One of the most important factors in website optimization is your title tag. This is written in the HTML code for your page in the “head” section. Many companies make the mistake of simply using their company name on every page of their site. This is a costly error, since today, search engines use the title plus key words in your content, more than ever to determine your standings. Here are some tips for getting better standings through the proper use of title tags.

In addition to ranking, your title tag will appear in the title bar of web browsers for visitors who open your page. Having a descriptive title tag is important for visitors as well as for search engines.

A Word About Keywords

Before building any web site or even any web page, it is important that you choose 3 or 4 prime key words and a number of lesser words as well. The web is full of keyword selection tools, but we suggest you begin with an excellent keyword tool that is free from Google. We cannot cover this process in this article, but we have other articles that go into this critical area. For each page of your site, select two or three major keywords you believe people will use to find your page in the search engines.

What To Put In Your Tag

Many web sites just have the company name in the title tag. This is great if you are so well known that people will use your name to search when they want to find your site. For example, www.cocacola.com. However, if your company name is less well known than Coca Cola, GE, IBM and others you will do far better to put your name, your city and two or three of your primary keywords. An example for my company web-star.biz might be , “web-star marketing affordable consulting”. This title has about 60 characters. It describes the prime keyword for the page and identifies the company name.

If you are going for a local market, we suggest you include your area such as Denver or Denver CO or CO because more and more searches on the internet (about 30% in Nov 2008) are searches for local products and services. It is far easier to get to the top of the search engine pile for a city or state than for the world as there is less competition.

Proper Length

We suggest that you limit your title tag to 65 characters or less as that is the limit most search engines display. Don’t waste any characters using “and” or other words that take up space in the prime area.

Critical Title Errors To Avoid

There are three common title errors that really cost. The first is no title. It is amazíng to me how many sites have no title. This is very costly as the title is an important factor in telling the search engines what keywords to líst you under. The second error is using just your company name. Unless you are world famous, people will not be keying in your name to find you. Use your name but also use two or three prime keywords. The third most common error is using the same title (usually the company name) on every page in your site. Many search engines penalize sites that do this by moving them down in the ranks. More importantly, using a unique title tag for each page allows you to get lísted in the search engines for several keywords and make your page content very relevant to those keywords. This makes for better engine placement.

Other Considerations To Move Up

There are a few other things you can do to improve your ranking. When you put a hyperlink to another page, instead of using a phrase like “Clíck here”, use a keyword. For example if you want a visitor to click on your upcoming seminar page, use a hyperlink like “upcoming seminars”. Using the keyword in a hyperlink helps the search engines rank that page and your link higher and more specifically.

Also, when you select file names for the pages on your site, use the appropriate keyword. For example, if you save your page on seminars as “p10345987.htm” you will not be as successful as if you assign a page name like “seminars.htm” which contains a prime keyword.

These are a few simple ways to improve your title tag that will result in more visibility, more traffíc and more sales.

With everyone bombarded by email overload, do you really think your ezine is being read? A Nielsen Norman Group Report revealed that the typical email newsletter gets 51 seconds of your reader’s time. That was three years ago. Today, many say its closer to 26 seconds. And, that’s if your email newsletter is even opened.

You’re Not as Popular as You Think

While you believe YOUR ezines are special and opened like gifts on Christmas morning, remember this: Dozens of emails are routinely wiped out daily in one swoop with the push of the delete key.

Even if the reader recognizes your name, you can be expunged just because they’re having a busy day or your email got caught in a large block of spam.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you stop doing email newsletters. In fact, I advise you to do an email newsletter on a weekly basis. But, I also suggest doing a monthly print newsletter.

Here’s why…

6 Ways Print Newsletters Beat Email Newsletters - And Why They Need to Be Part of Your Marketing Mix

1. Printed mail gets delivered - It’s never blocked or caught in spam filters. Faulty connections, email authentication and webmail service idiosyncrasies are not issues. And, you have no worries about connection speeds.
2. Print newsletters have more perceived value - Think about it: How many companies are willing to do this? Your clients aren’t stupid. They understand the energy, cost and time required to send them a great newsletter every month. It will get their immediate attention.
3. Print newsletters let you use unlimited amount of images - A picture really is worth a thousand words. Print newsletters are not shackled by bandwidth. That means you can use a variety of text, graphics and formatting styles to capture the interest of your clients.
4. Print newsletter are sticky - Print newsletters have great ‘hang-time’. Not only are they likely to be read from start to finish, they usually get passed around. Hand-along readership can be as high as four-to-one. Talk about free marketing!
5. Print newsletters offer convenient and comfortable reading - Printed newsletters are much easier on the eyes. Reading articles of any length on a computer screen is uncomfortable and often inconvenient. Plus, a print newsletter allows you to mark sections you find interesting, take it to work and leave it there to be picked up by workmates.
6. Print newsletters stand out and get noticed - By using color, logos and a familiar return address, a print newsletter is easy to spot. With an inbox filled with subject lines, every message looks the same.

