Web Moves Blog

SEO Trade Secrets – 8 Great Tools for Search Engine Optimization
About 80% of website traffic comes through search engines. And research shows, if you’re not on the first 2 pages, most people won’t find you.

This article isn’t about how to achieve a high ranking. That topic has been done to death over the past few months. We all know the basics now: Submit your site to the major search engines, scatter a generous helping of the right keyword phrases throughout your site in real sentences, then get a lot of other relevant sites link to your site. That’s it.

This article is about what tools to use to make your job easier.

1) Choosing Keyword Phrases (costs approx USD$7.50 per day).
To decide what keyword phrases to use, subscribe to www.wordtracker.com for a day and do some analysis. Simply enter a keyword and WordTracker tells you how often people have searched for that keyword in the last month or two, how many competitor sites are using that keyword, and how many searches it expects in the next 24hrs.

2) Measuring Keyword Density (FREE).
To measure the density of the keyword phrases on your page, go to http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php and type in the domain and keyword phrase you want to analyse. It’ll give you a percentage for all the important parts of your page, including copy, title, meta keywords, meta description, etc. The higher the density the better.

3) Check How Search-Engine-Friendly Your Site Is (FREE).
Search engines send out spiders (or robots) to investigate your site. These tools allow you to see your site from the spider’s point of view.
– http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.search-engine-viewer.htm
– enter your URL and it gives you a summary of the things you could improve.
– http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?
– Poodle tells you how many links the spider will see and investigate.

4) Check How Many of Your Pages are Indexed (FREE).
Go to just about any search engine and type site:www.yourdomain.com. The search engine will then tell you how many of your pages it has indexed.

5) Monitor Your Position in Google (FREE).
No need to waste time clicking through hundreds of Google search results looking for your site. This tool allows you to enter a keyword and a domain name, and it searches Google to see where your domain is positioned. Go to, http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm to download the setup file. Then just install.

6) See How Important Sites Are (FREE).
The Google Toolbar is an indispensable tool. One of the things it can tell you is the “importance” of every site you visit (in Google’s eyes at least). You’ve probably heard a bit about PageRank or PR. PR is Google’s measure of the importance of a site. Basically, the higher your PR, the higher your ranking. This tool gives you a snapshot of the PR of every site you visit. Go to http://toolbar.google.com.

TIP: It’s good to get links from other sites with high PR especially if they contain the same keywords as your site.

WARNING: Apparently the Google Toolbar monitors your internet usage. As yet, it’s unclear what it uses this information for.

7) Monitor What Sites are Linking to Yours (FREE).
Google News Alerts (http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en) and Google Web Alerts (http://www.google.com/webalerts) will tell you who’s linking to your site. Simply set up an alert to be notified when Google finds www.yourdomain.com.

8) Getting Help (FREE).
If you’re new to SEO, the first thing you should do is check out Google’s guide to SEO at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you already know the basics, there are a number of forums you can subscribe to to post questions. These forums are free, and they’re frequented by countless SEO experts. And when I say “experts”, I mean EXPERTS! Some of these people do SEO all day, every day. And like many technical experts, they’re only too happy to help  for free. The best forum seems to be http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3, but http://searchengineforums.com/Forum28 is ok too. If all else fails, you can try sending Google an email. Go to http://www.google.com.au/contact/index.html, but don’t hold out much hope of help here. They’ll eventually answer, but there’s no guarantee on the quality of their response.

This is just a snapshot of the tools available out there. Doubtless there are better tools available, but these will certainly get you started.

Enjoy!

Author Bio:
Glenn Murray heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.divinewrite.com for further details.

8 Ways to Build Your Subscriber Base
When you combine the use of several of the following techniques for building your subscriber base you will find that you can grow your list rapidly. Don’t forget though, building your list is the easy part, Keeping your subscribers requires a lot more effort.

You will want to provide your readers with quality information they can depend on. If you promise to deliver your information on a certain day, then make sure you deliver it that day.

Provide your readers quality information that teaches and informs. And more than anything treat your readers with respect. Don’t abuse your list by sending continuous advertising or displaying twenty ads each issue you send.

Here are some of the best ways to build your list:

1. Your Website
Place a subscription box on every page of your website. Make sure you don’t overlook this simple but powerful way of gaining subscribers.

2. Give Them Something to Subscribe
This strong way of obtaining subscribers can literally quadruple your subscription rate. All you have to do is offer your visitor a free gift in return for their subscription. This free gift can be a free ebook, software course or report.

3. Writing Articles
You can write informative articles and allow them to be freely published. You will be branding your name. Include your subscription information within your bylines. You probably subscribe to at least one online newsletter or ezine. Most ezines will include a feature article written by the editor or a guest author. At the end of the article, a few lines of text about the author, referred to as your “byline” or “resource box.”

