Does URL Shorteners Pass PageRank?

With all of this social marketing and how it is taking off, you might have asked yourself if URL shorteners like bit.ly and tiny.url help with SEO efforts.   Afterall, part of social marketing is building backlinks to your website.  These URL shorteners do a 301 redirect which tells the search engines that the link has permanently moved locations.

Watch this video with Google’s Matt Cutts to get some more information about these urls and how they effect your SEO.

I just hope these companies are around to keep my links active 5 years from now.

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How To Backlink To Your Website

Number one. Articles

Number two. Directories

Number three. Local links

Number four. Niche specific sites

Number five. Blog links

Number six. Social bookmarking links

Popular Keywords Search For Your Niche

One way to drive traffic to your website is through Google AdWords. However, in order to be successful, you need the right keywords. Most people usually bid on the most popular keywords and therefore, most expensive keywords. You can search for keywords without having to pay anything, all it takes is some creativity. Here are some ways for you to do so and find top keywords for your website.

Find Out More About Finding The Keyword Search Suggestion And More…

Joining Forums

There are thousands of forums on the Internet and they are one of the best place to search for keywords. All you need to do is to type in your topic and the word “forum” to find the relevant forums. For instant, you can type “computer forum” or “fashion forum”. To start, create your profile and start browsing the forums. Find out the favourite topics, phrases and words people use, and you put them into a list. While you are going through the forum, you are slowly building your keyword list with the common words and terms.

Keyword Tool From Google AdWords

Making use of Google’s Keyword tool is also a good option to find popular keywords. You can find the tool’s website by searching “Google AdWords Keyword Tool”. Once you get to the site, you can start your search by typing in your topic and the clicking “Get Keyword Ideas”. The site allows you to also search for synonyms. Make sure that you tick this option so that you get more keyword suggestions. The search engine will return a keyword list, as well as some suggested keywords. Included in the results are the search volume and this is very useful. Best of all, this is all free.

Use Amazon

One of the most overlooked, but amazing methods to search for keywords is through book content. Amazon.com is a website that contains plenty of books, and you can use these books for information and keyword research provided that you know what to do. You start by searching for the top 5 most popular books that are related to your topic, then you start going through the content page and pick out some initial keywords. Aside from the content page, you can also go through the first few pages and search for additional keywords. With this, you get the keywords that you need and also a good idea about what your audiences are looking for.

Websites Of Other People

Another method to get popular keywords is by website or blog hopping. But make sure that these websites are related to your topic. You can start looking at their content. These popular websites have been optimized for search engines and are ranked for certain keywords. Look at their headers, page titles, meta keywords and also descriptions. These things will give you an idea of the keywords that these sites use and what your common audience usually searches for.

Internet Keyword Tools

There are several useful keyword tools that you can use on the Internet, like WordTracker.com, KeywordSpy.com and KeyCompete.com. These tool come with membership fees if you want to use their services. They gives you access to thousands of keywords all at once. Do bear in mind that they can also be a bit difficult to use.

You can use these methods to find keywords for your niche. What you need to remember is that there are thousands of keywords on the internet and you can find them using different methods. What is very important, is finding the keywords that are relevant to your site as well as to your audiences, so you can eventually make sales with them.

Find Out More About Finding The Keyword Search Suggestion And More…

Your Business Needs SEO

A good website can be a valuable tool for any type of business. If you are a traditional offline business then it can be a marketing tool to show potential customers your products and services or for online based business then it is critical to your entire business success.

HAve you suffered for the dissapointment of putting blood sweat and tears into a great company website, getting it live and then finding nobody comes to your site. If your trying to boost online traffic the your efforts need to be focussed on the mighty Google.

If you are a big brand then you may be lucky enough to have large volumes of people searching specifically for your brand and company website. If on the other hand you are not such a major brand then your going to get the best results in gaining new business by ranking well on Google for generic search terms relating to your business.  For example, if you ran a credit card comparison website then ranking for a term such as compare credit cards would be important.

