The Single Most Misunderstood Concept in Search Engine Positioning by Michael Buck

The Single Most Misunderstood Concept in Search Engine Positioning by Michael Buck

On April 27th, we shared with you our article entitled "Is Search Engine
Positioning Dead?" (If you missed it, visit
for the archive)
In this article, we presented several compelling 3rd party statistics
suggesting that search engine placement remains by far the most powerful
method for driving large amounts of targeted traffic to your web site.

As a result of this article, we received lots of great feedback, and many
pertinent questions. But when the dust settled, one topic rose to the
top of the list and seemed to cause a great deal of confusion and mystery:

"Why is keyword selection so important and
how do I select the best keywords for my site?"

Let's break this down into bite-sized pieces and clear up the mystery,
by answering our most frequently asked questions regarding keyword
selection:

"What's the difference between a keyword and
a keyword phrase? And which should I use?"

Put simply, a keyword is a single word such as "Maui." While a keyword
phrase is a more descriptive string of two or more words such as "Maui
vacations." Your specific approach to keyword selection will vary,
depending on your industry. For certain niche markets, single words can
be a good strategy (as long as they are specific to your product or service).
But regardless of your industry...

Well-researched keyword phrases will attract quality, targeted visitors
to your website who *specifically* want what you are selling.

Let's assume you sell Maui vacations, and your website is listed at the
top of the search results for the keywords "Maui" and "Maui vacations."
Let's look at the characteristics of two groups of visitors you'd attract.

Those who perform a search on "Maui" are searching for a wide variety
of topics. Such as Maui's history and culture, snorkeling, botanic
gardens, hiking trails, sailing, golfing, and yes - some will be looking for
Maui vacations. But only a small percentage of the people who perform
a search on the keyword "Maui" are qualified prospect for your vacation
packages.

Now think about the prospects who find you by searching for "Maui
vacations." Every prospect who performs this search is a qualified
prospect for you. And by getting a top ranking with this more
descriptive keyword phrase, you attract people who are more likely
to become paying customers!

You see, someone who wants to take a vacation to Maui is not likely
to search for "Maui." They're not going to search for "Vacations." And
they're not going to search for "Hawaii" either. They're much more
likely to enter a keyword phrase like "Maui vacations."

Today, more than ever, your ideal prospects are going to enter precisely
what they want to find, rather than general, open-ended terms. Which
means your keyword selection must target your ideal customer with
laser-beam focus.

At the same time, the search engines and directories themselves are
also becoming much more strict with the pages that they'll accept and
index. They'll be watching your submissions like a hawk to make sure
that they're completely relevant to the topic reflected by your keyword
phrase.

In our last article, we weighed the pros and cons of doing your search
engine positioning yourself versus hiring a reputable company to handle
this time consuming task for you. Many of you have wisely realized that
it can be much more time-effective and cost-effective to leave your
search engine placement in the hands of experts, so you van focus on
your core business.

So the most important question of all now becomes:

"If I hire a company to do my search engine placement for me, should
I be expected to provide my own keywords and keyword phrases, or
do they have a responsibility to advise me?"

Frankly, any company that doesn't provide hands on consultation in this
area is not helping you to maximize your search engine rankings.
Keyword selection is the entire foundation on which your search engine
campaign is built. Can you imagine hiring a contractor to build your
house... only to have him say, "Okay, YOU lay all the bricks and pour
the concrete - then I'll do the rest?"

If you're going to hire someone to achieve top ranking for your website,
be sure that they take on the full responsibility - not just bits and pieces.
Otherwise you run the risk of your entire promotion falling apart.

I hope it's now clear how vital it is to target the best possible keywords
and keyword phrases for your web site. And you now have the burden
of proper keyword selection lifted from your shoulders.

Sure, your expertise of your business warrants your input. But at least
you'll have the peace of mind of knowing that the search engine
specialists are doing their job, and not leaving your keyword selection
to chance.

