Create an Effective Email Opt-in Process by Starting Simple

Email marketing is all about building and maintaining strong relationships. The email relationship starts when someone opts-in to receive information from your company or organization. Start simple and build the relationship from there. In the beginning, most people don’t want to give out much personal information. Asking for to much right away decreases your chance of getting that initial sign-up. Even just asking for the email address is a great start.

What happens after you get their email address is where the relationship starts to build, and first impressions are everything to building a good and trusting relationship. It is important that these next steps are done right and not overlooked. There are three key parts to this process that help create a great opt-in experience. First is the opt-in form itself. Second is the subscription confirmation page and the third is the subscription confirmation and welcome messages...

source: http://www.bluetentmarketing.com/blog/

Discover the Google Cash Sniper!

This is without doubt of my most IMPORTANT announcements of 2009.

Discover How A 25 Year Old Self Confessed Loser Sniped A FREE $52,383 From Google In Less Than 3 Days With No Big "Guru" Friends!

If your struggling to make money as an affiliate, have no big "guru" friends then you need to STOP now and read every word of this letter very carefully....

source: http://internetmarketingebooks.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html

Content - Bots vs Visitors

The renowned concept of optimized content for search engines to crawl at a rate faster than ever before and webmasters are considering it for better search engine ranking and popularity.

The question that is of extreme importance for both leaders and followers is whether they should write for bots or for people? This is something divisive, someone tell writing for people doesn't worth because the search results are collected by robots, while others hold that robot won't search what people are not looking for. Both angel of thinking are right at their own place but that is not the ultimate solution
The targets of SEO writing

source: http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2009/07/content-bots-vs-people.html

Internal Links Important !

Most of the Internet entrepreneurs who have atleast some idea about the search engines are often engrossed about links. Yes, Links do play a very important role to affect a website's search engine rankings and the business it does. However, in most cases, I have seen that webmasters are more concerned about getting inbound links from external sites and often tend to ignore the internal links.

We need to understand while external links are important, internal links are actually the life line of any web based business.

As a webmaster you would definitely want your visitors to be able to visit every part of your website and for that they need a easy navigation path. Your need to set up your internal links in a way that they guide your visitors in a logical path throughout the website. Though a cool flash menu or an equally atractive Javascript menu might be pretty interesting for some visitors, think about those visitors whose browser do not support scripts or flash - It is most important that you provide a simple HTML links for all your pages.

Besides, this ensures that search engine bots are also able to crawl your site properly. Search Engines hate flash or JavaScripts and they would not crawl the links you set in them. Feed the bots with plain HTML links and your pages will definitely be indexed.

To add to it, if you are using suitable anchor texts to link to relevant pages that adds more value to your internal links. For example, in your site about Widgets, you can have a particular page about Red Widgets - linking to that page using the text "Red Widgets" is much more beneficial compared to using "Widgets1" or "Other Widgets" etc for the anchor text. This helps your visitors to understand where the link leads them to and also the page gets benefit in terms of search engine positioning.

In addition to enhancing the navigation system and facilitating search engines to crawl the site properly, your links can also help to increase your conversion - Yes, Links can affect your sales.

Think of a big retail shop, you have just picked a shirt that you like and have almost made up your mind to buy it but you dont see a salesman anywhere -- you might just consider looking for a few other shirts and in the process forget about the one you thought you would buy :( Yes - this happens in web too !!

If you want to increase your conversion add links stratezically; if there's a page giving small intro about the various products you sell make sure all of them have a link directly to the page that gives details about the products and from there it should have a prominent link to the order page.Make your links attractive and easy to recognize so that more people clicks on it.

When I say, "Make your links attractive and easy to recognize" - I really don't mean something flashy or zazzy.. it has been observed that most Internet users are more likely to click on the same old Blue Underlined Links compared to the fancy ones that we blend in with other content using our CSS skills.From the advent of Internet that was how a link used to look originally and in my opinion its basic e-ntuition that people tend to click or hover their mouse over any Blue and underlined text on the web. I am sure most of you have already done that to the above phrase , even though it is not linked.