Google and other search engines use a complex algorithm to decide who ranks where in search results. Google and others try to pick the most relevant and high quality websites for the search term. For the main search results you can’t pay Google to place you in a certain position but you can make your website more attractive to Google through a process known as search engine optimisation or SEO for short.

Many web designers fail to understand search engine optimisation when they build a site so you may need to learn some skills yourself or employ the services of a search engine optimisation company.

The process of SEO involves researching what your potential customers are actually searching for online and making changes to your site structure, page titles, headings, content and more to ensure each page is relevant to the keyword terms you want to rank for. It’s also important to build up quality inbound links to your website to support your status as a useful resource.

Don’t expect overnight results with search engine optimisation, it takes time but the long term rewards can put your business ahead.

Article by Richard at Brisbane internet marketing firm Quantive.

A Beginners Guide To Website SEO

For many people, SEO is something only highly skilled people can do. As a Houston SEO it’s my belief that a lot of this is because of all the snake oil taught by scores of people calling their self SEO experts. Some do this because they don’t know any better while others do it to keep their Clients in the dark about what they really do. Search Engine Optimization isn’t rocket science people. It’s nothing more than systematically building and optimizing a website the same way over and over to achieve high rankings.

To start with, one should make sure that the main keywords are used in the web address if you can arrange it. With everything except the domain names being equal, a site with your keywords in the URL will rank higher than one without the keywords included in the domain name.

Next, the you keywords should be used in the Website’s Title. By doing this, you’re helping the search engines come to a conclusion as to what your Website is about.

Your keywords should also be used as the Title of each page also, or at the very least, some parts of a keyword phrase should be in the page Title. This has the same effect as putting keywords in the Title of your Website in that it helps the search engines determine what the subject of the page is, what it’s about and how relevant it is to the search term being searched for. Plus, the page Title should also be used in your H1 tag. Search engines rely a great deal on the H1 to tell them what the page is about and how relevant it is. If you’re using a web design company company, make certain they know how to do this one little thing.

You should now have those three things taken care of. Now that you do, it is crucial that the words you wish your website to rank higher for show up in the content of the page. For best results, you should insert the keywords into the first paragraph somewhere and at least once in the last paragraph. A few more times between the first and last paragraph can’t hurt but don’t over do it, just be sure you work them in the first part of the page and again at the end.

Finally, you’ll soon discover that the most important part of Search Engine Optimization actually takes place off your Website. In my opinion, the most important thing in getting higher ranks for a Website is backlinks going back to your page on your Website. And it’s not enough to just get backlinks, these backward links need to have your keywords as the Anchor text of the links back to your site.

How important are backlinks? Well, I can rank a website that doesn’t have the keywords in the domain, one that doesn’t have keywords in the Website Title, Page Title and in the Content (although it’s much, much harder to do), but without anchored links back to your site going to your web page, {it is nearly impossible} to rank a site in Google for any search terms that are the least bit in high demand.

3 Steps To Optimize Blog Post

For many blog owners, they fail to capitalize on search engine traffic because they do not understand how important SEO optimizing their blog is. This is one reason you’ll see so many bloggers fail to earn money online.

It doesn’t take a SEO guru to optimize your blog. It can be done in three simple steps. By doing these three steps all the time, you can increase visitors which may make the difference in a blog that makes the owner virtually no income or a blog that is an instrument for additional income.

Follow the advice below to optimize every post you upload and take advantage of free traffic from search engines.

To begin with, you should make sure your blog post addresses are SEO friendly. With free blogs like Blogger, this is automatically done for you. If you’re a WordPress user, then you’ll need to set your url structure so that the code produces search engine optimized url’s when you create a post.

All you have to do in WordPress is to click on the Permalinks tab, and click the radio button along side the Custom field. Then you’ll put a percentage sign followed by the words Postname. {Immediately after the words postname, Now} add another percentage sign. Now all your blog post will have search engine optimized addresses.

The best tip to optimizing your blog is to put your main keyword in the Title. If you’re blogging about earn money easy, then make these keywords the Title of your blog. What you don’t want to do is put unrelated keywords in your Title. If your name is John and you have a blog named Johns Dog Blog, then you’ll rank higher than if you name it something totally unrelated.