Here’s Your Best Bet

Make no mistake. There is a place for electronic communication with your customers. Websites and email are an important part of any business.

But the hands down best choice for keeping customers and getting more referrals and building relationships is to include print newsletters within your marketing mix

You can even offer your customers a choice. They will see that you really care about what they want, not just what you are willing to provide for them.

And that’s what relationship marketing is all about, isn’t it?

About the Author:

Print Newsletter Marketing Expert David Gruttadaurio was tired of wasting money on marketing that didn’t work. So he searched for a marketing tool that would give him more clients for his cleaning business. Then he found newsletter marketing! Through print newsletters he was able to triple his sales. Now, discover how he got and retained more clients with his FREE “Profit Exploding Newsletter Secrets Report” at http://www.NewslettersMadeForYou.com

The other day I received two emails, both with the same question, why didn’t we have a direct call to action on our website?

Sales people are taught, you always need ‘a call to action,’ a request to act or lose the opportunity of a lifetime. I’m sure you’ve seen the infomercials, website presentations, online direct marketing come-ons, and even high-pressure seminar and tradeshow presentations that will never be repeated, so you better act now. You’re familiar with the language used: “act now and we’ll send you two pieces of junk you don’t need, but wait there’s more, call in the next ten minutes and we’ll add a third useless item.”

Does any intelligent person really respond to this kind of pitch, and what self-respecting business would actually behave in this manner? The fact is, if you sell something of value at a reasonable price, and you treat your customers with some respect, you will get your share of business. You may not get all the business, nobody does, but the business you do get, will result in more satisfied customers, more word-of-mouth referrals, and ultimately more sales. High-pressure tactics, and demands for instant commitment, frighten off as many potential clients as they ensnare.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Statistically it may be true that if someone leaves your website without ordering, the chances of them returning to order are low, but as Shakespeare’s Cassius said, “the fault, dear Brutus lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.” The problem is NOT the customer; it’s what you’re saying, how you’re saying it, and the expectations you’ve set for determining your site’s performance.

Success is not a question of attracting more traffic, especially if your message is weak, unfocused, and lacking in emotional context. Success is a question of how many people you connect with both directly and indirectly, and how many people come back to your site because they are intrigued by what you have to say.

To start, many products and services are either too complex or too high valued to expect people to make an instant decision; and demanding one just frightens people away. Asking for an order is asking a lot, and leads to resistance. Inviting someone to call or email is reassuring and friendly; it’s an offer to communicate, provide assistance, advice, and information, and it’s easily accepted.

Orders are the result of building relationships and relationships are built on communication. You may not be able to speak to everyone who comes to your website but that only means that your website’s primary job is to communicate what needs to be said so that it makes a memorable impression, and provides something more meaningful than a ‘buy now’ button.

E-Commerce Gone Bad

The e-commerce industry with it’s easy to implement technical solutions has created a class of entrepreneurs who think all they have to do is display a product photo, description, price, and order button, and the sales will follow. This approach may work for mega sites like Amazon.com but it’s not going to work for you. You’ve got to be smarter than that.

When small and medium sized companies try to emulate major corporate business models, they are looking for trouble. It’s one reason why so many websites are so bad, and why so many under perform.

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman didn’t do entrepreneurs a favor when they wrote, “In Search of Excellence.” What they should have written was ‘In Search of Failure,’ since we learn more from things that don’t work than from things that do. In the world of Internet marketing, creating websites that are nothing more than online catalogs, digital brochures, or direct marketing come-ons, is a waste of time and money, not to mention all that effort devoted to attracting website traffic.

Redefine Successful Website Performance

Orders are not the true measure of a website’s success. Nor is the volume of traffic a site attracts. You can have loads of traffic, but little of it ever gets turned into business, and you can even get some orders, but few long-term clients.