Dan gives a lot of good stuff on this and also how to track which links are more effective for your website. He has mentioned quiet a few analytics tools and stresses a bit on measuring "average page views per visitors", though click through rate on a link is probably a more accurate measure for the links effectiveness (because a page may be accessible through multiple links and you might just change the link at one place for testing purpose). I personally find Google Analytics pretty handy for this. The "Site OverLay" link found under Executive Summary section will show you the click through rate for any link on a particular page of Your website. You can very easily compare the click through rates on a link blended using CSS and later by putting it back to the blue and underlined form.It is important that you do the testing on a measurable amount of traffic (atleast 1000 visitors) to get proper identifiable results.

Change in Google Referral Strings - Another Attempt to Push Google Analytics ?

Google has again made a change to their search result page URLs that is likely to create trouble with most other web analytics package besides Google Analytics. A few days back they experimented with their SERP URLs by using AJAX and putting the URL parameters after a #. While that experiment had the potential to kill all the existing web analytics package in the market and created a big buzz in the blogosphere, they seem to have stopped that.

Now in their new experiment with the Google Search result URLs, they have done some changes which again would leave most other web analytics package high and dry to track Google referrer data.

At present a typical Google search referrer URL would look like
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=candles&btnG=Google+Search

The New Referrer URL format would be
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=candles&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Now besides showing the complete result page URL and other multiple parameters, the key difference between these two referrer strings is that in the first on the parameters started after "/search?" and in the second one they start after "/url?". Now most of the present day analytics packages parses the Google referrer string based on the "/search?" part and looks for information after that to figure out which keyword or which page of the search result the traffic came from. Also most of them look for the "/search?" to determine if a visitor is coming from organic search results. Replacing "search" with "url" would leave them all messed up.

Google analytics however does not depend on the "/search?" string in the referrer and would continue to work properly. Also the latest version of Urchin (6.5) would not be affected by this change.

Other analytics packages would probably need to do some changes to adapt to this change in Google referrer string to provide accurate analytics report.

These new referrer String is launched at beta stage and only a small percentage of users are getting this at present but it is likely that Google would soon roll out this in the main stream.

While Google has not explained or given any reason for this sudden changes there seems to be just two possible reasons for this.
a) Making other third party analytics less usable / giving them a hard time - I don't think other analytics providers would have a lot of problem to adapt this but they would definitely need some time and webmasters would need an option for that period and Google Analytics would be the choice.

b) This new referrer string would allow Google to pass all clicks through their server thereby making it much easier for them to track the CTR for individual sites. As it has always been said that Google uses CTR data as a factor for their algorithm, now that Google can track individual CTR with so much precision I would think that they are very likely going to use these information for further refining the organic results.

You are NoWhere on the Search Engines Why?

You have wonderful products and services, you always hymn “Customer is our king” and you have showcased some of the best services that anyone in your industry can feel proud of! Then wondering why still is your website not visible in the top searches of search engines? There could be many reasons why still your website is being buried somewhere deep inside the search engine results.

Let us analyze one by one as to what the probable and top reasons could be:

• First and foremost thing to start with is to choose URLs that are keyword driven, so that users land exactly on your website when they type those keywords!
• The first best thing would be to check if your website has been listed in the search engines or not. This can be checked by typing out the website URL in the search engines and checking out if the result is showing your website as a result or not. It should ideally show a result of your own website, thereby proving that your site is actually listed.
• Getting search engine visibility takes time. It does not happen just like that. You need to spend more of your time and effort on it, just like it takes time to build up a new business and establish it. Though the results are not SO long to be seen, still it done need to have some time for itself too, to get established and familiar for the search engines. Give it more of time and consideration and hard work, and am sure it’ll pay off. So don’t be lazy start off right away
• Another essential thing to be noticed is to have more of written and relevant content in your website. Now this does not mean you just fill your website with keywords, just for the sake of getting listed in search engines. You must write articles in such a way that are meaningful, relevant to your website at the same time uses important keywords that your visitors might search for in search engines.
• Title tag title tag title tag!!! Get this phrase embedded in your brain! The area in the HTML pages that asks for page title is where you must include keyword or keyword phrases, in order to get attention of the search engines.
• Next thing would be to include ALT tags to the images in the website. This also helps in the images in your website to participate and contribute its share to search engine optimization.
• How popular is your website among the search engines? This is the next question that you must be asking yourself. Popularity of a website increases with more of quality inbound links. The more other websites would link to your website, the more your website’s popularity increases among the net, thereby the search engines. This is done by link building, wherein you submit your website links to other quality and related websites, in order to develop site popularity.
• Finally create a business blog and update your current key services, products or any value added information which can help your business as well as your visitor. This can boost your search engine visibility and traffic

