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Many SEO experts will tell you that they have specific ways of choosing the right keywords for a website. Some do it using SEO tools – software that compares possible keywords to see which are used the most. Some will give you DIY methods with spreadsheets. We say, however, that you should try every method you can in the search for keywords. Here are some steps that might help:

Identify and create a list of keywords from meta tags, research on your competitors, your highest-converting products and biggest current traffic sources. For each term (typically between 30 and 50 terms overall), narrow the field down to about 15 or 20, choosing the terms you feel are most relevant to your website. Your higher ranked competitors are probably up there for a reason so take a look at what they are providing. Make sure that everything is directly relevant and try to stretch yourself out into some unchartered water. The less common that your key words are, the more likely you are to get the search engine results for these key words.

We would recommend a piece of software called WordTracker to find out how many searches have been done on a certain term. You can choose to work with this information however you want – spreadsheets are good, but you can use anything that will make it easy reasonably easy for you to track these keywords. You’re trying to find a popular word that has a low competition rate. Although this is easier said than done, it’s very rewarding to find an area where your site can succeed because of the lack of competition. You should remember, though, that these search databases are relatively small, and should be used for comparing keywords against one another rather than for estimating their true ‘market sizes’.

This keyword selection research should then be compared with client experience of which keywords may be most profitably optimized, as well as any current ranking on the target keywords. Data from PPC campaigns can be helpful for this. The outcome should be a focused list of, say, 15-20 keywords that are both strong performers in terms of search volume, as well as solid candidates for successful optimization.

When determining how profitable your key words are you should look into your web sites statistics and see what key words were used for what number of sales. This is called your conversion rate. The more sales that are associated with a certain key word, the more valuable that key word is. It is important to account for all of the variables, however. If ten people come across your site through a certain key word but only one of them buys an item this key word isn’t as profitable as a key word that one person finds your site through and still orders a product. It is important to work percentages into your decision of worth of a key word. Your “conversion rate” is the number of sales divided by the number of visitors.

You probably know who your competitors are, so go to their site and open the source code of a few of their pages (select ‘View Source’ from your browser’s menu). Look for the tag to see which keywords they’re aiming for. Their keywords are often garbage, but if you look around at a few sites then you can often find keywords you hadn’t thought of. It is not good practice to simply copy and paste a list of key words. It would even be concievable that you would be charged with copyright infringement for such activities. Whether or not you get charged, it is morally wrong. Looking through and coming across a few extra relevant key words is one thing. Steeling an entire list is something else completely.

Another approach is to type in the keywords you have in mind and look at the current top results. Analyze their pages for keywords, descriptions and content – this will give you some idea of what kind of keyword density you should be looking at for your keywords. If the sites that come up are a different kind of business to you altogether then you’ve probably chosen a dodgy keyword – remember that you’re trying to get relevant traffic, not just any traffic.

The general rules that you need to keep in mind when selecting key words are:

1. Try to select unique key words that your competitors have not thought of.
2. Optimize for your most profitable key words. How many sales does the key word generate? How much profit is made for each of these sales?
3. Make sure that the key words are very relevant to your site so that people who find your site through your key words will not immediately leave.
4. Try to assemble a list of key words that covers your site very will so that you aren’t leaving anyone or anything out.

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

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As the demand for search engine marketing continues to grow, so does the demand for experts in the area. In recent months, mass emails seem to be the new ‘promise’ of top search engine rankings. How do you choose an SEO provider that will understand the needs of your website and provide quality service?

Let’s breakdown the elements of SEO, to make it easier for you to recognize a good product. To find a good SEO provider, look for these things:

They need to be able to check your current site, evaluate it and set goals for it. They should develop a list of target keywords relevant to the site, write and insert good meta tags for you, and check all other tags to make sure that they’re alright. They should also check all your content and make recommendations on how to improve it to get better search engine rankings.

They should provide link-building programs, including writing and submitting listings to directories and giving you ideas on who to ask for links from. Reports tracking search engine referrals to your site are always good, especially if they explain what they mean and how they can be improved.

Website maintenance is a very important aspect of any SEO program. Once their site has been optimized, many people don’t realize that they need to keep up these methods over time. If you let your site lapse back to the way it was as you add new content, then you’ll need to start all over again.

What kind of price can you put on all this? Well, pricing structures for SEO vary a lot between companies. Some companies will charge more because they include a monthly maintenance fee, while other companies offer customized proposals based on a websites specific need. In general, good SEO can cost as much as $150 an hour, so be prepared for that. Keep in mind that the larger your site is, the more work will be involved. It will naturally take less time to optimize a smaller, simpler site, so keep this in mind when you consider the pricing.

