have used article campaigns to market many sites. As long as you go about it correctly, you should be able to do the same thing for your site.





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Submitting Your Site to the Open Directory

Getting your site an optimum listing in the Open Directory is vitally important as far as search engine positioning is concerned as Google gives a lot of importance to sites being listed in the Open Directory.Before you submit your site, go through your entire site and ensure that there are no missing graphics, no links leading to empty or non-existent pages and no "Under construction" symbols. Also, check for typos and grammatical errors. Furthermore, your site must provide good content. If your site simply contains links to various affiliate programs, you will find it difficult to get through. The Open Directory does not mind sites containing links to affiliate programs, as long as you provide proper content.You now need to select the two most important keywords for your site based on their popularity. If you don't yet know the keywords which are applicable for your site, have a look at my article on "Choosing the correct keywords for your site". In this article, I have mentioned that while selecting the keywords for your site, you should look at both the popularity of the keywords as well as their competitiveness. However, for the purpose of this article, don't worry about the competitiveness - select keywords only on the basis of popularity.We now discuss how you should write the Title and Description of your site's listing in the Open Directory. You don't really have much choice regarding the Title as the Open Directory insists that the Title be the official name of your site. There is no way around it.When you write the description, your aim should be to make the Open Directory editor's job as easy as possible. You should not give the editor the feeling that he/she needs to edit your description in any way. The moment an editor starts to edit your description, you risk having your keywords removed from your description.Your description should be a single sentence which conveys what your site is all about and contains the two keywords you are targeting as close as possible to the beginning of the description. However, your description should not just be a list of keywords - the description that you use should be a proper sentence and should be grammatically correct.Broadly, here are the rules that you should remember when forming the description:i) Make sure that the description can tell a visitor what your site is all about. Things like "Have a look at our site" or "Welcome to my site" does not tell a visitor what your site does.ii) Avoid hype of any sort. Avoid using ALL CAPS or exclamation marks. Phrases like "The best web site dealing with widgets!!" or "Offers the BEST QUALITY, CHEAPEST WIDGETS you can find anywhere" are inappropriate.iii) Don't capitalize every word in your description - capitalize only the first word. Of course, if some of the words in the description are proper nouns, then you should capitalize them.iv) Write the description in the third person. Don't say "We offer financial planning and credit counseling services", say "Offers financial planning and credit counseling services.".v) Don't make your description too long - limit yourself to 15 words at the most. If you are lucky, you may be able to get accepted with a description longer than 15 words. However, longer the description, higher the probability that the editor will want to edit it.vi) Check your description for typos and grammatical mistakes.vii) End your description with a period. If the editor has to add the period to the end of your description, she may also end up editing the description, which is not what you want. Your aim is to have the editor accept the exact description that you had written in order to ensure that your keywords are not removed from the description.Now, we come to how you can select the right category for your site. Go to the Open Directory, and search for the two keywords you have established. Does a particular category come up at the top for both the keywords? If so, go to that category, and see whether the sites present in the category are similar to yours. Also see whether that category has a Description and/or a FAQ. Read them and find out whether that category is applicable for your site. If so, this is the category you should submit your site to.If different categories come up at the top for the two keywords, go through all the categories and find out which is the most appropriate category among the different categories.For some keywords, you will find that the Open Directory does not display any categories. In this case, find out which category most of the top sites belong to and submit your site to that category, assuming it is applicable for your site.Once you have selected the right category, click on the "add URL" link at the top. Type in the address of your site in the first text box, the official name of your site in the next text box, the description that you have earlier developed in the third text box and your email address in the fourth text box. Although the Open Directory says that including the email address is optional, I would recommend that you include it - if, for some reason, your site is not accepted, the Open Directory editor may want to tell you why your site has not been accepted.