The primary objective of your website should be to initiate contact either by email, phone, or in the case of brick and mortar companies, store traffic. In order to achieve that objective, your website presentation must be engaging, enlightening, and above all memorable. Potential clients want a little foreplay, a little respect, and an understanding that you are asking them to put their faith in you.

Marketing Is More Art Than Science

Marketing is about human nature, and the idea that all aspects of human nature can be quantified, and that meaningful results can be extracted and formed into an action plan guaranteed to produce results, is simply over-reaching. The human brain is far too complex, and human motivation is the result of far too many interdisciplinary factors to be boiled down into a unified mathematical formula. The movie and music industries have been trying for years, and still neither one can accurately predict what will be a hit.

In an effort to always maximize productivity, business has bowed-down to the false idol of statistical razzle-dazzle, and succumbed to its faux extrapolations. As a consequence business, and especially Web-business, has forsaken insight, intuition, and a ‘consilience*’ approach to marketing, one built on continuous creative experimentation and implementation.

*Consilience: “the linking together of principles from different disciplines especially when forming a comprehensive theory” - Merriam-webster.com.

Three Website Ingredients Needed To Motivate Action

Donna Flagg of the Krysalis Group is quoted in the article, ‘For the Love of Sales,’ published in the online magazine “Selling Power”: “Good selling comes down to three things: communication, education, and the ability to affect others.”

I know of no better method to achieve these three goals than to implement video on your website, it is THE must have marketing vehicle for companies intent on maximizing website presentation impact.

The Center for Media Research reported in their recent ‘Research Brief’ that 42.6% of retailers surveyed were adding product videos to their websites. And the power of video marketing is not just about sales; it’s about how you as a business communicate in the most efficient manner to all your concerned publics.

“Video’s importance transcends the customer experience. It can transform every aspect of an organization, from sales, marketing and communications to investor relations, employee training and education.” - David Dutch’s MediaPost “Online Video: Redefining How Business Connects With Their Customers”.

1 Communication - Engage
Your website serves no purpose unless it engages your viewer and communicates a meaningful, memorable message. A video presentation uses sights, sounds, and performance to produce psychological persuasion.

2 Education - Enlighten
A message delivered using creative video presentation techniques is seen, heard, and embedded in the audience’s mind. It informs, explains, clarifies, and focuses attention on the key decision making elements that produce leads, and ultimately sales.

3 Affect Your Audience - Create An Experience
A properly crafted Web video makes a human connection, it affects the viewer on a psychological as well as rational level, so that the message delivered resonates and impacts the decision making process.

About Those Emails

You may be wondering how I answered the emails mentioned earlier; the simple answer is if a marketing presentation is intriguing enough, your audience will respond, and in this case, both visitors did exactly what our website is designed to do, get people to email or phone so that we can open a dialog with them, so we can get to know each other, so we can start to build a productive business relationship, and we do it using video - the media is the message.

It is time businesses employ a new Web-philosophy, one that is aimed at turning advertising into content, and content into an experience. And I know of no better way to create an online experience than to employ Web video.

About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit MRPwebmedia.com, 136Words.com and SonicPersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

Since its launch in June 2005, Google’s Webmaster Help Group [GWHG] has helped tens of thousands of frustrated webmasters to overcome a vast array of problems, penalties and other assorted issues between their websites and Google. Now, some three and a half years later, on Thursday December 4th 2008 at 8.15AM PST, Google’s main front-line support group has undergone a dramatic transformation.

Moved from its old location within the Google Groups framework to a brand new home within Google’s own support site, the Webmaster Help Group has received a much-needed technological upgrade. Gone are the old ‘Usenet Feel’ and the clunky, unresponsive, plain-text interface, replaced with a slick new look, rich-text functionality and the ability to cross-reference answers, post live links, cite resources and even embed video, all of which combine to turn the group from being a great webmaster resource into a truly outstanding one.

Another major improvement in the new group is the introduction of user-levels, ranging from 1 through 6 [One being a new user and six being a Google employee], with increasing access to the group’s new functionalities as users gain reputation and progress through the levels. And, since a user’s level is clearly displayed next to any posts they make, it is now much easier for new forum members to distinguish whether the person answering their question is also a new user, a regular, a top contributor or even a Google employee.

So, from a sheer technology & functionality standpoint, Google Webmaster Help has taken a huge leap forward

But, like so many things, a support group of this kind cannot function on technology alone; it needs expert members, capable of dealing with the myriad problems webmasters around the globe will ask it to address.