Well as I already said, there are many other things that might be one of the reasons hindering your website from coming anywhere near the top search results. But these are few of the important reasons.

With these tips, don’t be no-where in search engines, you are Now-here, get noticed!! Keep going!!

Downloaded google talk and don't want your boss or your parents to find out

suppose you have downloaded google talk and don't want your boss or your parents to find out. Because when you downloaded google talk it will show at the bottom toolbar thing opposite to
the start menu at the bottom. But at are tips to hide it!!! Or delete it.
see pic here and follow this step

1. just go to run and type msconfi
2. Choose start up tab
3. Remove the google talk service

Yes you have done now google talk will not come up at front in the toolbar.

Second way is to hide google talk follow tese step

1. At the top of the g talk messenger there is an option called "settings"
2. Click on settings and there will be an option i.e. "start automatically when windows starts"
3. Remove the tick for that option and press OK button !!!!!

read gmail offline

If you are a Gmail user then it is great for you because you can use Gmail offline also now,as you hear this your reaction may be "what!" so answer is yes now you can read,write and send E-mail from your Gmail account when you are offline. For work offline you need dowanlaod Google product google gear.

Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail and as you lose your connection,Gmail automatically switches to offline mode and use the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. if send any message in offline mode it will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time when you connect again.

Dowan laod google Gears here.

Define: PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting deals with the principle of link flow architecture utilizing rel="nofollow" attribute and by organising non-priority pages for SERP's in an external include file, blocked with your robots.txt to stop your site link juice to pass for unimportant pages, untrusted sites and bad neighborhood

Where all does PageRank Sculpting matters

• These can be implement to your least important pages like sign up, cart page and so
• Other domains that you don't know or trust
• This would work better for sites having 100's and 1000's of WebPages that are not important for keyword listing and in addition link juice loop to the domain

search engine optimization (SEO) terms

Landing Page
The landing page is a web page where people go to once they click on an online advertisement or natural search listing.

Landing pages are designed to be highly relevant to the advertisement or search listing and encourage users to complete a "call to action".

The landing page is also known as the "click through URL" or "destination URL".

Example uses of landing pages are newsletter sign up forms, download demonstration trial software and purchasing of a product or service.

Link bait
Useful or entertaining web content which compels users to link to it.



Link building
Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your "link popularity" and/or "PageRank."

Considerations for link building can include directory submissions and press release syndication.


Link farm
A link farm is a group of highly interlinked websites with the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR). A link farm is a form of spamdexing, spamming the index of a search engine.

Link popularity
When other web sites link to your site, your site will rank better in certain search engines. The more web pages that link to you, the better your link popularity.

Link spam
Links between pages that are specifically set up to take advantage of link-based ranking algorithms such as Google's PageRank (PR).

Links
text or graphics that, when clicked on, take the Internet user to another web page location. Links are expressed as URLs.


Log file
All accesses to a web site can be logged by the web server. Data that is usually logged includes date and time, filename accessed, user's IP address, referring web page, user's browser software and version, and cookie data.


Keyword research
Determining the words and phrases that people use to find something, then compiling them into a list for use on web pages, etc.

Keyword stuffing
Placing excessive amounts of keywords into the page copy and the HTML in such a way that it detracts from the readability and usability of a given page for the purpose of boosting the page's rankings in the search engines. This includes hiding keywords on the page by making the text the same color as the background, hiding keywords in comment tags, overfilling alt tags with long strings of keywords, etc. Keyword stuffing is just another shady way of gaming the search engines and, as such, its use should be strongly discouraged.