What to do if your site is not acceptedAfter submitting your site, go to the category where you have submitted your site every day and see when your site gets listed. If you find that your site is not in that category, it may so happen that you have been placed in a different category. Type in your domain name in Open Directory's search box and see whether your site comes up in the results. I have seen some sites getting accepted within 1 day and some sites in about 2-3 weeks.If your site has not been listed after three weeks, then re-submit it to the same category and wait for another three weeks. If your site is still not accepted, then have a look at your site again. Does it contain any missing images or links, links to empty pages or under construction signs? Does it provide good content? Does it have any spelling or grammatical errors?If you are absolutely convinced that your site is eligible for being accepted by the Open Directory, then the fact that your site is not being accepted may signify one of two things:i) The editor of that category is inactive, i.e. he/she has not been reviewing sites for a long time.ii) He/she is your competitor, and does not want to list you.In this case, the first step is to write to the editor of the category. Scroll down to the bottom of the category to which you are trying to submit your site and click on the name of the editor. If that category does not have an editor, go to the category above that in the hierarchy. For instance, suppose you are trying to submit to the Computers: Consultants: Business Systems category. At the time of writing of this article, that category did not have an editor. In this case, you should go to the Computers: Consultants category and click on one of the editors there. Click on the "Send to editorname" link, and in the Comments field, write a very polite message to the editor. Tell her that you have been trying to submit your site to the Open Directory and you have been unsuccessful. Give her the complete details of your submission, i.e. the category to which you submitted, your URL, the Title and the Description that you used and the dates on which you submitted. Ask her as to whether there are any mistakes that you are making and whether she would be kind enough to point out the mistakes to you so that you can correct them.If, after two weeks, you don't get any reply from the editor and are not accepted into the Open Directory, then look for another category which is applicable for your site using the method outlined earlier and submit your site to this category.


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What is the best Hosting Service on the Web?

When I first started looking for a Hosting service for all my websites, the 1st thing I did was read as many reviews as I could on all types of message boards and blogs. Then I spoke to some of my webmaster friends and they gave me some of their personal experiences. The bottom line is Dedicated Server hosting is the best, but is approximately 100$ a month. I'm sure 99% of you are not willing to put that kind of money down for your small new site. So basically if you are looking for a OK hosting company with amazing deals and no scams then I came to the conclusion HOSTGATOR.com and DREAMHOST.com are the best. I am telling you all in advance not to fall for their gimmicks and expect gazillion GB montly bandwith, because by the time you reach 1/10th of that you will be suspended for using too much CPU. But chances are you will need 1/10th of that if you hosting small and new sites...and are not spamming, so there shouldn't really be a problem. If you made me choose between the 2 , id have to say HostGator because they have much better technical,online support with their 24 hour live chat support. Also their control panel is more user friendly. Expect to pay around 10$ a month at both of these hosting companies..

message me if you have a problem and need some more advice

Ash



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Archive: Google Adsense & Other Advertisement Tips

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Archive: SEO & Traffic Tips

Google SEO Advice for your Website
SEO tips for the big 3, GOOGLE YAHOO MSN




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Archive: Domain & Hosting Tips

Best Hosting Service on Internet for New websites


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SEO tips for the big 3 - MSN,YAHOO and GOOGLE

Ranking your website highly on one of the "big three" search engines (Google, Yahoo or MSN) is a daunting task let alone ranking your website highly on all three. Three engines, three algorithms, three different sets of rules - and yet there are websites out there that have first page rankings across them all – how do they do it?While all of the major search engines use different algorithms, the end goal of all three is the same: to provide the searcher with the most relevant results available. It is this one common thread that makes it possible for an SEO to rank a website highly across all the major engines. While there are a variety of factors at play and an even wider variation in the weight each of these factors are given – the possible variations that can produce relevant results are limited.For example, if inbound links are given 0% weight then insignificant sites will rank highly for high-competition phrases. Many reputable companies such as Microsoft could lose rankings for their own names so links must and will always hold value. On the other hand, if links were to hold 100% weight then spamming the search engines would be a simple matter and so there are a limited number of possible variables in between these extremes that this factor can have, no matter which engine we are optimizing for.That said, there are still three main engines with three distinct algorithms despite common requirements. To clarify how to optimize for all of them it's easiest to discuss them individually first. Due to the way their algorithms work, it is best to expect rankings on MSN first, followed by Yahoo! and finally Google (I am assuming that the phrase is at least moderately competitive). For this reason, we will discuss them individually in that order.