The writer gives the publisher permission to publish their article free of charge in exchange for the publisher including the author’s
byline. Your byline is basically just an advertisement for your business. You can usually include a couple of lines about yourself and a web address. By allowing your articles to be published, your articles will have the potential to be viewed by millions of Internet users.

4. Write Your own Ebook
You can create powerful ebooks and allow them to freely distributed. Place your subscription box on each page. Allow others to pass it along.

5. Submit Your Ezine or Articles to Ezine Directories
You will need to submit your ezine to a variety of listing sites. Do a search for ezine directories in your favorite search engine. Start submitting your ezine subscription information. Submit to at least ten different sites everyday. Pretty soon you’ll be listed in hundreds of sites. Be sure and study the listings on each site. You will need to submit a description of your ezine. Write a powerful description that will generate hundreds of new readers.

6. Use discussion lists to promote your list
Discussion lists provide a great way of communication with other people with the same interests. Usually blatant advertising is prohibited, but signature lines are permitted. When you subscribe to discussion lists you will be joining a group of individuals who have mutually subscribed to receive posts from other subscribers on the same list.

7. Pop-Up Windows
Although pop-up windows can be irritating if not used correctly, they will provide a highly effective means of obtaining new subscribers. Combine pop-up windows with your incentives.

8. Alert Boxes
Although using pop-up windows with incentives is a highly effective method of obtaining new subscribes, there is another method that is even better. When combined with an incentive, this method will literally double or even triple your subscriptions instantly. The alert box is similar to a pop-up window but doesn’t require your subscriber to fill out a form.

Author Bio:
Kristie Weddell is an independent researcher and owner of Affliatesource.com, a site devoted to providing resources for Affiliate and MLM Marketers. Subscribe to her free ecourse ‘5 Simple Steps to an Online Cashflow’ at http://tinyurl.com/33p42

Just what exactly are Trusted Feed programs?
With today’s many PPC (Pay per Click), PFP (Pay for Placement) and PFI (Paid for Inclusion) programs from so many vendors, it’s no surprise that some people can be confused. While organic SEO (search engine optimization) search results (the ones you see at the left of Google’s screen) are considered the best and generally constitute the highest ROI, for companies that just launched a new site and that need sales real fast, these various ‘paid’ programs can make a big difference in their search engine marketing campaigns.

Enter the trusted feed arena
Before I start describing some of the advantages and disadvantages of using trusted feed programs and how you can benefit from them, let’s see what the term ‘trusted feed’ means and what it entails for companies that are considering using such programs.

When a company has a large website, with more than 400, 500 or maybe 600 pages, a trusted feed program would make a lot of sense. With most trusted feed programs offered today, your site’s listings are given the same chance to rank among the generic or organic listings, usually on the same pages.

With certain PFI programs such as Inktomi, you need to pay for each Web page you submit. Trusted feed programs differ from this, since you are required to pay a fee only for the clicks your links are getting.

So, what makes trusted feed programs popular with some companies is that you only pay if there is traffic to your site, as opposed to PFI where you have to pay, whether you get traffic or not.

Trusted feed programs are also called XML feed, since they are based on the XML protocol, a technology developed specifically for Web services. It also used to be called Direct Data when it first came out, but the two most popular terms we hear of today are either trusted feed or XML feed.

Advantages of Trusted Feed programs:

1. Trusted feed is continually re-indexed
2. Appears as generic listings, not advertisements
3. Can boost more keyword and key phrase rankings
4. Greatly facilitates indexing of sites that are database-driven
5. Helps with indexing information that is buried deep in a site

Similarities between Trusted Feed and PFP
Trusted Feed and Pay for Placement (PFP) programs have one thing in common: both programs rely on a Cost per Click (CPC) pricing model. However, PFP click charges for every keyword fluctuate constantly, since advertisers keep modifying their bids all the time. In the case of trusted feed, you can negotiate a single, fixed CPC cost with some of the search engines or their inclusion partners.

Two of the most popular and most recognized PFP search engines are Google’s AdWords program and Overture. A lower and more stable CPC rate makes trusted feed programs a more attractive option to some larger advertisers, since it helps facilitate its monitoring.

Inventory management
If you are a manufacturer or distributor, what happens if you temporarily run out of stock on a certain product? Another popular advantage of trusted feed programs is that there are mechanisms in place that allow an advertiser to remove discontinued or temporarily unavailable products pages from the engine’s database.

Additionally, XML and trusted feeds support the utilization of most third party tracking URL’s from each search engine, for their corresponding individual landing pages. All of this helps companies better manage their ad programs, while at the same time offering them better flexibility.

Trusted Feed limitations
Everything can never be perfect and there are a few limitations to trusted feed. Although trusted feed can significantly improve the indexing of a database-driven website, top rankings can never be guaranteed. Sometimes, certain positions that are achieved can be located in a further down (lower) position than those of sponsored ads.