After all, isn't that why you hire them in the first place?


About the Author
Michael Buck is a marketing consultant & Director of Marketing for
SearchEngineWebPromotion.com. To find out more about top search
engine placement and how you can attract targeted traffic with multiple
Top 20 rankings - visit http://www.SearchEngineWebPromotion.com.
You may also call Mike at (310) 798-0467.

It's All in the Links! by Dale Sexton

It's All in the Links! by Dale Sexton

Link popularity, big in search engine ranking of late, may be as difficult
to accomplish as the top 30 ranking itself. Using links can't fail. Even if
you don't reach the top 30 ranking, linking will bring more traffic.

You sign guestbooks, use classified ads and swap links. Keep a database of
those sites linked to you. This will become an important part of link
popularity.

You will submit this database to the search engines for a link popularity
boost. As the search engine follows the links, the pages found will be added
to the search engines database. Your link will more easily be found on the
search engines.

If you haven't already started a database, you might think this is going to
be a tough chore, especially if you have thousands of links on the internet.
It might not be as hard as you think.

You need the tools that can find pages linked to yours and put them in a
database. Here are my recommendations:

URL Spider Pro v1.92
http://www.innerprise.net/us4.asp

WebWolf 2.03
http://www.msw.com.au/webwolf/

After you have your database of links, you'll want to convert them to HTML
format. Try:

DataBox v2.1
http://www.simplewebfx.greatxscape.net/

DB to HTML Express 1.5
http://www.xlinesoft.com/db2html/download.htm

DB-HTML Converter PRO v1.4
http://www.primasoft.com/dbhtmlp.htm

A product that gathers the links and puts them directly into HTML format is:

QueryN MetaSearch v2.1
http://www.freeflowsoftware.com/freeflowsoftware/Products.htm
http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,,000UBZ,.html

You have your web page with of links, now you need to submit it to the
search engines. Of course, the best way of doing this is to go to each
search engine site and submit to them individually. If you need to save
time, these submission tools work great:

Submitta Standard 1.1
http://www.submitta.co.uk/download/

CybeRat v1.4
http://www.cyberat.com/promotion/download.htm

PageCrafters Submission Services
http://pagecrafters.net/url.htm

Here is a good tool for gathering new reciprocal links. Be sure to add those
new links to your database.

Link Crafter v1.020
http://linkcrafter.bannermation.com/fc/LinkCrafter

For me, this is the 'piece de la resistance' (what ever that means). It will
copy any URL from any clipboard application till you tell it to stop. Put
this piece of software in copy mode and copy links till the cows come home.

URL Manager 2000
http://www.dlcwest.com/~sorev/downloads.htm

It's all about making the work easier, more productive. Now you can have
more time for relaxing, or maybe for more work. Sheesh!


About the Author
Dale Sexton owns & operates 'PageCrafters.net', &
publishes 'Small Business Tools magazine'. Both
focus on tools & tips for small business.
mailto:pagecrafters@pagecrafters.net
Sign up for 'SBT magazine' at:
http://pagecrafters.net/newsletter.html

Website directories: More than meets the eye by Lauri Harpf

Website directories: More than meets the eye by Lauri Harpf

Yahoo, DMOZ and Looksmart are probably familiar names to all of
us. Many people attempt to get their sites listed in those
directories, because it is a well-known fact that plenty of
people visit them when they want to find interesting sites.
This
in turn translates into a healthy flood of visitors to the
sites
that are represented in the aforementioned directories.

While it is true that the directories themselves can produce
quite a bit of traffic, there are additional benefits that come
with a directory listing. Unfortunately, these advantages are
not often mentioned and that is why they are unknown to most
siteowners. Many are well aware that you can influence the
directories by submitting to different search engines;
for example, you can submit to Google and if you're lucky and
the keyword you're aiming at is rare enough, your site will
appear in searches that are performed at Yahoo. But did you
know that directory listings can have a massive impact on how
your site performs in different search engines?

Some of the large search engines, for example MSN and AOL, draw
their search results almost entirely from different
directories.
MSN relies heavily on Looksmart and AOL is affiliated with
DMOZ.
If your site is not listed in these two directories, it will
not
appear in searches at MSN and AOL. Since they both are very big
sites, receiving together around 100 million visitors each
month, it is very important to have your site well represented
in them.

So, we know that it is important to be listed in the major
directories in order to get into some of the search engines. Is
that all? Nope. The thing is, many search engines also rank
sites based on whether they are listed in certain directories
or not. Let's take an example: One of my sites wasn't ranking
very well at Google. I had optimized it pretty well in my
opinion and had received decent rankings under some keywords,
but it still hadn't achieved the success I was looking for.
This
puzzled me, as I couldn't point out why the site wasn't doing
as
well as I would have wanted it to.

After working on it for a while, I decided to switch my focus
to
other promotion methods and get back to optimizing my site
later. As I knew that both of them were good traffic providers,
I chose to spend the time I had to submitting the site to both
Yahoo and DMOZ. Fortunately, my submissions were accepted and
the site was added to both directories after a while. A few
weeks passed and I begun to see referrals not only from Yahoo
and DMOZ, but also from Google in my logs. I went back to check
my rankings and noticed that they had vastly improved. And then
it dawned on me..

I went back to DMOZ and managed to get another sub-section of
the same site listed. I waited for a couple of weeks for Google
to reindex and WHAM! This sub-section went from nowhere to be
found to a Top 15 ranking on a competitive keyphrase with over
half a million returns. The only thing that had changed was
that
the page was now listed at DMOZ.

This incident inspired me, so I went and looked if the same
principle could be applied to other engines as well. I noticed
that nearly all of them appeared to give weight to directory
listings, but if the search engine happened to be affiliated
with a
certain directory, it was extremely important to be listed in
said
directory in order to rank high. With Google, this directory
was
DMOZ, with Excite it was Looksmart and so on. Sites that were
listed in the right directories appeared to have a definite
advantage against sites that weren't.

My conclusion would be that the days when search engines and
directories could be treated as separate entities are now gone.
If you want to achieve high traffic, you're going to have to
tackle both at the same time. The traditional search engine
optimization methods - a keyword-intensive copy, meta tags,
link popularity and so on - are far from being dead, but there
definitely is a new major factor in play that you should
account for.
About the Author
Lauri Harpf runs the A Promotion Guide website, where he
offers free information about search engines, directories
and other promotion methods. His site can be found at
http://www.apromotionguide.com/

Site Submission Services by Richard Lowe

Site Submission Services by Richard Lowe

This is a simple fact about life on the internet: if you have a web site you
must get it listed in all of the major search engines. In fact, not only
must the site get listed, but it must get listed "well".

What does this mean? It means you must spend some time designing your site
properly so the engines can make a good guess as to what it's about. You
see, search engines are robots - they are automated pieces of software which
examine your pages and attempt to decipher the subject(s). This translates
to words and phrases that the robots believe will allow best describe your
site to people who need your information.

What this actually means is for each page of your site, you must be able to
come up with some good keywords which accurately describe the contents of
that page. Once you've done that, you must scatter those keywords throughout
the page in various ways. The search engine robot will examine your pages,
see the keywords in places it likes, and determine your page is indeed about
that subject. For many engines, the better you do this the higher your site
will be in the results when someone searches using that keyword (this is
called ranking). And, as should be obvious, the higher you are in the
listings, the more hits you will receive.

Google is one of the most significant exceptions to this rule. It's primary
concern is not the keywords on your pages. No, Google actually looks at the
links to your pages and uses this information to determine your site's
ranking.

Making your pages "search engine friendly" is not difficult but it can be
tedious. The basic procedure is to pick a keyword which describes your page,
then scatter that keyword in various places: the title, description and
keyword Metatags, ALT tags on images, H1 and H2 headers and within the first
couple of paragraphs of text. To satisfy Google, you can get people to link
to the site with text including the keyword as well.

Okay, so now you've got some pages which are very descriptive to search
engines. How do you get them listed?

You submit them, of course.

Virtually all search engines have a page which allows you to submit one or
more URLs from your site. Some search engines are smart and require only a
single URL, others require as many URLs as you want to give them
(occasionally limiting the number that you can enter in a single day). All
of them have rules about spamming (making many submissions on a single day
or week, or trying to get your site better ranked using unethical means). So
be sure not to submit your site too often.

It can be a major pain to submit your site to the search engines. If you do
it manually, you have to get a list of as many search pages as you can,
visit each of them, find their submission page, then enter one or more URLs.
To be complete, you also need to do this again occasionally - perhaps once a
month or quarter. Even just submitting manually to the major 10 engines can
be a real pain.

So what do you do? I mean, a webmaster should really be spending most of his
time designing and creating his web pages, shouldn't he? Well, actually, yes
and no. Promotion is a major part of being a webmaster - a site must be seen
in order to be successful (otherwise why bother at all). Thus a webmaster
must promote his site, and he should be spending some time on this practice
every single day.

Of course, it would be silly to hand-submit your site to the thousands of
search engines and hundreds of thousands of FFA (Free for All List) pages.

One course of action is to hand submit your site to the major search
engines, then use submission services to submit it to the medium sized and
smaller ones. Don't forget about the directories, especially Yahoo,
Looksmart and DMOZ. These are very critical to getting traffic to your site.

There are many programs and services available to help you submit your site.
Some of these are good, others are a complete waste of time and money.

Submit Wolf
http://www.submitwolf.com/
This is a program into which you enter your site name, URL and details. The
program then can be used to perform automatic submissions to thousands of
search engines and FFA lists.

WebPosition Gold
http://www.webposition.com
Probably the best way to get your site listed well in the major search
engines. This product combines every tactic into one concise and easy-to-use
package.

Jim's Tools
http://www.jimtools.com/
This awesome site includes a full suite of tools to help you submit your
site to search engines, FFA lists and directories. Highly recommended.

Everything which submits to FFA pages
You will find hundreds (or even thousands) of services which claim to submit
to thousands, tens of thousands or even more "search engines". Actually,
what they are doing is submitting to FFA pages. FFA pages are completely
worthless as a promotional technique, and thus all of these services are
pure garbage. Don't even bother wasting a minute looking at them.

I know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other site submission
services available. I look at them all with caution, as most of them are
highly overpriced and many use or promote unethical submission practices
(search engine spamming).
About the Author
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at
http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to read
over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your
internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.

How to turn 2 keywords into 1000's of keyphrases by Robert Brady

How to turn 2 keywords into 1000's of keyphrases by Robert Brady

Are you happy with the hundreds of carefully chosen keywords and keyphrases
that you have included within the pages of your treasured website? Are you
thinking to yourself that there can be no more possibilities left?

Read on....

Look up the keywords used by your competitors in trade journals, Yellow
Pages, directories, outdoor advertising posters, etc. Right click and view
source on web pages to see what other people are using in their META tags.
(More information on META tags at http://www.ed-u.com/metatags.htm)

Set your target for hundreds or even thousands of keywords and phrases if
possible; your competitors will. Ask friends, colleagues and children what
words they would type into a search box to find you.

META Tags:

Use different META Tags on different pages:
In the META name="keywords" list use:

o lower case
o Capitalisation
o UPPER CASE
o iNVERTED tEXT
o Misspellings (see below)
o Hyphenation
o Join words i.e. ice cream = icecream, ice-cream
o Pluralizations = icecreams, ice-creams
o Use commas to separate key words and key phrases within your META tags on
some pages, on other pages just use spaces.
o Extensions i.e. fast = faster, fastest. Many search engines use string
queries when indexing sites.

Ask friends and colleagues how they would misspell your keywords. Children
are a very productive source for misspelling; they often come up with ones
you might not have thought of yourself. Do not under-estimate the need for
misspellings. Even the less obvious variations of words and phrases attract
traffic.

Always use the correct spelling on the META name="description" content=" and
the visible part of your site and try to repeat your most important keywords
and phrase a few times throughout the page. Include them in descriptive
sentences of what you have to offer and place the very important keywords
high on the page.

Pluralization of words is important with some search engines. It is
recommended that you use it so that you don't lose possible visitors.

Examples of keyword possibilities for META name="keywords":

ice-cream(s)
ice cream(s)
icecream(s)
ice-creme(s)
ice creme(s)
icecreme(s)
ice-craem(s)
ice craem(s)
icecraem(s)
find(ing) ice-cream(s)
ice-cream(s) for (on) sale
ice-cream(s) for (on) sale (in) London, New York etc.
ice-cream store, shop, outlet etc.
cheap(est) ice-cream(s)
ice-cream site(s)
ice cream recipe(s)
homemade ice cream(s)
home made ice cream(s)
homemade ice cream recipe(s)
home-made ice cream recipe(s)
ice cream maker(s)
ice cream machine(s)
vanilla ice cream recipe(s)
ice-cream information, info, info., infomation
buy(ing) ice-cream
buy + (all the misspellings of ice-cream)
ice-cream sundae(s)
(all the misspellings of ice-cream) + (all the misspellings of sundae)
(all the misspellings) sunday
ice-cream flavours (flavors)
(all the misspellings of ice-cream) + (all the misspellings of vanilla)
(all the misspellings of ice-cream) + (all the misspellings of chocolate)
(all the misspellings of vanilla) + (all the misspellings of ice-cream)
(all the misspellings of chocolate) + (all the misspellings of ice-cream)
choc-ice (and all of above)
ice-lolly (and all of above)

The above list has 1000's of possibilities; the longer you spend on the
keywords the more traffic you can expect.

Some words will attract no visitors while others will attract many. Even if
you operate in a very niche market and only get two or three visitors a year
on each key-word or key-phrase, that should still net you hundreds of extra
visitors. Other sites can expect thousands. Visit
http://www.ed-u.com/payperclick.htm where you will find a list of
pay-per-click directories that you can submit all of your new keyphrases to.


About the Author
Robert Brady mailto:trafficplus@ed-u.com
ed-u.com - The Education Mega-Site
http://www.ed-u.com

Get Rid of Those Doorway Pages by windsong

Get Rid of Those Doorway Pages by windsong

Getting traffic to your site is the ultimate goal. Without
the traffic, you site isn't going to do much but take up
cyberspace. Now, there are many ways to do this, and you
should be doing them all. But for our purpose here, I will
limit it to Search Engines.

A while back, doorway pages were all the rage. Everyone was
scrambling to create hundreds and thousands of pages to
essentially trick the search engines into leading people to
their sites. It seemed unethical to me, and I figured that
the engines would pick up on this and bring it to an abrupt
halt. And they have. They want pages with content. So much
for all those doorway pages. It was a big waste of time and
effort.

Most web sites consist of several pages. Hopefully, each
page covers a specific, but related topic. And, hopefully,
there is already a navigational system in place, where
each page links to all other pages. This is a must.

If you have a site, for example, on Internet Marketing,
you already know that this subject encompasses many topics.
Each of those topics deserves its own page. You might have
pages on Ebook Marketing, Promotion, Ezines, Search
Engines, etc.

Each page in your site is already a 'doorway.' If you
optimize each of these pages as if it were a doorway page,
you will get a good ranking in the Search Engines. First,
make sure that each page sticks to a particular topic.
Then write your meta tags accordingly.

Here are some guidelines for top placement in the Search
Engines:

* Try to limit your meta keywords (preferably phrases)
to 3. The worst thing you can do is have a gazillion
keywords. Your relevancy will be shot to heck and you
might get listed, but you will be #3,583,204. No one
will find you.

* Do not use the same keywords on every page. Each page
is different, so make the keywords different.

* Make sure your keywords appear in the title tag, the
description tag, and all over your page, especially
near the top.

* Do not list keywords that do not appear on the page.
Again, Do NOT list keywords that do not appear on the
page. Lists have been circulated showing the "most
searched for keywords". They generally consist of words
like: sex, naked, women, gay, adult, erotica etc....
Don't even go there. Do you really want people going to
your site that don't give a hoot about what you have to
say??? They are not interested and will not buy anything.
You are wasting your time as well as theirs.

* Use keywords in comment tags, alt tags, and in header
tags. You can also use a clear 1x1 pixel image and load
the alt tag with keywords.

* The very first thing that appears on your page should
be a statement of benefits rich in keywords, similar to
your description meta tag. Some Search Engines ignore
your meta tags and print the first words on your page
as the description in their listing. If your navigational
bar is at the top of the page, that is what will show up
in their description. Not good.

* Header tags, (H1 for example) are very important. Search
Engines read the header tags. Use these for paragraph
headings instead of font tags, and load up the Keywords.

* Forget the bouncing flash and glitz. Yeah, they are fun
to play with, but the Search Engines are not impressed.
They may even be hampered by this as far as indexing
your page. Frames, flash movies, CGI scripts, javascript,
applets and image maps are all complete junk to a search
engine spider. Not only that, this sort of thing will
actually push your real content further from the top of
the page, reducing the relevancy of what the spiders
actually do see.

* Keep the spiders happy. Feed them lots of relevant
content. This bears repeating, but I won't. :)

* Get a Domain! A top 10 listing is virtually impossible
to achieve without having your own registered domain
name.

There is no secret magical formula for getting a top ranking
in the Search Engines. Currently there are over 5,000 places
to register a web site with the number increasing daily. In
reality, about 10 of these search engines will produce 90%
of your search engine traffic. The larger search engines like
Excite, Lycos and Alta Vista are visited millions of time a
week and offer the most comprehensive types of searches for
Internet surfers.
About the Author
windsong is webmaster, editor and publisher at:
http://marketing-resources.com/
Subscribe to windsong's free e-zine:
All About Search Engines!(tm) Send a blank email to:
mailto:aboutsearchengines-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

How To Use Pay Per Click Search Engines Successfully by Jerry Robertson

How To Use Pay Per Click Search Engines Successfully by Jerry Robertson

Pay Per Click Search Engines(PPCSE) are popping up everywhere. There are over 180 and growing rapidly. Many of them are new and you will not get much traffic at this time. However, the top PPCSE can direct many interested customers to your site. The keys to being successful are as follows:
1 Advertising in the right PPCSE. The requirements are traffic at an affordable price.

2 Use specific keywords that are relevant to your web site. General terms will get your more hits and a lower conversion rate. Learn to use any tools or services that can help you with your keywords, descriptions or bids.

3 Terrific descriptions can really help you attract targeted customers to your website. The more specific your description, the higher the conversion rate. If you do not have a top bid, make your description different from your competitors.

4 Using smart bidding strategies can help reduce your expenses. Bid only a penny or two more than the position you want. Need to check your bids on a regular basis. Set a maximum bid per term.

5 Try all PPCSE that give you money to try out their accounts. They are slow and you will not get very many clicks at the beginning. However some of them are starting to grow. Once you find a PPCSE that is giving away free clicks sign up right away. Many of them are limited time offers.

PPCSE can bring instant profitable targeted traffic to your web site. Studies have shown that PPCSE traffic may be the most profitable way to advertise along with ezine advertising for your web site. If you have a website, make sure you take full advantage of the PPCSE.


About the Author
Jerry is the editor of the free bi-weekly newsletters Elrob Search Engine Tips and Elrob Online Biz Tips. Subscribe to these newsletters at:
http://www.elrob.com