Keyword-rich
when a given page or bit of text is chock full of good keywords rather than a bunch of meaningless words (e.g. "welcome", "click here") or irrelevant words (e.g. "solution").

5 Tips for Success on Squidoo

Whether you're new to internet marketing or not, Squidoo really is one of the easiest ways to market your business online, build traffic to your site, and you can even make money.

For those that don't know what Squidoo is, it's the brain child of Seth Godin one of the top marketers online. A Squidoo lens is a page on the Squidoo site that is on a specific topic.

A lens can contain articles, reviews, RSS feeds, links, and all kinds of other resources on a specific topic. Lenses also tend to rank really high in the search engines making it an easy way to get your site seen without your site having high search engine rankings.

The best part is that this site is friendly to affiliate programs, so if you're a bum marketer, or you don't have a site of your own, this is an easy way to build one. There are, in fact, quite a few lensmasters who make a full time living with their Squidoo lenses, and if you choose to, you can too.

Although there are many ways to market your Squidoo lenses, here are five tips that will help you quickly promote your lenses and get high rankings:

1. Carefully choose your keywords.
   You want to make sure that the keywords you use are keywords that people are actually searching for. You also want to make sure that the keywords aren't too broad. Long tail keywords, keyword phrases at least three to four words long, will help you drive more targeted traffic to your lens.
   
   Test your keywords to see which ones are getting you traffic. Look for more keywords that may be related to your lens and add those.
2. Bookmark your lenses.
   This is one of the easiest ways to get new traffic to your lenses and announce them. You can use services like Digg, as well as Only Wire.
   
   Not only will this give your lenses some good, high ranking backlinks, but it will also help your lenses get indexed faster.
3. Link your lenses to other lenses.
   You want to make sure that the lenses you create in your account are similar in topic. You can easily link these lenses together. This is another form of linking for your lenses, but it's called internal linking. This will also help you raise your rankings in the search engines.
4. Visit other lenses.
   You can share your lenses on Squidoo by visiting other lenses. You want to look for lenses that are related to yours and have a guestbook. You can post comments on these guest books and leave a link to your site. You also want to vote on other lenses. This will help get other lens masters to your lens.
5. Join groups.
   There are thousands of groups on Squidoo you can join and showcase your lenses. You can do a search through the groups to find groups related to your lenses and add your lenses to these groups. This is also an opportunity for you to see what others are doing with their lenses so you can improve yours, get more traffic, and make more sales.

Squidoo also has plenty of resources to help you get more traffic to your lenses, including Squidoo U, a forum, and tips on showing off your lenses.

5 Tips for Success on Squidoo

Paid Survey, How to Get Started?

Make money with paid survey, is it just a scam or non-sense. Well, there are actually a lot of reputable market research and consumer companies welcome people to become their members to earn cash participating in their online survey. It is a legitimate way to make money online. Additionally, Paid survey is very popular, there are more than 100,000 people searching for paid surveys every month in Yahoo as recorded in Overture Search tool.

However, the downsides of paid survey is that you will not know how much money you make ever month. The companies only send paid survey invitations to you if you are eligible. If you receive more surveys in the month, you'll earn more. Another problem is that most paid surveys only available to US residents, so people outside US will find hard to make money with paid survey.

Start Earning with Paid Survey in 3 Steps:

• Step 1 - Create a new e-mail account specially for receiving paid survey invitations. You can use Yahoo, Hotmail and other free email services. This will make finding your survey invitations easier compare to using an existing email that receives plenty of mails daily.

• Step 2 - Go to Yellowsurveys.com to sign up with as many online market research companies as possible. The site compiled a long list of market research companies that offer paid surveys. Sign up with the companies in "Most Popular" category first and then continue to join the rest. This can take few days of work.

• Step 3 - Wait for paid survey invitations send to you. It can take fews days to months to receive your first survey invitation. You shouldn't rely on paid survey as your main source of income. It can only be a way of earning extra money.

Paid Survey, How to Get Started?

Is your competition beating you in SEO?

You have optimized your website for winning keywords, are mid-way with your link building campaign, and have been going absolutely crazy creating fresh SEO friendly content that pleases the users and search engines.

You are obviously very serious about your online business, and yet you cannot seem to cross the rank No.12, Page 2 barrier of Google search listing for your primary keywords.

A series are questions arise from the imaginary situation above:

1. Why is my ranking for the particular keyword not going up?
2. Am I missing out on any SEO strategies?
3. Maybe I am not building enough links? How much will be enough?
4. Do I have to improve my content quality?
5. The search engine has changed their algorithm (…again)
6. Others are using illegal SEO techniques

Now while one could go over the questions in your head, read up on latest search engine algorithms, contact a SEO expert, or blindly start buying links out of desperation, there is an easier way to find your answers.

Simply ask why are the other 10 websites ranking before your website?

Now that does not mean that the above questions 1 to 6 are not relevant, but simply put, one of the easiest way to boost your search rankings is to study the top 5 to ten websites for your keyword and then apply what working for them into your own strategies.

Now I am not asking you to copy the competition or have a strategy that just involves beating the competition at the ranking game. It never works. What is needed is a better balance between your company's SEO strategies and of those of your competitors.

Like in any business strategy, you have to know your competitors, study what strategies they are using, and then apply the best of those strategies to your own game plan.

In the same way, in defining the SEO path ahead for your website you must analyze your competition. What are they doing to rank in the top 10 that you are not doing? After all those websites are listed on the top for a reason, and they are applying SEO strategies that the search engine in particular seems to like.

Now while finding the answers to those questions in the real business world may be difficult, in the online world all you have to do is to right-click and view the source of the page.

The above simple step will open up a world of information to you. (Editor note: you can use Site Information Tool and Keyword Density Analyzer to reveal some important information about your competitors' sites).

1. Does the domain name contain the keyword? If the link is a sub domain then does the sub domain contain the keyword?
2. In what Meta tags, title, etc has the competition placed their keywords?
3. Does the link name contain the keyword? eg. www.seo-optimization-experts.com/mumbai-seo-expert.html
4. 4. How many keywords are listed in the keyword tag i.e. is the page focused around one or two keywords, or is it a jumble of keywords listed out.
5. Is the title and description captivating enough? How has the keyword/s been placed in the title and description and at what position?
6. Is the page graphic intensive? Is the site using a lot flash or active server pages? Search engines cannot understand graphics, only the text it can read on the page. Make sure there is a good balance between the graphics and content.
7. How long is the body text? Writing 400 to 600 words is normally fine.
8. Has the keyword (keyword weight) been used appropriately in the body content? Ideally the first 25 words of content should be keyword rich, and the keyword should appear after every 100 words in remaining content.
9. Is the content interesting to you as the reader? Does the content follow a theme? Is the content relevant to what keyword the page has been optimized for?
10. What is the page rank of the page (You can check page rank of any website by downloading the Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com.
11. Which is the first place in the source code the keyword appears?
12. Has the keyword been used appropriately in headline tags and link text?
13. Does the site use java script, tables, frames, dynamic content, CMS etc?
14. Is the page focused around a theme?
15. How many inbound links are there to the page? You can check the link popularity of the page on www.marketleap.com? Visit the sites that have given the link? What is their page rank? What is the link text that describes the link to the website? Has the keyword been used in the link text?
16. How many pages does the site have?
17. Does the site have a good site map that lists all the content pages, videos on the site that search engine spiders can crawly easily?
18. Are there any 404 errors on the website?
19. What is the domain name extension e.g. .com,. net, .edu, .co.in
20. How long has that domain name been in existence? Search engines rank those sites better that have been around for a while, or those that plan to be around for a while?
21. How many directories has that page/ website been submitted to?
22. Has the site used any spamming or illegal SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, duplicate content and other such Spam's? If yes you can inform the search engine of the same but do so with caution. For Google: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Please note that sometimes you will find no reasons why the competitors' website is ranked above yours. And that's ok. I have experienced many cases of certain sites which go against the search engines guidelines (set by search engines themselves), and yet they rank above meticulously optimized pages.