Another drawback to using trusted feed programs is the time it can take to carefully manage them, in certain situations. Generally speaking, there are certain types of trusted feed programs that were designed mainly for bigger companies that have large advertising budgets to work with. Furthermore, even with trusted feed, don’t neglect the fact that your title tags and description tags still need to be written in a convincing fashion that will entice visitors to click on your link.

Other disadvantages of Trusted Feed
Although advertisers using trusted feed don’t need to worry of large outbursts of click-fees or such big variations, they still need to monitor their campaigns closely, to ensure their maximum profitability. A steady stream of visitors from trusted feed listings could, in certain cases, come to an unexpected halt.

As with conventional and generic SEO, with trusted feed, you will still need to have your Web pages optimized, if you want the best positioning on most engines.

Another common disadvantage to using trusted feed is the amount of people it generally takes to prepare all the data. It is fairly easy and simple for a programmer to export data inside a document. However, in some large companies with thousands of different products to sell on their sites, this can take a few months if there are some problems. So there could be additional delays, which might in effect circumvent one of trusted feed’s main features: faster time to market.

Conclusion
Trusted feed inclusion programs are not for every marketer or advertiser. By their inherent design, some trusted feed programs are more appropriate for larger companies, or advertisers that have larger budgets and can afford longer-lasting ad campaigns.

Carefully evaluate your advertising needs and consider the ad budget you have to work with, in order to determine if a trusted feed program is really appropriate for your company.

____________
Reference:
‘Search Engine Advertising’ by Catherine Seda.
347 pages. New Riders Publishing. Indianapolis, IN. 46240.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

Why writing for the Web is different than in print
As you sit down and start thinking how you are going to write the content for your new website, or if you are contemplating a complete redesign of your existing site, there are a number of important things you need to know, before you even start writing.

If you have never written for the Web before but if you have plenty of experience writing for print, there are in fact a number of things here that may even shock you. To be really successful on the Web, you may even have to ‘relearn’ a few things.

The exact way you do this will have a direct and long-term impact on the overall ranking features of your website in the major search engines. So if you want to succeed at this task, and if you want to significantly increase your site’s ROI from the search engine’s generic (organic) results pages, listen up.

First, what do search engines need to index a page?
To begin with, the only thing search engines are interested in is text, and lots of it. The more text you can place on your pages, the better. To be properly indexed, any Web page needs a minimum of 500 to 750 words on it. Make it less than that and you are seriously compromising your chances at good rankings.

I often have to work with writers that have lots of experience in print advertising, but know very little about the correct way to write for the Web. In fact, there are still many that tell me our finished copy has more than one word repeated a few times on the same page! I smile every time I hear that of course, since it is an important part of the SEO process in itself!

Don’t get me wrong here: if a Web page ‘sounds’ like you are repeating your keywords or key phrases over and over, you should review it carefully, since this is not the intent of SEO. To be real effective, a properly optimized page needs to read well and ‘sound natural’ to your visitors, and it must convey a message that your content is professionally written.

At the same time, you also need to get the right keyword density and keyword frequency that is all so important, as far as the search engines are concerned. Neglect either one of them and you won’t end up with the results you had hoped for.

Just how much is enough?
So some of you may ask: when do we know how much is enough, without repeating our keywords too many times? I have been optimizing pages and websites for the past seven years, and I can honestly tell you that, for a typical page with about 700 to 750 words on it, your keywords or key phrase for that page needs to be written at least three to four times, in order to yield their maximum ranking effects in the search engines. Less than that would not be enough, and more than five times would be too much.

Avoid the error of ‘going off on the deep end’ by repeating your keywords 10 times or more, like I have seen on some sites we had to redo, since they were hit with the Google OOP (Over Optimization Penalty), either in November of 2003, or two months later, when Google did their ‘Austin’ monthly update in January. These sites were ‘over-optimized’ by either ambitious SEO’s or by people that lacked the experience or the knowledge to ‘know when to stop’. Too much of a good thing is never good.

What else is there to know?
While utilizing the right techniques in writing for the search engines is extremely important and can vary a lot than writing for print, there are other important considerations to evaluate and implement. Such considerations as the correct way to write your title tags and your meta description tags are equally as critical.

Also, depending whether your site caters to your local market or to an international audience, the proper linking strategy of your site can have a dramatic influence in the overall rankings features of your site in the search engines.

Additionally, before you even start writing your text, you need to carefully research your real keywords that people type in the search boxes of the search engines. Depending on the exact products or services they are looking for, the keywords that you might think they are using are often not the same keywords at all they are typing, in order to find your site.

I see this over and over. Even if you have been in business for 20 or 30 years, the words people type in search engines to find businesses like yours will surprise you more than once! The only way to effectively determine and accurately identify these correct keywords or key phrases is to use the facilities of Wordtracker.

Optimize a site for the wrong keywords, and you will end up with enquiries or questions for products or services your company may not even sell! Not only that, but you will seriously undermine the ranking characteristics of your site at the same time.