As things stand currently, some three and a half years after the group’s inception, Webmaster Help is inhabited by a colourful assortment of professionals from around the globe, always ready to answer the many questions thrown at them by close to 42,000 members. During the past year, the group has also seen the ever increasing participation of Google Employees (affectionately called Googlers), with even such ‘celebrities’ as Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, John Müller and Susan Moskwa answering the occasional frustrated query.

Indeed, given the ever-growing number of Googlers regularly frequenting the group, Webmaster Help can now safely be counted as the best place to get your website questions answered by Google’s own staff, given that the company fields no means for webmasters to contact them via phone or email.

However, the Webmaster Help Group’s strength lies not simply in the participation of Google’s staff, but mainly in its population of resident experts, dubbed Bionic Posters by Google. Currently numbering fourteen, the ‘Bionics’ are an eclectic crowd of experts in subjects ranging from site design, CSS, Java and W3C compliance to more SEM-specific topics such as improving conversion rates and SEO Consultancy, who freely donate their time each day to help webmasters and frustrated site owners who reach the group in need of some expert advice.

Ultimately it is this little crowd, along with a growing number of less frequent regulars, who answer the vast majority of users’ questions, be they about Rankings, HTML, Penalties, SEO or whatever. And, thanks to the new group’s architecture and facilities implemented by Google, they will now be able to answer those same questions far more efficiently.

And, with persistent rumours of a group companion-site, laden with answers, statistics and diagnostics tools coming in the New Year, Google’s Webmaster Help Group is poised to further extend its reputation of being the single most comprehensive resource of its kind on the internet.

Having spent a substantial amount of my spare time around Webmaster Help since August 2006, I have witnessed a great many changes and improvements to the group, though none on quite this scale. I have also been privileged enough to be part of an online community which has taught me more about web design and online promotion during these last 28 months than any other resource on the web, and would heartily recommend anyone reading this article to take a look at the group and learn from the wealth of knowledge shared by its many inhabitants.

As a technical writer and SEO consultant with a career spanning almost fifteen years, Sasch Mayer has been living in the Republic of Cyprus since 2005. He has helped countless webmasters and online business owners to diagnose problems with their websites and is rated as a Top Contributor by Google in its Webmaster Help Group. His company, IceGiant Web Services also undertakes graphic and web design work.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process getting your website ready to be found in organic web searches. By organic searches, I’m referring to web searches that appear naturally as the result of a search for a particular keyword or phrase, rather than appearing in the sponsored links (pay-per-click advertising) section of a search page.

Frankly, for the first few years I was online, the thought of doing my own SEO made my eyes cross, and I was overwhelmed at where to start. I even toyed with the idea of hiring a specialist to do this for me, but never got around to it. However, over time, I slowly began to see a pattern emerging, and started to optimize some of my sites accordingly. One of the best days of my business was when I recently ranked #1 for a particularly competitive search term.

I’m not a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist, nor do I play one on TV. However, even a new business owner who creates and updates her own websites can implement some very basic SEO strategies to make her website appear higher in the organic rankings on certain keyword searches.

Here are the 11 strategies that I regularly implement on my sites for better SEO positioning:

1. Page title tags: This is the page information that you see in the blue bar of your browser in the upper left-hand corner when you visit a website. For best SEO, use your top 2 keywords in your title tag. The best way to do that is separated with a bar, as illustrated in this example: Internet Marketing | Web Marketing.

2. Domain name: If at all possible, use one primary keyword in your domain name. You will have a slight edge over your competition by doing so. If you already have a domain that you have used for some time, include a keyword in the name of files for your website pages. Example: http://www.yoursite.com/internet-marketing.htm if your keyword is Internet marketing.

3. Meta tags: These are descriptions on a web page that are not seen by most visitors except when looking at the page source code in their browser. While the keyword and description metatags used to be the primary way that search engines indexed sites, that is no longer the case. However, you shouldn’t ignore them entirely, as it is still worthwhile to include them as a part of your page description. For optimal SEO, your meta description and keyword tags should be no more than 150 characters each.

4. Header tags: Header tags are the HTML code that indicate a headline, like H1, H2 and H3 and show up as bolded headlines in your page content. The first 3 header tags are the only ones you need to be concerned about, and the primary header tag, H1, is the most important. Use your primary keyword once in the H1 tag, 2-3 times in your H2 tags, and multiple times in your H3 tags.