After you’re more comfortable with what the services offered are and how they’re priced, you’ll want to make sure that the company you’re choosing as your SEO provider has the knowledge and skill to complete the work for you. You should talk to three or four companies before you choose one. Be sure to ask them these questions, and back off if you don’t feel like you’re getting an honest answer:

1. How long has your company been in business? Can you explain what your previous experience is and what principles your SEO works under?
2. What other services do you provide besides SEO? Do you provide Internet marketing services?
3. What kinds of industries have you serviced previously? Can you provide me with checkable references?
4. How will you break down the cost of your services?
5. How much will I need to do myself for this SEO project to run smoothly?
6. How much time do I need to set aside to communicate with you during the process?
7. How long does it usually take to achieve results? (SEO is a gradual process, so a reply of anything under 6 months should be a red flag for you).
8. Is it possible to have someone from your firm teach us how to maintain your SEO once it’s done? (If they tell you that you wouldn’t be able to do it yourself, then that’s another red flag).

When they do send you a proposal on the project, you will want to make sure that it contains everything you spoke about, and everything else that should be there. If the answers to any of these questions are missing, you should walk away:

1. What specific services are included in the contract? Are any omitted? Make sure that what you discussed and wanted is included.
2. What is the name or position of the person you will be working with? Are you dealing with a salesperson, a designer, or someone else?
3. Are allowances made for communication with you? Are there any additional fees for contact?
4. How will the company be providing support? By email? On the phone? Do they stop supporting you after a month or so?
5. Are there extra fees for re-optimization or additional consulting? Is it really necessary? What maintenance is provided? If not, what is the additional cost of it? When maintenance is not included with the plan you need to be careful, as there are people who will charge you exorbitant amounts of money to maintain their optimization.
6. What reports are provided and how often will they provide them?
7. What are the total charges? Are there any additional charges?

By taking steps like this you will guard yourself against bad practices, you will also have a better understanding of the service you are getting, and you can easily compare offers to find the best one. But how can you tell if your provider is operating ethically? Well, that’s is pretty easy. Here’s a list of the sales pitches that bad SEO providers will use on you. If you hear any of these from a company, use someone else instead.

1. Guaranteeing top-ranking placements. This is impossible to do since the algorithms of the search engines change often, and any good SEO provider will tell you that.
2. Offering a service that includes the development of ‘doorway pages’. These designs often don’t take your visitors ease of use into consideration, and search engines will ban your site if they catch you using them.
3. Telling you that you need more than one domain name pointing to your website. You can get banned for domain spamming, so don’t take the risk.
4. Any company that says it will get thousands of inbound links to your website – they will be using free-for-alls, which are very bad for your rankings.
5. Companies that offer you search engine submission software. Good positions always come from hand submission. If they tell you that submission by hand is not the best way to go, don’t stick around.

Many SEO providers use unethical ‘spam’ practices because they are cheap, easy to implement, and do provide very short-term results. Beware of any provider that uses them.

The best way to tell if the provider’s SEO practices are ethical is to ask: “Do these changes benefit visitors to my site as well making it more search engine friendly?” A good SEO provider will always say ‘yes’, as SEO is as much about the users as it is about the engines. After all, what’s the point of a high ranking page if it’s nothing but unusable rubbish that will have people rushing for the ‘Back’ button?

Don’t be overwhelmed by these things, but always be on the look out to make sure that you’re getting the best service possible. Good SEO companies can boost your site’s traffic without resorting to unethical practices, and keep up with changes in the industry.

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

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We all want to know how keywords affect our rankings, but to find out we’ll need to do a little work. Many say keywords are the key to good search engine rankings, although they aren’t at all the only factor.

If you need a tool to help you decide on your keywords, try Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool – it allows you to test your keyword rankings by showing you statistics on recent searches for them. It’s a great tool when you have no clue which keyword you should choose, as it can give you a list of terms that were recently searched on.

Keyword Density.

Keyword density refers to the number of the keywords contained within your text relative to the amount of text there is. Preferred keyword density ratios vary between search engines, but you should generally try to keep them between two and eight percent (major search engines prefer the lower end). Keyword analysis tools can help to optimize a web page’s keyword density. These tools are good if you’re not sure of what you’re doing, as they’re very intuitive and explain things as you go.

Counting the Keywords.