Conclusion
Writing for the Web is significantly different than writing for the print media. To be real effective, a site needs to be written for its human users: the real people that will visit your site. At the same time, consideration must also be given to the search robots that will crawl your site at regular intervals.

Search engine optimization (SEO) need not be boring, nor should it ever be systematic. Write in a compelling fashion that will truly add credibility to your site’s image. Important words such as your main features and benefits, the many reasons why a person should do business with your company, your store hours, etc. can go a long way in fully realizing the true potential of any website, large or small.

With all else being equal, generic or ‘organic’ search results pages usually carry a significantly higher value. Additionally, unless there are serious problems in the overall structure of your site’s design, they will also deliver a better conversion rate, while at the same time offer a higher ROI, provided the optimization was done correctly.

Author: Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

Peak Cycles are Driven by Timely Content
The very first time I had ever experienced this phenomena online was in December of 1996. In those way-back days, I ran a site focused on selling Christian t-shirts. Back then, I had posted Christian based poetry on my website to draw traffic to the domain. Over the two days leading up to Christmas and the two days following Christmas, I had served as much traffic as I had in the previous nine months of existence!

Fast-forward to April 15th, 2004. I currently have more than one dozen articles on my website dealing with 401k retirement funds and 401k tax issues. These articles are the third most frequented topic on my site as the traffic is generated from the search engines. Beginning on April 12th, my site traffic started to climb beyond its average level. It then peaked on April 15th. Of course, the vast majority of this traffic was visiting my site to find my tax related content.

Although the traffic to these tax resources comes from many sites beyond just the search engines, as many people have linked to these articles, one site in particular is the tax related site for one of my article distribution clients. My client had decided to leave his articles off of his site, and to link to his articles on my domain. Between April 12th and April 15th, my site received 448 unique visitors from my client’s domain alone. (http://www.investsafe.com/articles.html) On the 15th, my site served 90% more visitors than is average on any given day.

So the lesson I have learned here is that if I have date targeted materials on my site for several different dates, that I can actually draw more people to my site during these peak time periods. While the time dated traffic may not generate immediate sales, it will allow me to garner more recognition in the marketplace. Over the long haul, this extra recognition serves to generate more referral traffic that has proven to be the basis of my business model. 95% of all of my clients have come to me directly by referral.

Author Bio:
Bill Platt owns The Phantom Writers, a company committed to helping people to establish an Internet presence & promote their businesses through the use of Free-Reprint Articles and Press Releases. Articles are distributed to 6,000+ publishers & webmasters as part of the package. http://thePhantomWriters.com Do you write your own articles? Let us distribute them for you.

Using Words That Sell
This article may come as a surprise to you.

Especially since it is written by a web designer. Let me explain……

Rescue Your Web Site from Boring Words and Poor Design.

The difference between a successful website design and a site that brings in zero or very little business is not how nice the graphics are, not the colors you choose. It’s not the flashy animation, and it’s not your precious company logo.

I’m not saying to remove these elements. Some of them are important. But they’re mostly ego-driven. They are “me” messages, and have absolutely nothing to do with what you want your visitor to do.

And what is that you ask? The answer is of course. You want your visitors to buy something.

People who are considering doing business with you are only interested in one thing; “What’s In It For Me?”

One of the first steps toward a successful website is writing copy that tells the reader what’s in it for him, in a style that is easy to read.

Make More Cash

Study any website that makes money and I promise you’ll see the following copy elements in place:

In the main body copy, the text color is always black with a white background, making it easy to read. This should be obvious, but it’s amazing how many websites out there do not follow this very basic guideline.

Testimonials, and other secondary elements commonly use a contrasting font such as courier, courier new. The background in light blue, beige, or yellow shade to make it stand apart from the white background of the main body copy.

Verdana is the most widely used font for your body copy. This font was actually developed for use in the web. Times New Roman, Arial, and Georgiana are also popular. Never use more than two different font faces in your sales copy.

The use of yellow highlights, italics and bold font-style for emphasis.

Headlines and Subheads are usually a contrasting color from the black body text. A shade of red, dark green and dark blue are good colors. However, do not use more than three or four different colors.

Sentence and paragraph font size is commonly between 8pt. and 12pt. Never smaller than that, and never bigger.

Headlines and sub headlines usually between 14pt. and 18pt.

Paragraphs never justified. Most common is left-margin with no indent.

How To Write Successful Headlines

In your sales copy you need an attention-grabbing headline and a compelling sales message full of benefits, clearly describing what your product or service is all about.

Legendary copywriter Ted Nicholas author of 14 best-selling books including “Magic Words That Bring You Riches” has these excellent tips on writing headlines

“Start with a well thought out headline.”

“Five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. It makes sense, therefore, to spend the major portion of your effort on headlines.”