5. Alt image tag: The alt tag typically describes an image in a floating text window when you put your mouse over the image if the image isn’t able to be displayed. The best use of any <ALT> tag is to use your keywords in your image descriptions.

6. Content formatting: Search engines pay attention to formatted content, as in when text is bolded, italicized, and underlined. Make sure that you are bolding your keywords in the content of your website.

7. Keyword density: Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears on a web page. Rather than trying to focus on the number of times a keyword appears in the content of your page, aim for a more natural density by keeping your keyword phrases in mind as you write the copy for your page. Optimally, keyword density should be between 2% - 7%. There are a number of keyword density checkers available online to assist you with determining the keyword density of a page.

8. Anchor text: Anchor text refer to links on a page that connect your visitor to other pages. So, rather than telling someone to “click here” in the content of your page, include a keyword in your anchor text, as in “click here for dog training tips.”

9. Inbound links: Reciprocal link exchange (you link to my site and I’ll link to yours) used to be a great way to attract the attention of search engines to your site. Now, search engines pay attention only to the quality and popularity of the site providing you with an inbound link that is not a reciprocal link. One of the best ways to get quality inbound links back to your site is to submít articles to high traffic article directoríes and submit press releases to paid press release services.

A second way to gain high quality inbound links is by listíng your site in search engine-friendly directoríes in which humans review the listings. Google and other search engines place more credibility in the directories in which the listings are reviewed by real people than they do other kinds of directories. Consequently, these links are weighted more heavily and favorably in the inbound link evaluation process.

10. New content: Content is still king, so one way to improve your page rank for a search term is to write high quality articles containing one or two of your keywords in the title and posting those regularly (weekly is best) to your site. Search engines are always seeking good, fresh, content, so your goal should be to make your site into an information-rich resource for your industry.

11. Site maps: There are sitemaps that help a visitor navigate a site, and sitemaps that are expressly designed for the search engines. The two are not the same. To enhance your site, submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer. I use XML Sitemaps to build search engine-friendly sitemaps on my sites.

Search engine optimization strategy is not as difficult as it appears. Take some time to do some keyword research for your site, and then spend another 15 minutes a day employing a few of these strategies until you have a well-optimized site. Why pay for visitors through pay-per-click advertising if you don’t have to?

About The Author
Online Business Manager and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketíng Toolkit, visit her site at www.OnlineBizU.com . Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at www.AskDonnaGunter.com .

Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. There, now that we’ve got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let’s move on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them. Being a beginners guide this won’t be an entirely complete líst but it will be enough to get you going on the right path. Understanding what you’re trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the “why” of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.

Why Are Links Important?

To put it simply: a link is a vote. Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site. So it must be about getting tons of links and you’re done right? Wrong. This is incorrect as …

Not All Votes Are Created Equal

Unlike your vote in an election, some votes are worth more than others and some votes are worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than yours (unless of course you’re a content writer for the Google.com domain in which case you obviously have the top vote). The basic factors that affect a link’s value to your website are:

The site strength – the strength of the site that is pointing to yours is a significant (and historically abused) factor in the valuation of links. In the absence of other easily-visible criteria let’s look at PageRank as a key valuation of a site’s strength. If a site with a PageRank 8 links to your site, this vote is worth significantly more than a link from a PageRank 3 site. This is because a PageRank 8 site is, in Google’s eyes, a more important site than the PageRank 3 site.

Relevance – the relevance of a site linking to you is, if anything, more important than a site’s strength. If you run a bed and breakfast in Utah, a link from a PageRank 3 bed and breakfast will be worth more than a link from a PageRank 5 web design site. This area is a bit grey in that it relies on the engine’s ability to determine what is relevant and what is not. However, we’ve seen evidence that this area is strong at this stage in the game and is only becoming more important over time.

Anchor text – the actual text used to link to your site is extremely important. I’ve seen extremely strong sites get beaten out by weak ones simply due to the poor use of anchor text. If you’re building links to your site, be sure to include your keywords in the text that links back and, if possible, the exact phrase you are trying to rank for. At the same time, you can’t make all your anchor text exactly the same – how can that possibly look natural?

Position – the position of a link on a page and the number of other links on that page impacts the value of a link. A link in the footer of a page is given less weight than a link near the top, a link in the content of a page is given more weight than a link in a list of links and a link on a page with 50 other links is given less weight than a link on a page with only a few other links. If we think about it – this makes sense. All of these things indicate whether the site with the outbound links actually intends for one of their visitors to click the link or not. From an engine’s perspective – the more it appears that a site wants a link to be clicked on, the higher the weight that link (or vote) is given.