Search engines are constantly trying to remove badly optimized or spam pages which offer little or no value to the users. Our intent here is not to focus on the missing pieces/loopholes of search engines algorithms or isolated instances of sites that don't deserve it and yet are ranking high, but to work within the framework and guidelines for the long haul.

By mapping out the answers to the above questions (preferable on a spread sheet), you will find the overall patterns of what is working for those sites and why, and then figure out ways to modify your SEO strategies to improve your rankings.

Key Differences Among the Most Commonly Used Keyword Suggestion Tools

Rigid, unchanging procedures threaten any business activity. With Internet-enabled and -related enterprises, keeping up with technological progress is absolutely essential to survival. As opposed to static (unchanging) websites that are not looking to strengthen or increase their industry share, any dynamic (changing) website will have new copy, even new strategies, on an ongoing basis. Regular, extensive, ongoing keyword research is not a luxury, but a basic survival tactic.

Understanding how people actually use words, and the relationships these words have in the context of an Internet search, is key to threading these words and phrases through the fabric of your site. Because the Internet is so very dynamic, with word relationships changing seemingly by the minute, this is a huge and growing challenge for more and more people and companies. After all, the Internet is growing into the major commercial and communication hub of the world. Accurate and useful keyword suggestion tools - and their intelligent implantation into business and marketing strategy, are a major part of the solution.

There are a plethora of keyword suggestion tools available, from free to cost-based, including NicheBot, Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery , SEOBook, and the various Google keyword tools. In this article, we will consider these tools and the differences among them.

Most importantly, perhaps, these tools help you estimate the relative (rather than absolute) size of the search referral "market" produced by particular words and phrases. You will develop a better understanding of what terms appear how often in search queries, and what other terms are correlated with them, and how many times they are searched compared to those other terms. The analytics you develop with the tools will also give you a good idea of how their suggestions will fare, and provide a means of understanding "competition levels" for specific words and phrases.

Naturally, there are differences both large and small among these keyword analysis/suggestion tools. Google, of course, compiles its tool data from its own search network of sites and offers tremendous functionality at low or no cost. The subscription-based services, such as Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery , take advantage of databases of multiple sites and data that can be assembled, broken down, repurposed and presented in myriad ways.

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem - you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Google SEO

This article is part three of a four part series on optimizing your website for the the three major search engines. Part one, titled "Google SEO For MSN" covered optimizing your website to rank highly on MSN, while part two, titled "Google SEO For Yahoo!" covered optimizing your website to rank on Yahoo!. In this article we will cover optimizing your website
for Google.

I likely don't even need to mention that Google is currently the largest of all the search engines with ComScore Media estimating this giant to be responsible for 42.7% of all online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people tend to view Google as the engine to rank on. While this
point is debatable (let's remember that there's still 57.3% of searches that aren't done on Google) it's definitely an important engine to rank on. So how is it done?

The Factors To optimize and rank highly on Google, as with any of the major engines, specific areas need to be addressed. On Google the most important of these factors are:
• Backlinks
• Age
• Content
• How it fares in the results

Backlinks

More than on either Yahoo! or MSN backlinks are key to attaining top rankings on Google. More importantly, Google's methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is very different than either of the other two engines. Once upon a time backlink acquisition was mainly a numbers
game. If you had more links you had higher rankings, it was basically as simple as that. Today however Google has an algorithm inside their algorithm for determining which links are more valuable than others. This algorithm has a number of factors itself, however there are some that are more important than others. They key factors that determine the value of a link in regards to its contributions to the ranking of your site are:

• The age of the links - Like domains, links gain weight with age. The longer your links have been on a web page the higher their value. Basically this means that your link building efforts today aren't going to pay off for a number of months. The weight seems to age gradually. In a month your link will hold partial weight, in two months it'll hold a bit more and so on. Links hold the majority of their weight after about 5 to 6 months.
• The location of the link - The physical location of your link on the page is an indicator to Google of its value. A link buried in the footer of a page will hold virtually no weight whereas a link near the top (i.e. where a visitor is likely to see it) will hold much more. Another location factor is how this link is situated relative to the content around it. A link that is located within content holds more weight than a link in a typical link-page or directory format with a title and
description. The inline nature of the aforementioned location indicates that the link itself is more natural.
• The anchor text and formatting - The linking text used is obviously important. If you are targeting a phrase such as "SEO firms" then using these two keywords in the anchor
text is going to attach relevancy between your site and these keywords. Be careful though, building a thousand links using all the same anchor text is going to look suspicious.
Vary your anchor text, perhaps include other keywords and you'll find your efforts rewarded. The formatting of the link is also relevant. A link that uses bold, italics, etc. is obviously
meant to be seen by a visitor and is thus more highly regarded by Google.
• Relevancy - The relevancy of the site linking to you is of key importance. Getting a link on a health site if you're an SEO firm is going to hold little weight whereas a link from an SEO resource site will be much more valuable.
• PageRank - While the value of PageRank is arguably dropping when one is considering it's importance in link building it is still a factor. A link from a PageRank 5 page is worth substantially more than a link from a PageRank 2 page.

Age
In a patent application from back in 2004 Google told SEO firms (and anyone else for that matter) that age was an important factor. Google has since become a domain name registrar which gives them access to whois data and thus they can clearly see the age of a domain, who it is
registered to, where it is hosted, etc. The older your domain is the more legitimate Google sees it and thus the more likely they are to rank it. Additionally, domains that are registered for longer periods of time are also seen as more legitimate and thus will tend to rank higher.

Content
Google is pickier than either Yahoo! or MSN when it comes to content. While the phrase, "content is king," may be overused it is still relevant. The more content you have on your site the more likely someone is to find what they're looking for when they get there. Thus, the more content you have on your site the more likely Google is to believe a searcher will find what they're looking for there. This does not mean that you should grab every bit of content you can
find and build a 500,000 page site about potatoes. The content needs to be relevant and preferably well written. While a search engine spider may not be able to tell if your
content is truly well written it must appeal to a human visitor.
The reason for this will be made clearer below. A blog is a good option for the easy addition of relevant content provided that you can dedicate the time (generally only a few minutes per day) to post some new and interesting information on your industry. Keyword density is not as large a factor on Google as on Yahoo! or MSN however it is a factor and in the SEO "game" any factor that holds weight needs to be taken into consideration in all but the least competitive areas. While a site targeting a phrase such as "bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere" can afford weakness in some of the areas most of us cannot. As noted in the articles on MSN and Yahoo! it would be unwise for me to specify an optimal keyword density here as the optimal levels vary by site type, topic, and fluctuate with the algorithm updates. Keyword densities need to be reanalyzed approximately monthly or any time an update is noted.

How it fares in the results
How your website fares in the results is a growing factor and will only continue to gain importance as time passes. If your website appears in the results for a specific phrase yet no one click on is your website will drop out of the rankings. Arguably worse, if your website is clicked however after a few seconds Google detects that the searcher has returned to the results to find a new site your site will drop. It is for this reason that it is important to insure that the titles you
write for your website are both search engine and human friendly. You want Google to rank it highly and you also need humans to click it or Google won't rank it highly (circular
logic I know but valid nonetheless). You also need to make sure that what people see when they first land on your page either is the information they are looking for or alternatively, clearly indicates where that information can be found. This point may seem obvious simply from a usability standpoint however the number of sites out there that violate this basic principle is vast. As part of your SEO efforts you will want to take a look at your site from a user's standpoint or better yet, watch real users navigate it to see if they can find what they're looking for quickly. You have about 3 seconds to get a visitor's attention so make sure that your visitor can find what they want in that time. You may need to hire experienced web designers to bring your website up to speed however the cost of this is lower than the cost of losing rankings and business due to poor design and the falling rankings that will follow.

Conclusion
Google has the most sophisticated algorithm of the three major engines and must be treated as such. Tricks rarely work and when they do they tend to work only for a short period of time. Build a strong site with lots of quality content that is easily navigated and will appeal to your human visitors and you're off to a good start. Optimize your keyword densities and secure quality links to your site and while it may take a bit of time to get past the aging delays, you will succeed on Google.