SEO for MSN
Proper SEO for MSN requires that a site be structured well with a distinct theme throughout and many inbound links. The advantage an SEO has while optimizing a site for MSN is that MSN tends to pick up and credit new content and inbound links very quickly. That means that with the right tactics in place, one can rank a website relatively quickly on this important engine.While MSN has the lowest number of searches performed on it, ComScore's report back in July revealed that MSN searchers were also 48% more likely to purchase a product or service online than the average Internet user. A very important statistic for website owners that sell online.To rank highly on MSN one needs to build a solid sized site (exactly how large will depend on your industry – look at the size of your competitors' sites for an idea), a relevant theme throughout the site that focuses on your primary keywords and a good number of links. MSN doesn't (at this time) employ an aging delay on links such as the one employed by both Google and Yahoo! so the effects of the site and inbound links can be picked up very quickly and with good SEO efforts one can rank well within a few months on MSN for competitive phrases.

SEO for Yahoo!
Until recently Yahoo! acted very much like MSN, but now it's leaning a bit more towards Google. Ranking a website well on Yahoo! requires a solid-sized site with unique content and a very good number of links.While PageRank is a Google factor, Yahoo! does have some type of page value factor at play. Many moons ago Yahoo! was playing with a PageRank-like calculation called WebRank. They even went so far as to put out a beta toolbar testing it. This indicates that there is a factor at play in the Yahoo! algorithm similar to Google's PageRank – they just don't advertise what a specific page's value is.Yahoo! is placing a fair amount of emphasis on the age of links though not in the same way that Google is. We will get to Google shortly, however to understand what to expect from Yahoo! one must understand that when you get a link to your website it won't deliver its full value for a number of months. While the exact number of months in unknown, it appears to be around 8 before it delivers its full weight, though it will hold some weight from day one and this weight will increase as time passes.To rank well on Yahoo!, you must optimize your site similar to what you would do for MSN and you must build a large number of inbound links and have patience as these links age. You will not see a sudden spike 2 weeks after a large link-building campaign. You will likely have to wait 3-4 months to notice any significant effect.

SEO For Google
Virtually every webmaster and website owner is primarily concerned about attaining Google rankings because of the significantly higher number of searchers using it. Provided that you are building your website following the best practices of SEO (i.e. unique content, a sizable amount of content, and a good number of incoming links), then your rankings are sure to follow. However, because of the aging delay it will likely take longer than for MSN or Yahoo! Google considers the age of your links, your domain and even the individual page to be factors, and the longer your page has been online the better.Essentially, ranking a site on Google requires that you take the same actions as for the other two, continue your link building efforts on an ongoing basis to ensure that you end up with more-and-more links, and that you update your content and add content on a fairly regular basis (through the addition of a blog for example).Tying It TogetherThe logical process for a new website or one at the first stages of SEO is to first target MSN. At this point, you can focus your attention on continuing to build high-quality, relevant links to, and content on, your site which will continue to increase your value on Yahoo! and Google.Analysis will be required to determine exactly what weight you will be giving to different areas. For example, if your onsite factors are optimized for MSN, then you know that you will need to make up for this in the offsite factors for Yahoo! and Google. If you figured you would need 100 links to rank on Google, then you will now need to up that number to account for the fact that you have optimized your site for a different engine.During the analysis process you will likely want to use a tool to speed up the process of keyword density analysis and competitor link analysis. At Beanstalk we use a tool called Total Optimizer Pro though there are others out there (note: I have yet to find one that does what this one does as quickly and easily).ConclusionI am hoping that none of you read the title and were expecting to rank on the first page of all three major engines next week. Ranking highly on all three major engines takes time, patience and a good few rounds of tweaking to get the perfect balance of onsite and offsite optimization. Of course, as you can gather, done properly it's well worth the effort.
article by Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc.
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Google's SEO Advice for Your Website: Content

by Joel Walsh
The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content.I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web.Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing.Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?Apparently not.

Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Features

Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

• Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.
• Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same
• Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
• Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.
• Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together
• Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.

SEO Bugbears and Sacred CowsA hard look at the results shows that, practically speaking, a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows may matter less to ranking than good content.
• PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.• Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.
• JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.
• Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contained over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes money.
• Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.Recommendations
• Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the "back" button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.
• If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.
• Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.
• Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.
Joel Walsh's archive of web business articles is at the website of his business, UpMarket Content, a website content provider.