Admittedly there are a number of other factors but this is a beginners guide. Following the considerations above will insure that as you make each link decision – your odds of making the right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore them. Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned, but it will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less valuable links and thus need to build far more than following the right methods.

So far we’ve covered briefly the why of link building, now let’s get into the real-life, here’s-how-to-do-it side of things. Below I’m going to cover three of my favorite link building tactics. These are tactics that apply to virtually every scenario. The number of ways to build links is only limited by your imagination, however, and this should not be viewed as a comprehensive líst. This is, after all, a beginners guide and I’m trying to list the tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.

Side Note: Reciprocal Link Building

I’m not going to count this as one of my favorites and so it won’t count as one of the three noted above and I’ll only touch on it briefly. There have been a number of assertions that reciprocal link building is dead. This is simply not the case. I have seen and competed against sites that were very successful with reciprocal links as their primary link source.

The problem with reciprocal links isn’t so much in their value which does seem to be a bit lower than non-reciprocal links however often more easily attained. No, my problem with reciprocal links is in the management. Unethical webmasters’ removing links after you’ve put the link up to them, sites expiring and not being renewed, sites getting penalties of their own due to their bad tactics are all inconveniences the reciprocal link manager must deal with.

As an SEO company, a huge issue we faced was leaving our clients with this task after a campaign was over if they decided not to go on a maintenance package. Non-reciprocal links may be a bit harder to attain in some cases, however, that issue is much easier to overcome than the sum of all these issues.

And now on to the top three …

Articles

If you’re paying attention as you read this, you’ll probably have guessed that I’m a fan of article writing as a link building method. If you look to the “about the author” section you’ll notice a link to the Beanstalk site (and if you don’t, well … let me know as somebody’s stealing it without permission). While I genuinely enjoy writing and sharing my experiences with others – the purpose of getting the article distributed is primarily as a link building tactic, secondarily as a great source of qualified traffic and thirdly for my own enjoyment.

You are an expert in your field. Who knows more about your business than you? So share. Writing an article may not be easy, but it is rewarding. If you can’t think of a topic, think of what you get asked. If you’re asked common questions repeatedly then chances are, it’s a good topic for an article. I often get asked about link building, and you’re reading the result.

Once the article is completed you need to get it syndicated. Using an article submission service such as Article Sender is a simple way to get your article out to a large number of publishers quickly. On top of this you’d do well to seek out specific sites in your field using one or all of the major search engines to find highly relevant sites that accept articles and submit to them.

And oh, don’t forget an “about the author” section.

Directory Submissions

Directory submissions are likely the most painful of the link building tactics you’ll employ. Why? Because it’s tedious and time-consuming work.

To be done right directory submissions must be done manually. The titles and descriptions must be tailored to the specifications of the directory in question and often, you’ll have to decide if a review fee is worth it.

While there are a good many directories that accept free submissions there are also a large number that require a review fee. The fee can range from a few dollars to a few hundred. If you see that a directory has a low PageRank, is general in it’s nature (i.e. it isn’t about your specific field) then it likely isn’t worth more than a couple dollars if that. If the site is strong, and strongly related to your site then it’s obviously worth more.

There is no hard-and-fast set of rules for how much a listíng is worth. I’d recommend to start your hunt for directoríes (don’t forget the topic and/or region specific ones), submit to all the free ones and make a líst of all the ones that require a fee. After you’ve gotten a solid number in your “need to be paid list” you can get a general idea as to what’s out there and what you can get and for how much. This will enable you to make solid choices knowing what all your options are.

Forum Posting

I just know I’m going to get a couple comments and/or emails for listing this as a link building tactic, but if it’s done right, there’s nothing wrong with it. Forum and blog posting got a bad reputation as a link building tactic when it came under huge abuse by unethical webmasters spamming forums with useless garbage just for a link. They even went so far (and still do) as sending out spiders to automatically submit posts. To this end, I have to agree that it’s a bad tactic, however …

If you’re seeking out forums related to your site, reading the threads and responding with solid advice or with questions and not just firing off some sales-pitch, then you’re doing what you’re supposed to be. Another perk to this is that, like articles, if you do this right, you’re gong to see traffic as well and what more can you ask from a link building tactic than traffic as well as links.