“A good headline motivates action by stirring an emotion”

“Write as many as 250 headlines before settling on one”

13 Proven Headline Words

Announcing…

Secrets of…

New…

Now…

Amazing…

Facts you…

Breakthrough…

At Last…

Advice to…

The truth of…

Free…

How would…

How to…

How To Write Attention-Grabbing First Sentences

Joe Sugarman (of blu-blocker sunglass fame) and author of best-selling book “Advertising Secrets of the Written Word” has these tips on writing first sentences;

“Keep it short, sweet and almost incomplete.”

For example:

It’s easy.

It had to happen.

It’s time.

It’s crazy.

The sole purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence.

How To Write Attention-Grabbing Ending Sentences

“You must plant seeds of curiosity for the reader.” “At the end of a paragraph offer a reason to read the next paragraph.”

Using sentences such as…..

But there’s more.

So read on.

But I didn’t stop there.

Let me explain.

Now here comes the good part.

These tips represent just the tip of the iceberg on breathing new life into your half-dead web site.

We’ll cover all of the other necessary elements in future articles. Stay tuned.

I hope that you have found this information to be helpful in your pursuit of excellence. Thank you for reading.

Regards,

Dave Peterson

Author Bio:
Dave is not only a Professional Website Designer. He also incorporates exciting state-of-the-art marketing strategies and expertise that help clients put more cash in there pockets. Providing great value to his clients.

Ways To Promote Your Business
A business, more often than not, has a very limited budget when it comes to advertising. The business owner needs to make the public aware of his or her product or service at the lowest possible cost.

There are many ways. A pet breeder in a large city was struggling for several years-until he came up with a novel idea. He started giving away customized “birth certificates” for the pets he sold. Almost immediately, his sales rose more than 10 percent.

The owner of a new home cleaning service was trying to attract clients. She couldn’t afford much advertising, so she began offering “home cleaning seminars” to civic groups. After two months of seminars, she was swamped with inquiries and clients.

Promotion often makes the crucial difference between business success and failure. Customers or clients must know about a business or product line before they’ll buy and they must have a reason to buy.

GIVEAWAYS. People love to receive “free” items, especially items they can use to gain knowledge or improve their lives. You can base an entire promotional campaign on this desire. If you’re running a furniture repair business, for instance, you could give away a furniture repair brochure, free furniture planning guides, or color swatches. Once you begin giving away authoritative information, customers will begin to perceive you as an expert in your field.

NEWS CREATION.Want to get your business in the local newspaper or TV? It may be easier than you think. If you don’t have any news to report to the local media, create some. One man hired a team of beautiful girls outfitted in skimpy bikinis and had them waving signs in a busy part of town announcing his new Web site address. Did it get attention by the media? You bet it did!

EVENTS.You may be able to attract the attention of the media or a crowd by staging a special promotional event. If you run a fitness classes, for instance, you could stage a celebrity instructor day. If you’re promoting a new real estate business, you can offer tours of a model home in the area. If you’re selling children’s products and it’s springtime, you can offer lunch with the Easter bunny. Get the idea?

CHARITY TIE-INS.Are you launching a new product? Trying to increase visibility among a particular segment of your community? Offer your product to one or more local charities as a raffle prize or for use at a fund raising event. You’ll receive lots of exposure among people who buy tickets or attend the event.

CONTESTS. Offer a desirable or unique item-or even several items-as contest prizes. First, find a contest theme that tiers into your business. A caterer might offer a quiche-eating contest. A photographer might offer a young model contest. A mail order craft firm might offer an “Early American” handicrafts contest. Invite contest submissions and offer prizes to the winners. Do contests attract attention? You bet. All it takes is a few signs, a small press announcement or two, and the word will spread throughout the community grapevine.

COMMUNITY SERVICE.Nothing brings you to the attention of the people faster-or more favorably-than community service. Ask yourself how your enterprise can be a “good neighbor” to your community. If you’re running a lawn care and gardening service, perhaps you can offer one season’s services at no charge to a needy charitable organization or nursing home in your area. Hundreds of people will hear about your work in the process. Volunteer for various community causes. If appropriate, you can step in during community emergency, offering products and services to help an organization or individuals in need.

COUPONS. Americans are very coupon-conscious. Test the market: at what level will coupons increase the volume of various product or service lines? When you get some tentative answers, start distributing coupons that offer a discount on your services. Distribute them to area newspapers, on store counters, in door-to-door- mail packets (which can often be quite inexpensive), at the public library, at laundromats, at any location where people congregate.

BADGES AND NOVELTIES.You can easily and inexpensively produce badges, bumper stickers, book covers, and other novelty items for distribution in your area. You can imprint your business name and the first names of the customers on many of these products at little cost and distribute them for free. Or you can tie your novelty program into a contest: once a month, you can offer a prize to any individual whose car happens to carry one of your bumper stickers or badges with peel-off coupons, redeemable at your place of business.

CELEBRITY VISITS.With a bit of persistence, you may be able to arrange to have a local media celebrity, public official, or entertainment personally-even a fictitious cartoon character or clown-visit your service. The celebrity can sign autographs, read stories to children, perform cooking demonstrations, or perform any one of a hundred other traffic-building activities.