Your next step is to put your keywords in the Post’s title. If you’re targeting blog readers to read your post about online auctions to to make extra money, then put the keywords in the post title. Forget about using non relevant titles like How I Make Money With Auctions. Doing this prevents the search engine bots from figuring out what your post is about and prevents search engine users from finding your blog post. If you’re blog is monetized with Adsense, this tip will increase traffic while showing the highest paying ads for an increase in the pay per click you receive.

Implementing these 3 simple tips will be letting the Search Engines understand what your post is about. By making it easy easy for the search engines to determine what your post is about, the search engines will rank your post higher than a non-optimized blog.

Building links to each of your optimized post is the last step in dominating the search engine rankings with your blog post. Ahh, but link building is a whole nother article that has to be saved for later. But you need to learn how to optimize your blog before tackling link building.

Optimize Your Pages for Search Engines

There are a number of steps I always follow when optimizing a site for SEO (note these are just the high points, there are others that I don’t mention here, but these WILL take you a long way):

1) If it’s a new site, I will include the keywords in a non hyphenated domain name (if you can get a .edu or .gov Top Level Domain do so, otherwise a cheap .info will do just fine)

2) If possible, I will rename the URL to each important page to include the main keyword for that page.

3) Set up Google Analytics for the site and ensure the tracking script is added to every page.

4) Go through the “money” pages and make sure that the title, descriptions and keywords meta tags are unique and optimized for the keywords on the page. In a competitive niche (over 1 million result pages in Google), I would limit the keywords to one main phrase, a couple of local modifiers and one or two more closely related terms per page.

5) Review the non-money pages (i.e. pages that don’t matter from an SEO perspective) and ensure the title and meta description tags are not duplicates of any of the money page tags. Google Webmaster tools will identify this for you once your site has been registered and crawled.

6) I nofollow any links to overhead pages from all of the pages on the site with the exception of the home page. I leave the home page links as follow links, since I want the SEs to index all pages on the site and having privacy, contact, disclaimer, etc overhead pages add to Google’s view of the “trust” for the site. On all other pages I want only the link to the home page to be a follow link, so I can build up the page rank of the home page. I handle this in Dreamweaver by using two different site templates. If your main keyword page is something other than the home page, modify your approach accordingly.

7) I then optimize each page’s content for it’s main keywords, modifiers and related terms. It’s critical that each word or phrase used in the keyword META is found on the page to avoid keyword spam penalties.

At this point the on page optimization is complete enough to start with link building. As you may already know, building links is hard. I use articles, blog posts, submit forms on relevant sites, reciprocal links, etc. There are ways to shorten this process, without going black or even grey hat. Contact me at Mississauga Search Engine Marketing if interested.

SEO and Website Designers

As the internet has become increasingly sophisticated, the various professional fields in the internet marketplace have become more and more specialized. In each area there have been massive leaps in complexity, usability, design and technology.

Even just a few years back, there were relatively few separate specialties for people who work within the arena of the internet. These days there is a vast multitude of ways in which people can specialize online. These professionals include:

Web designers,Information architects,Google Adwords campaign managers, various types of program and software developers and last but not least, SEO services.

In my experience, most web designers these days don’t even know how to include Search engine Optimization in the sites that they design and build. There is ample proof of this; it is visible easily every day by just taking a look at what is out there. Websites that have either no or empty Meta tags no headline tags and in some cases no title tags! What is frustrating about this is that all of these are extremely easy to include.

So where does that leave the buyer? It leaves them with a website that will no doubt look fantastic; however the chances are that few will ever see it. Let alone become customers of whatever service or product the site is offering. This seems to be particularly true in the case of websites that contain a lot of flash, it looks great, but it is heavy in the browser and as it is purely images, the search engines cannot read it, even if there are words as the words themselves are rendered as images not text.

Therefore, when shopping for a website designer, be aware that though most will have the words ‘SEO’ or ‘Search engine Optimization‘ somewhere within their marketing or sales material. Take the precaution of checking that they actually know what that means, many don’t. The way to check it out is to look at sites they have already completed – particularly their own. Check to see if it has Meta tags such as the keyword and description meta tag, check to see if their title tags actually have something useful in them not just ‘welcome to company XYZ website’.