Conclusion

Above we’ve covered the basics of link building. As I’ve noted repeatedly, once you’re done reading this and applying some of what you’ve read, you’d do well to read other articles, forums and blogs. This isn’t a complete breakdown of everything link-related (that would be a full book) but it will keep you out of trouble and save you countless hours of wasted time getting poor links that haven’t held value since 2003.

About The Author
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc. . Beanstalk offers SEO services, consulting, training and link building services. Dave has been involved in SEO since 2001 and shared his experience through articles, speaking at conferences as well as on his weekly radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm.

When you think about the skills it takes to do link development your first thought probably isn’t “coding” is it? However, as we see more template-based sites and sites administered by people who don’t have much coding knowledge gain authority, you’ll potentially want to think about paying a bit of attention to at least basic HTML.

As you may have gathered, particularly if you’ve been link building and needed to approach a blog owner, not everyone has a site because he or she is adept with code. Now, you will find some blog owners who’ve chosen a blog package for various reasons, people who are quite fantastic coders but simply wanted to set something up quickly, have ease of maintenance, etc. What you will mostly find, at least according to my experience, is people whose knowledge of HTML isn’t all that fantastic, which isn’t at all surprising, considering the fact that these blog systems have been developed for ease of use, even for the least technical beginners. They are the great equalizer.

Here’s the issue with this sort of thing: blog owners can be your bread and butter, at times, depending upon your industry, and there are cases when you are going to be the only person on earth capable of explaining to this person about how to insert a link to your site. Sounds easy enough, right? It’s not, actually. I’ll start by detailing a conversation that one of my link builders had with a very, very sweet blog owner who obviously hadn’t a clue about how to do what we wanted.

A link builder made contact with this blog owner who has a truly spectacular blog, the kind of thing that, if it’s in any way motivated by anything other than the simple desire to write and spread ideas, is simply undetectable. This blog, on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being obviously done just to get rankings and/or traffic and 10 being done for the joy of blogging, would be a 10. Well, a conversation was started with my link builder, who happens to excel in the art of communication, and a deal was struck, with the link going live. Thus, the problem began…

The link was made live, as I said, but it was without a doubt the most obvious and horribly placed link that I have had the privilege to see. It stuck out like a flashing banner, only with less panache. We discussed how to handle this and another link developer actually went to the trouble of using Photoshop and a spray-painted arrow to indicate to this lovely blog owner EXACTLY where we wanted our link, so as not to appear too obviously “obtained” for a client. It didn’t hit home. The blog owner, not understanding HTML, couldn’t figure out how to do what we wanted.

And why would she be able to, anyway? This is a woman who has a blog because she enjoys writing about certain issues, not because she’s a coding genius. If blog software wasn’t so easy to use, she may never have started a blog. She isn’t alone in this regard, and it’s these types that can generate the best content out there.

Even on the sites that aren’t template-based, you can’t assume that you’re off the hook and that the site owner is code-savvy, of course. In the end, if you want the link and you want it placed in a certain spot, you need to be prepared to do things such as dig into the site’s CSS and HTML and figure out how to make it happen. Coding a link seems so simple, doesn’t it? However, let me assure you that there really are a thousand ways to mess it up. Even if you take the time to send over the code exactly as you’d like it, you can’t be sure that it will come out the way you want. As a link builder, you become the project manager of each link and it’s your job to ensure that it goes up and meets the requirements, whatever that takes.

Thus, my argument for knowing just a tiny bit about how to code…as you can see, it sometimes takes a bit more than simply telling or showing someone where you want a link. Some of your best sites are going to be run by people who will need you to hold their hand for the entire process, and if you really want the link, you’ll need to do it.

Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engine tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in determining their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportuníty to íncrease your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of a search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceives the use of hidden text - splat! - the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you - cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the líst.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

About The Author
Using one way links for your Web Promotíon gets results. WHY? Link popularity is one of the most important factors in search engine performance. Increasing the number of links to your Website will get your site lísted higher in search engine results, generating more Website Traffic, increasing your Google PR and improving your site’s overall strength. http://www.seolinkmart.com

Want to know the hottest search terms across the various search engines? Yahoo, Ask, and Google [Product Search] have listed the most popular items. Here’s what Yahoo has as its top 10 searches:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

And Ask.com’s most popular list, on the contrary, doesn’t seem that interesting (as some say):

1. Dictionary
2. MySpace
3. Google
4. YouTube
5. Facebook
6. Coupons
7. Cars
8. Craigslist
9. Online degrees
10. Credit score