By all means, advertise in the media if you can. But don’t neglect your greatest promotional asset-your mind. Ponder the products, services and events you can offer the community and devise a creative promotional strategy around them. You’ll have to invest a bit of time and energy in the project, but the payoff will be worth it. You’ll save hundreds-or even thousands-of advertising dollars and better yet, you’ll travel a well-worn shortcut to profit.

I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

Author Bio:
Serge Daudelin of WSPromotion.com is a top Marketing Agent Regulary putting on marketing seminars and working for one of the largest Advertising Agency in Canada.

What is Link Popularity?
Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your site, from other sites on the web. The Search Engines consider your site important and rank it higher if several other sites link to your site.

You can search for the sites that link to your site by typing the following command in Google Search

For a detailed Link Popularity report, you can use our Link Popularity Analyzer Tool, which checks the link popularity of your site across various search engines like Google, MSN, AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo and AlltheWeb.

History behind Link Popularity and Google PageRank
Web, by its very nature is based on hyperlinks, where sites link to other prominent sites. If you take the logic that you would tend to link to sites that you consider important, in essence, you are casting a vote in favor of the sites that you link to. When hundreds or thousands of sites link to a site, it is logical to assume that such a site would be good and important.

Taking this logic further the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page formulated a Search Engine algorithm that shifted the ranking weight to off-page factors. They evolved a formula called PageRank (named after its founder Larry Page) where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and assign it an importance score on a scale of 1-10. More the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

Google’s PageRank is important because it is one of the primary off-page factors that influences your page’s ranking in the search engine result pages.

PageRank in Google’s own Words
Google explains PageRank as follows (http://www.google.com/technology/):

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

For more information on Google PageRank, go to

http://www.google.com/technology/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html

Benefits of Building Link Popularity
Building Link Popularity is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective Search Engine Optimization campaign today. The ‘off-page’ factors such as link popularity, PageRank and Anchor Text in incoming links play a major role in your site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Search Engines consider your site more important if more links point to your site. Building link popularity improves the PageRank of your web pages (Read more about PageRank). The higher the PageRank of your website, the higher its importance for search engines and higher it gets ranked in the search engine result pages. Search engines also take into account the PageRank of the pages that link to your site and its industry relevance to your own industry. Links from higher PageRank pages and industry relevant sites give your site a higher value.

Note: Search Engines need to ‘learn’ all the links you have created pointing to your site, in order to reward your website. Patience pays.

Types of Links
There are two types of links you can establish on the web. One way is to trade links (Link Exchange), where you give a link from the links Page on your site to the partner sites. The second method is to establish ‘only-incoming’ links also called ‘one-way links’ or ‘Non-Reciprocal links’.

Only-Incoming Links
Only incoming links are the links established on the other websites where you do not need to link back to them.

There are various compelling reasons and methods to establish such one-way links which include linking back from a different website that you may own, publishing articles on sites, content syndication, listing in trade directories and giving out press releases in news networks.

Link Exchange
Link exchange is an easier way to establish links from other websites to your website. In link exchange process, you trade links with prospective partner sites by offering a link to their site from your own site. This method is faster and a good way to establish several hundred links to your website without big efforts.

Only Incoming Links vs. Link Exchange
Google developed the PageRank algorithm to provide authentic and quality information while making it difficult for webmasters and site owners to contaminate the search results by artificially inflating their PageRank.

The new algorithm came into effect with the launch of Google in 1998. Google’s PageRank was based on the logic that more the number of sites that link to a page, higher its PageRank.

As Webmasters realized the importance of PageRank, they found ways to artificially inflate their PageRank by manipulating direct link exchanges. This defeated the very essence on which the Google PageRank algorithm was build. To counter this, Google has constantly been fine-tuning and updating its algorithms. Read about Google’s latest algo updates.

The search engines are aware that a large number of sites are deploying link exchange campaigns to boost their site’s PR. Search engines are working towards fine-tuning their algos to discount direct link exchanges in order to preserve the effect of their link popularity related algorithms and rationalize artificially inflated links popularity of sites.

While the algos are yet to reflect this change, we believe that it may happen soon enough. In the long run, we recommend investing your resources in an ‘only-incoming links’ campaign for your website which is likely to benefit your site more as opposed to a direct link exchange campaign.

Important Parameters to Consider while Building Link Popularity
Some of the important parameters that you need to consider while establishing links with any website are discussed below:

PageRank or PR of the Linking Page
PR of the linking page is one of the most important factors. PR of the linking page determines how much value of importance is passed on to your page. Higher the PR of the linking page, higher the value you get. The home page PR is not as important, but it is an indicator of how much PR a linking page may jump to, in due course of time. For instance, if the PR of the site’s link page is 0, but the home page PR is 6, then, there is a bright possibility that in a month or two, the link page PR may also jump to a PR of 4 or even 5 due to the internal linking structure of the partner site. While sites would be happy to give out links from a PR 0 page, you can estimate that in two months time, this link page can jump to a high PR, giving you great value in the future.