These things are simple for anybody to check out. The title tag is easily visible to you as you open the site in your browser, you will see it on the very top of your screen. To double check the other items you will need to view the source code, you can do this in Firefox by clicking on ‘View’ then on ‘Page Source’. This will show you all the code of the site, the meta tags should be near the top just after the the title tags.

Finally, take a look to see if the website has headline tags. Between them should be the main title of the page, including the keywords that you want people to find your site with.

Article by Johnathon Black

The Million Dollar Keyword

Here is one example of the financial results that a company achieved by optimizing a single keyword that moved from the bottom of the second page of Google to a number 4 position, above the fold on the first page.

A client’s website had a ranking of 18 for their primary target keywords on the second page of Google’s natural search engine results. Considering how many marketers are competing for the top positions for this keyword, appearing on the second page of search results seemed a like an accomplishment, but we thought that it could be better.

SEO Works

We focused our optimization efforts on improving the natural keyword ranking for this one target keyword. Eventually, the ranking for the keyword first moved to the number 9 position, and then to the number 4 position of the first page search engine results. The improved search engine ranking for this single keyword generated an increase in sales leads far more than expected, which subsequently converted to an increase in sales revenue amounting to over $1,000,000.

Tracking the Moves

The list below shows the search engine ranking relative to the number of sales leads that were generated from the company’s primary target keyword:

• Nov 08 – position 18 = 6 leads
• Dec 08 – position 9 = 31 leads
• Jan 09 – position 9 = 126 leads
• Feb 09 – position 4 = 102 leads
• Mar 09 – position 4 = 207 leads
• Apr 09 – position 4= 221 leads

Summary of Results

The increase in the number of monthly sales leads can be seen as the target keyword ranking moved up over the six month time period. The full benefit of the keyword moving from the 18^th to the 9^th position is reflected in the January total because the change occurred later in the month of December. The same applies to the move from position 9 to position 4 because the change occurred later in February.

For marketing managers and business owners who are wondering about the difference between having a major keyword listing on the first page of search results compared to the second page of results, this case study should provide some insight based on our experience.

It also shows an example of the potential benefit from having keyword search results listed above the fold of a web page as opposed to below the fold where viewers must scroll down to see more search listings.

Based on these results, there is clear evidence that a higher organic search engine ranking can dramatically affect sales lead generation and company revenue, in this case over ,000,000.

Wriiten by Rick Smith at 10th Degree: Online Advertising Agency and Car Dealer Websites.

Search engine optimization services: how to effectively for your business

Every industry from small to large business who want to increase the possibility of directly or via the Internet. The importance of internet is understood by the public and the companies very well. The awareness is really increasing day by day among the people and the organizations. Therefore, internet is a successful source to get to large number of business.

Online now increase in the number of trading days, then every company would like to promote their Internet business. Internet is the best medium to promote business world wide. In order to catch up with the attention of Internet users, you must have a high-quality content pages and site must contain quality. Content is all about your business, product and the services you are providing.

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays an important role to represent your web site in front of users. Technology must follow the guidelines of search engines so that search engines value your web site, and then let them in the search engine results page. The aim of SEO Services is to optimize the site in such a way that search engine will place your site in a good position for the keyword searches. The SEO experts know the techniques and they know how to rank your site in search engine.

Apart from the different technologies in the search engine optimization, pay-per-click or pay per click management services also play an important part of search engine optimization services. There are many who believe that the online advertising company and to make use of online marketing. They expend vast amount of money in online advertising. Review of a survey that the company spent nine billion U.S. dollars, the annual pay-per-click advertising.

The efficiency of search engine optimization services has increased now a days and each and every small to large companies want to make most use of it. Hiring SEO professionals are too easy on net but how to find out best SEO professional? The real issue, the fight against the idea of all the organizations, but there is no need for confusion. There are many affordable search engine optimization company in India providing quality search engine optimization services, the lowest price. This is highly advised to choose a professional SEO company after checking the company profile.

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