Google’s most popular searches are not available (yet?), but Google’s most popular product searches are public:

1. nintendo wii
2. wii fit
3. ipod touch
4. xbox 360
5. nintendo ds
6. ipod nano
7. uggs
8. nikon d90
9. zune
10. digital picture frame

Surprised much? Some are.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

I love the fact that ninety five percent of Internet marketers are targeting Google like crazy because it leaves MSN wide open for me. And it really is crazy when you think about it. MSN gets about twenty to twenty five percent of the traffic Google does, and most of that is from credít card carrying adults who are ready to buy. Think about it this way; if you could be number one on Google one full week of every month, what would that be worth to you? That’s what MSN is worth, at the very least.

Why am I so hooked on MSN? It’s the simplest search engine to dominate rankings on. I use one amazingly simple formula and hit the top three spots nine out of ten times. Really!
Here’s the formula, step by step:
Step 1: Target just one keyword per Website (don’t worry it’s just a one page Website anyway.) And don’t even bother with long tail keywords. Go for the ones that are impossible on Google. This formula nails them on MSN.
Step 1a: If you want to see exactly how much traffic potential each keyword has on MSN you can use their keyword tool at https://adcenter.microsoft.com/Research/KeywordResearcher.aspx. Unfortunately you need to be an AdCenter member to access it. But on the plus side, it only costs five dollars to join up. Clicking the above link will redirect you to the signup page if you are not a member.
Step 1b: If you don’t want to bother you can just use Google’s free keyword tool at as a max estimate and do a little guesstimating as to what MSN’s searches for the same keyword might be. There is no hard and fast rule but I find that dividing Google’s search volume by a number between four and seven is usually close to MSN’s numbers.
Step 2: Register a new domain name that is as close as possible to your keyword. Use hyphens as much as you like. If your keyword is a single word there is a 99.9 percent chance it is taken as a domain name so add a hyphen between each letter or add a double hyphen between two words. Be original.
Step 2a: Do not bother with any domains that do not end in .com, .net, or .org. Those are the ones MSN likes best (the original big three TLD’s.)
 

Step 3: Build a one page Website as follows…
Step 3a: Put your title at the top of the page and use your keyword once. Don’t bother with H1 and H2 tags. Just bold, underline or italicize it.
Step 3b: Write 250 to 350 words, broken out into three or more paragraphs. Use your keyword once in each paragraph (no more than four uses on the page.)
Step 3c: Use at least two instances of your keyword as anchor text linking back to the same (home) page.
Step 3d: Use as many images as you like but make sure at least one third of your text is above the first image. And if you find 350 words is not enough to say all you want, make images of your offer text and post those on the page as well. Just keep the actual text (search engine readable) to 350 words or less and have no more than four mentions of your keyword.
Step 3e: Limit your outbound links to one that leaves the site. This should go to your main offer page, payment processor, etc. All other links should simply link back to the same page. By the way, if you need to post a privacy policy or disclaímer, create an image of it and post it as an image if possible to cut down on page text.
Step 4: Use your Title and Description META tags. MSN still likes them. Here’s how…
Step 4a: Make your title tag in two parts with a separator between. First is the keyword. Then place a separator like a pipe (above enter key) or colon. Then add a few words that complement the keyword. Try not to go over seven words in the title.
 

Step 4b: Make your description up to 250 characters long (or longer if you wish but anything beyond 250 will likely not count.) Use your keyword within the first five words of your description if possible and do not use it more than twice at most.
Step 5: Get links from other Web sites. This is important! GPR or Google PageRank does not matter at all and neither does the site theme matching yours. Just get plenty of links. Here’s how I did it before buying a software tool…
Step 5a: Submít your site to as many directories as possible. DMOZ.org and Yahoo.com are the largest.
Step 5b: Do relevant blog and user group postings with a link back to your site.
Step 5c: Write and submit articles. The resource box from a single article can bring in dozens or even hundreds of links. It’s easiest to use an article submission service like SubmitYourArticle.us or another with similar advanced distribution features.
Step 6: Consider investing in a software tool. I spent $167 for SE0elite.com and it does all I need and more. Of course, there are dozens of choices out there so shop around.
Well, that’s it. Go get ‘em!

About The Author
Scott Jason has been as SEO professional for nine years and is the founder of BestSEOcopywriting.com . He specializes in MSN and Yahoo search engine optimization.