Identifying Total Number of Links on the Link Page
The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PR value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page. Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 outgoing links is much better than getting a link from a PR4 page that has 60 outgoing links. With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links. It is therefore as important to evaluate the total number of outgoing links on a links page, as it is, to evaluate the PR of the linking page. This is where many people often falter, as they usually insist on getting a link from a high PR page, but if that page has 100 outgoing links, your page would only get 1/100th of that value.

Industry Relevance
Search engines give high importance to links pointing to your site from your own industry segment as opposed to those from an un-related industry. For instance, a hotels and reservations website is likely to benefit more from links pointing from a related industry site like travel, vacation packages or cruises, than those from an unrelated industry like a drug site.

Industry relevance also needs to be given a high weight while creating resource directories. For example, if you have a site related to hotels, then you can create a resource directory related to your business that could be pertaining to travel, tourism, cruises, vacation rentals, vacation packages, car rentals, food and beverages etc.

Page Relevance
Most sites offering links have several categories listed on their sites. Try and get a link from a category that closely matches your own industry. For instance, if you have a site related to hotels, then, on your partner site, a tickets site for example, try and identify a resource directory pertaining to hotels, resorts, reservations, vacation packages, travel, tourism, food and beverages etc. If the concerned site has a directory on hotels, you should request a link in that category, as a link from that page would be relevant to a hotels site, thus getting you more benefits. An algorithm called ‘Applied Semantics’ determines the industry relevance of a page within a site. Applied Semantics algorithm studies various keywords on a web page and tries to determine the industry or business segment of each page. Applied Semantics estimates the industry segments that are relevant to a particular page. If the link to your page is coming from your business specific segment, then you are likely to draw more benefit.

Anchor Text
Anchor Text is the visible hyperlinked text on a web page. Since anchor text is very important, make sure that your most important keywords appear in anchor text from the link pointing to your site. You should try and work with at-least 10-20 keyword and link text options. If you are creating a large number of links using only one standard link text, then the search engines are likely to detect a pattern. It is possible that future algo updates may do away with all repetitive and similar looking links to your site.

You can also refer to our article on Anchor Text Optimization for more details.

Pre-Indexed Pages
Try and find link partners in Search Engines like Google and Yahoo, and check if the links page is already indexed in the search engines. Search Engines frequently re-index the pages in its database. They are likely to detect your link faster on a page already existing in their database as compared to a ‘yet-to-be indexed’ page. The safest way to check is to copy the prospective link page URL and paste it into Google Search. If the page is indexed, Google would show a result in response to your search, otherwise it would respond with a ‘no result found’.

The robots.txt file
robots.txt is an exclusion file that contains specific instructions for search engine robots regarding the content they are not allowed to index. Links placed on a page that the search engines robots are not allowed to index, would not benefit your site. Considering the importance of robots.txt file, it is a good idea to study a site’s robots.txt file to identify the excluded pages before approaching a site for establishing links with your site. Read our article on Working with robots.txt file.

Dynamic Link Pages
You should also watch out for any link pages that are generated dynamically. Chances are that such pages would not get indexed soon enough, which means that a link from such a page would not benefit you. Some dynamic link pages are intentionally generated in such a way so as to prevent them from getting indexed. Some unscrupulous webmasters do this to trick you to prevent any PageRank leaking from their site to yours. Links from such pages therefore do not give you any benefit.

Java Script Link Pages
It is also important to identify pages that are generated through Flash or a Java Script, as Search Engines cannot read flash pages or the links embedded within flash. These are some of the tricks unethical webmasters use. While a site can claim to have placed a link to your web page, in effect they are not giving you any benefit.

Re-Directed Links
A link that is first re-directed to another page within your partner site before pointing to your site is a re-directed link. You should watch out for such links, as search engines do not give weight to re-directed links. It is very unlikely that your site would draw any benefit from a re-directed link.

Frame Sites
Avoid getting links from framed sites as search engines cannot read texts within frames. A link placed on a frame site would not get your site any benefit, as search engines would not be able to recognize such a link.

Directory Depth
It is important to evaluate the depth of the directory of the linking page. Avoid getting links from pages that are embedded in a very deep directory or pages that are more than two directories deep (e.g. www.domain.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/linkpage.htm is not a good link page). Deep directories seldom earn high PR. They are also slow in getting indexed, if at all.

Building Link Popularity is a great way to help your site gain competitive PR. Links from other sites also sends direct human traffic to your site. Observing a little care in developing links will go a long way in getting your site rank high in search engines.

Author Bio:
Harjot Kaleka is an SEO Copywriter at www.SEOrank.com, a leading Search Engine Optimization services company. She has a Masters degree in Mass Communications and Copywriting.