Many SEO experts will tell you that the keyword density of your text isn’t a very important factor, and that you should be careful not to overdo it. So is there a limit? How many times should you use your keywords? SEO experts won’t be able to answer these questions for you, because no-one’s really sure of the answer. The best answer is that it changes regularly, and you can never be sure – you have to experiment to see what works for you.

Location of Keywords.

When testing the effects of keyword location, we found that pages with the keywords at the top and bottom of the page ranked higher on Google than pages with the keywords in the middle.

Many other search engines also give keywords more or less weight based on their location, but keep in mind that each search engine’s algorithm is different. Here’s a list of how most search engines prioritize keyword positions, from most to least:

1. Domain name.
2. Page title.
3. Headings (i.e. H1, H2, etc.).
4. Body text (the first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more).
5. Meta tags (especially description).
6. Links (including keywords in the URL or link text of links to you).
7. Alt text (the ‘alt’ descriptions for your pictures).

Really, though, keyword density is one of those areas where you’ll have trouble on your hands if you try to second guess the search engines. Be cautious.

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

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There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

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Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more and more, although it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are heavy on Java, Flash and images, it’s important to have something that the search engines can read. If the content can’t be read by search engines then they can’t index it, and if your site doesn’t get indexed then it won’t be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. This article will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods that you should avoid.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.

You see, when people use a search engine, they generally don’t look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isn’t listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results’ rankings.
It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool don’t match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings – be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.
Most websites don’t focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.

Free Search Engines.

The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and it’s not hard to take advantage of this free advertising – you can do it in as little as an hour.

There are several companies that provide free SEO tools, or you can pay a professional to take care of it for you. Looking around on the web will turn up all sorts of useful resources.

What is Unethical SEO?

Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, unscrupulous, or just in bad taste. You’d be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.

Keyword stuffing is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Don’t do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.

You may have seen ‘invisible text’ if you’ve been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and you shouldn’t do it.

A doorway page is a page that isn’t designed for real people to see – it’s purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.

Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, you shouldn’t do it – not only is it annoying to users, but it’s likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. You sites’ search engine rankings just aren’t worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.

SEO is a set of techniques used in order to attract visitors or prospective customers to your website, and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to the users of the Internet. These two objectives are not in opposition, if you do SEO the way it should be done.

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SEO ‘Tools of the Trade’.

Before you start optimizing your site for search engines, there are some tools that you should arm yourself with. These tools can become your best friends when it comes to SEO, especially when you’re just starting out. The first and most important step in any search engine position campaign is recognizing which keywords you should optimize your site for, and there are several pieces of software that are useful for this, including Wordtracker, Optilink, Zeus, and Agent Web Ranking.

WordTracker’s keyword research service is the only one on the Internet that provides a comprehensive database of the most popular keywords in a particular industry. It can help you recognize associated keywords that you may have never thought of. One of the differences between WordTracker and other tools is that it can spot subtle differences, for example singular and plural keywords, or often-misspelled ones, and tell you which versions are more popular.

Optilink has become very popular in a short period of time because of the power it gives you over search engines. Every site that links to you boosts your ranking, especially if its content is relevant to yours. Optilink helps you to come up with strategies to improve your link structure and get a better ranking. Here are some of the things it does:

1. Analyzes the link structures of your top-ranking competitors.
2. Tells you why your competitors rank well, so you can try to copy what they’re doing.
3. Tells you what kind of rankings you can expect if you adopt similar linking strategies.
4. Helps to monitor sites you’ve exchanged links with, to ensure that they’re still linking to you.

Zeus has an excellent way of increasing the link popularity of your site — by exchanging with other sites that are related to yours, giving you a head start on your SEO. Zeus does the work for you, identifying sites that it thinks you should try to exchange links with. If you look for the sites yourself you’ll often find it’s not worth the time, but an SEO tool like Zeus lets you do it instantly. Once you’ve got links, you can manage and maintain them automatically.

Agent Web Ranking helps you to check your sites rankings – this is good to see how your SEO efforts are working. Many people just optimize and submit, thinking the work is done, but they’re wrong. You need to continuously check your site’s rankings, and Agent Web Ranking is a reliable and quick tool for doing this.

The only real problem you might have with any of this software is that search engines can change the way they display their results, breaking the tools until their authors update them. This means that most position reporting software gets outdated very quickly. It’s not that much of an issue, though, as most software is provided on a subscription basis with updates included, rather than bought only once.

If you really want to stay ahead in the SEO industry, you should try as many different tools as you can. By paying attention to what tools others are using and learning how they work, you will have the edge in the SEO market. So get out there, and download these SEO tools of the trade!

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

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