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How to Strategize Your Link Popularity Campaign

Link popularity is the number of links pointing to a website. It is an important factor that major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN use to rank web pages.Webmasters figure out that in order for their web pages to rank well at the search engines for certain keywords, they need a lot of incoming links with these targeted key words. Linking schemes of all kinds were hatched ... mini-sites, site networks, link farms and reciprocal linking, just to mention a few. Some schemes like link farms were clear indication of manipulating the search engines.Google has clamped down on such practices and further fine-tuned its SERP algorithm to stop manipulation by anyone as evidenced by 'Jagger'.Focus on the long term. Build a site that is credible to the search engines and your website visitors.Here are 7 ethical link-building strategies for you work with ...

1. Internal linking. Having a well organized internal linking structure insures that your website gets 'spidered' and that all pages of your website gets indexed by the search engines. This in turn increases the chances of the number of phrases that your website has the potential to rank for. And I have had website traffic from key phrases that I never thought of.

2. One-way links. Human edited directories look like a thing of the past. With Google being more efficient and accurate as ever there's no need to turn to human edited directories. A directory may get you a few click-throughs in a month or none at all. However, to be listed in a high quality directory like DMOZ and Yahoo can increase your PageRank.The way to get inbound links is distribute content. There are many article directories on the Internet. Just include a link in your article. With article distribution you can choose the exact anchor text for the link.

3. Reciprocal links. What is reciprocal linking? It is simply trading links with other sites. You add their links to your site and vice versa. In times past website owners have sizeable directories with multiple links that are not relevant to theirs. Now, search engines have become wiser and look for link relevance. A word of advice here, know whom you are trading link with. Don't just choose any Tom, Dick, Harry or toothless Jane to be your link partners.People have asked whether they would be penalized by the search engines for reciprocal links. Well, at least for now, they are still acceptable.

4. Varied the Text of your inbound links. It will not appear natural to the search engines for every site that links to you to have the same link description. So vary the text of your inbound links using a few key phrases.

5. Grow your links at a steady rate. Google penalizes new sites with low-traffic that grow their links too quickly, whereas a well-established high traffic site that increases by a few thousand links a month will viewed as normal. The rate at which links are created without being penalized by Google, is directly proportional to the age of the website. For owners of new sites, bear this in mind, if you are thinking about buying inbound links.

6. Have inbound links from different ranking sites. If all your inbound links are Pr6 and Pr7 sites, then you will send a strong indication that you have purchased those links. Your inbound links will not appear natural to the search engines. It is more natural for you to have a large number of Pr1 and Pr2 inbound links with decreasing number of inbound links as you move higher up the PageRank scale.

7. Actively participate in forums or blogs. Don't just post threads indiscriminately on forums. Search engines view this as spamming. Participate in forums to learn and to contribute to the communities and at the same time gather inbound links. You will also build credibility for yourself and your business if you are a solution to people's problems.


Blogging is an effective way of gathering inbound links. If you have a personal blog, it is easier to post comments at other sites. But do spam blast your comments with advertisements. Just provide a link to your site with your comments. Your goals are to gather inbound links and to gain a good reputation online. Comment intelligently on the specific subject. A well thought out comment will not only attract the search engines, but also more readers of the blog to your website. They will naturally link to you if they find articles of good quality at your website.To achieve good rankings at the Search Engine through link popularity requires time and patience. Stick to the sound practices of link building. Impatience could cause you to incur penalties. It was once rumored, but now quite evident that Google uses a 'sandbox' to keep questionable sites in the hold until they have aged to a point. Then they are released at the sole discretion of Google. Other search engines also have their own safeguards to keep their SERPs from being cluttered with questionable sites.The underlying principle is to grow your links 'organically' whilst adding content of value to your website. Ethical SEO is not a black art. It is a matter of adhering to the guidelines, terms and conditions stipulated by the search engines.
by Gerrick W



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Welcome to my blog Webmaster 101

Hi,

I am the webmaster of many small and medium sized online sites and ventures. I am not the greatest expert at things but have a good knowledge on many things a new webmaster would want to know when they are trying to start their own online website or business. I can help guide you from my own experience with things like domains, hosting, web development, search engine optimization, directories, generating traffic and things like that...

Ash


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