Gmail privacy concerns?
I’m sure you’ve already heard, but Google is getting into the email business. We speculated about Google email a few months ago, but were unsure about the whole mail thing. It seemed to be a change in a direction that Google wasn’t used to. After all, Google is search, and nothing more. They build services on top of search (such as news, Froogle and so on) but essentially, everything is driven by search.

So when it was confirmed that Google was getting into email, we were a little surprised. Personally, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. One of the strongest assets both Yahoo! and MSN have is web based free email. From a competitive point of view it kind of makes sense. And search, as you will see, is built into it.

Google mail is still in beta testing right now, so you can’t get a new address. You can put a request in for one, but there are no guarantees.

So when people start complaining about privacy being violated with Google mail I get a little surprised. How is it that a beta product can be invading your privacy, especially when you request to use the product? If you haven’t heard, privacy advocates are saying that Google is invading mail user’s privacy because they will be scanning your personal email and offering ads which correspond to the body of the emails. This is where the Google search comes in.

Further, you won’t be able to delete old emails; they just keep building up apparently. I can understand not being able to delete them, especially if Google is trying to serve ads matching the email bodies, and I can see the point of privacy being violated (somewhat). However, it is a free service which you are requesting. You have to agree to their terms of use (which I’m sure addresses the whole scanning emails issue) in order to receive your free email address, so what is the problem?

I could see if it was an ISP who gave you email and did this, because you’re stuck with it, but to go after a free service which you are explicitly requesting to use? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

It’s kind of like when you go to a major sporting event. When I go to see our local hockey team, I don’t give express permission for the TV broadcaster to use my face during their broadcast (such as when they are showing the crowds reaction) yet I expect it, and I don’t consider it a violation of my privacy. I am at the event of my own free will as I chose to be there. If I were concerned about someone seeing my face on TV I wouldn’t be at the game.

Maybe I’m taking a simplistic view on this, but I really don’t understand what the fuss is about. Perhaps, if they added the scanning feature after I signed up I would be concerned, but otherwise, if I have previously agreed to it, then I’m stuck with it in exchange for having the ability to use 1 gigabyte of free email storage space.

I guess if I was really concerned, yet I still wanted to use Gmail, then I’d ask all my friends to send images to the Gmail address, and everything else to one of my other addresses. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about Google scanning my emails, because they wouldn’t get much useful text out of the images and I’d be able to keep all those pictures that get sent to me.

Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists

Different results in Altavista/MSN/Yahoo!
A team member of ours did some checking recently comparing results between Yahoo! and its search subsidiaries and found some interesting results. So much so that it begs the question: Why are there different results between the sites?

I am talking about the differences you may have noticed between Yahoo! and the sites it provides results for. Namely Altavista, Alltheweb and MSN. If you do the same search across these different engines, chances are good that you get different results. This doesn’t make sense considering that Yahoo! is supposed to be supplying the search results to these sites. If this is the case, you would expect that all four sites should have the same results, right? Wrong.

Why you ask? Well, it comes down to the algorithms.

When we were checking results against the sites, we were finding differences not only in the rankings, but also with the number of pages indexed and the number of pages per site indexed. But we are only going to be dealing with rankings here.

As you may already know, all of the major search engines have different algorithms. The algorithms determine how the pages will rank depending on a variety of factors including OTP (On The Page) factors, such as title tags, descriptions, body text, page length etc. as well as other factors including link relevancy and inheritance to name just a few.

The combinations of these factors, along with the weightings each engine puts on them, coalesce to make up the ranking algorithm which determines where pages will show up in the search results. These ranking algorithms are controlled by the independent engines. And this is why the search results appear differently across multiple engines.

What is happening is that Yahoo! is merely providing the index, or list of sites. They are saying, “Hey MSN, here you go. Here is the list of sites we have added in our index, now it is up to you to rank them the way you see fit.”

It would be like giving someone a deck of cards. Usually, if they are not new, they are in random order. Now if you handed the cards to 3 different people and asked them to organize them, chances are each person would organize them differently. You could organize them by suit, or by face value, or by some combination of these. Ultimately each person would likely organize them differently. If you then asked them to pull the 20th card from the deck, there is a good chance that they would each draw different cards as the decks are organized different.

This is how the algorithms work. Each engine determines how to order the results based on the factors mentioned above. Therefore while the Yahoo! index may be the same across the board for each site, the final search results will be different.

Just so you know, in our test of about 50 sites, there was sometimes over 1000-page differences in rankings. That means, for example, that a site could rank in the top 10 in MSN and not even be in the top 1000 in Altavista (or vice versa). There were some results displayed where rankings were within a few positions, while others were thousands apart. This difference is due to the ranking algorithms.

So, if you think your site will do well in MSN or Altavista just because you are doing well in Yahoo! don’t be so sure. Conversely, if you find you are ranking lower than you like in Yahoo! don’t assume that you are also ranking low in one of the other engines because it is entirely dependant on the engine.

Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists