Getting the Most Exposure Out of Your Articles

Using Blogs

Now a day, everyone is blogging, from grandmas to grandchildren. Since the popularity of the blog has gone up so rapidly, even businesses are using blogs. In some cases, it may be the owner blogging, but that is usually only in small businesses. Most major corporations hire someone to do the blogging for them.

There are a couple ways to use blogs successfully by helping your article marketing abilities along the way. The first way to publish your articles is through your own blog. Setting up your blog is a simple process. Most webhosting companies include blogs in the package or you can choose a hosted blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com. If you are looking for good search engine exposure with your blog, then you are probably going to find that WordPress.com is the best. The search engines pick these blogs up very well and you will get a lot of hits if you are blogging on popular subjects.

You will also want to make sure that your blog has syndication, or RSS abilities, and make sure to allow the readers of your blog to syndicate your articles. This is a very important part of using blogs in distributing articles.

After you get your blog set up with any of the categories you want it to have, begin pasting in the articles you send out. You will want to use pinging features so that blog directories are updated each time you add content to your blog. This will really help increase the traffic to your blog.

The second way to use blog is to visit other blogs within your niche. When you find a topic that you have written about, add a comment with a link to the articles listed on your blog, inviting the readers of the blog to check out the article.

In most cases, it would be considered rude to post your entire article on another blog. Make sure to link to the article instead of copy it on to someone else's blog. The article should also be really relevant to the topic at hand.

How To Get an Edge With Forums in Article Marketing

Forums can be very useful tools for anyone doing business, on the web or not. They benefit businesses in a plethora of ways. They are used to locate products that need to be created to fill a gap in the market, to inform people about available products, to learn or to teach, to find topics to write about in articles, and even distribution of written articles.

Most forum owners will invite members of the forum to submit articles and they provide and there is a space saved in the forum for this very thing. You should take full advantage of this.

The first thing you need to do before submitting articles to a forum is read the guidelines and follow all of the rules. If you just start posting articles wherever you see fit, you will be banned from the forum. This will make you look unprofessional and desperate. That is the last thing you want when you are trying to promote your business. You want to seem respectable and professional, not like a loser who can't read directions. In Internet marketing, image is everything and you would hate to ruin yours by not reading directions.

Being active in a forum is a great idea. You will be able to submit your articles regularly but remember, do not post inappropriate things during your participation. Most quality forums do not allow advertising and others won't let you use affiliate links in your ports. Doing either one of these two things will get you banned from the site. Most of forums will allow you to use signature file at the end of your post but again, read the regulations of the site thoroughly to insure that you do not break any rules. Some forums will also have special 'rooms' just for advertising and it is a good idea to use these to market your site or your informational products.

As stated above, forums can also be used to look up topics for articles within a certain subject. People usually do not want to read what you are writing about unless you are writing about something that they really need to know. There are only two ways to figure out what a person is looking for.

1. Ask them. Maybe you could conduct a survey

2. Listen to them. You could read what kind of things they are saying.

Forums are the place to find out what people within your niche need to know or what they are talking about. This can give you some ideas for new products or material for your articles.

You can find Forums on the Internet, of course, on pretty much every topic you could think of. Use your favorite search engine and include the word 'forum' with the topic you are looking up. It will simply amaze you how many of these forums actually exist and how many subjects they cover.

SEO Tips for Digg

In case you haven't been on the Internet for the past year or so, there has been a tremendous amount of attention being captured by socially-powered sites such as digg.

So, what does this have to with the world of Search Engine Marketing?

There is something called the Digg effect, which essentially brings a ton of traffic to your site in a small amount of time. (Usually within minutes of a posting).

While digg readers despise seo-planted stories, if you do have something topical or free to use or even something that's just "cool", you won't feel the wrath of the digg community, and end up with your post getting buried.

So how can you leverage this site?

One of the key elements of getting a story on the home page is to have either a ton of people who have "dugg" your posting, or if you happen to know some of the top users on digg to vote for your story, you'll have no time reaching the front.

For the rest of us, we need to work harder. While there are sites that sell services to "digg" stories for you, at some point in time, digg will wise up and stop that.

There is another site that allows you to alert any of your friends when you have posted on digg, called Digg Alerts.

But despite all the "gaming" that goes on, at the end of the day, you need to have a compelling story to have the readers interact with what you're saying.

As for the SEO coding and copy writing element of digg, you need to have a great title and summary to get any reader to even bother checking out your site. Another course of action you need to take is to review all of digg's categories - if your story would not fit on the site, don't waste your time.

The expectation set forth when using digg in as part of your marketing strategy should be to create buzz, build brand name and drive traffic to your site. To expect digg users to click on your Adsense ads is non-sensical - digg readers are tech-savvy and can smell that technique a mile away. Be patient, post often and become part of the digg community by also submitting great stories you find - often times it will already be posted, but every once in a while you can beat them to the punch, and you gain a little bit of credibility on the site.

Google TrustRank

There has been an ever increasing awareness to the value of Google's "TrustRank" algorithm. While there are many factors that are "Off-page", there are a number of simple actions you can take to make sure your site earns the trust from Google by employing these easy techniques.

The best way to think about Trustrank is to compare it to if you were to purchase a product or service in the real world. There are many built-in factors that we use to pre-qualify a business to see if we are willing to part with our cash for their goods or services. This is the same approach Google takes in order to measure the quality of a site, and doing this will get you out of the so-called "Sandbox" much faster than the typical 4-6 months.

While in no particular order, some are most costly than others, but all are worth doing.

• Register your domain for 10 years. If you can't afford the $70 it costs at GoDaddy then are you really serious about your site?

• Buy a SSL certificate - this tells Google that you are a legit business since they know you have to have a verified checking account to get a SSL cert. (And buy it for as many years as you can at a time, at the very least for 2 years)

• Have a privacy policy that tells in exact detail what happens to the information about the visitor that is collected from the site.

• List a mailing address (no P.O. Boxes) - Just as in real life, you feel better purchasing a service or product from a place that has a physical location.

• List your contact information - telephone, fax (if needed), email & name.

• If you have a bigger budget, use any of the "Hacker Safe" services and place those icons on your site. Again, this tells Google that you are seriously committed to protecting your visitor's experience on the site.

Those are simple techniques that you can directly apply to your site, and are signals to Google that you take your online presence seriously.

As far as the "Off-page" factors, it's really about linking to quality sites that are relevant and sometimes considered "authority sites" by Google. Also, getting links from those trusted sites will help re-enforce the quality of your site in the eyes of the Google spiders.

How Google Indexes Your Site

First off, let's describe what we are talking about. A "bot" is a piece of software from a search engine that is built to go through every page of your site, categorize it, and place it into a database.

Google has three well known bots: The Adsense bot, the Freshbot and the DeepCrawl.

The Adsense bot, as you could probably guess, is used for publishers who have Adsense on their sites. As soon as a new page is created, the JavaScript within the Adsense code sends a message to the Adsense bot, and it will come within 15 minutes to index the page so that it can serve up the most relevant ads.

But, for this conversation we are only concerned about the DeepCrawl and the Freshbot.

The Freshbot crawls the most popular pages on your website. It doesn't matter if that is one page or thousands. Sites like Amazon.com and CNN.com have pages that are crawled every ten minutes, since Google has learned that those pages have that amount of frequent changes. A typical site should expect to have a freshbot visit every 1 to 14 days, depending on how popular those pages are.

What happens to your site on a Freshbot visit is that it finds all of the deeper links in your site. It places those links into a database so that when the DeepCrawl occurs, it has a reference.

Once a month, the DeepCrawl bot visits your site and goes over all the links found by the Freshbot. This is the reason why it can take up to a month for your entire site to be indexed in Google - even with the addition of a Google Sitemap.

So, be patient and keep on adding content to your site, and work on getting valuable in-bound links to your site - Google will reward you for it.

SEO Tips For Blogs

While there are many reasons to blog, there are two primary uses that are becoming more widespread with blogging: To game Google Adsense, and to also game the search engines for better rankings.

Since Blogs are known to the search engines as daily snippets of information that are updated on a frequent basis, they get a lot of preference in the search results.

So from this, how do you optimize your blog?

Depending on the service you utilize, there are still some basics that you can apply. The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger. If you are looking for an advantage with SEO, you should use Blogger since they are owned by Google, and you'll be indexed quicker.

Blogs aren't all that much different than a site. The power of a blog is from the frequency of the posting. If the search engines see a pattern of 3 postings per day, they will be very active on spidering that site. Depending on the topic of the blog, you may be able to boost your blog in the rankings if it's related to a hot topic on the Internet.

Now, to the actual optimization.

Since blogs are typically a few pages long, you only need to establish a few rules that will be applied sitewide:

• Use an interesting title - Also known as linkbaiting - your title should captivate the user to read more

• Try to use your blog keywords in the title - while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant

• Use the H1 tags - All blog editors allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags

• Link to other blogs - Find other related blogs that your readers might find interesting, and ask for a link in return

• Don't forget about your archives - You may post a topic that isn't hot at the moment, but comes up later - make sure your readers can find that posting

As stated above, the key to a successful blog is frequent postings. You don't need to write up an article everytime, two paragraphs and maybe some resource links is what a typical posting should be comprised of.

How to Get Your Site a Top Ranking in Google

It's the new American dream. Your website appears in a top spot on Google for your chosen keyword. Next thing you know, orders start coming in faster than you can handle, and you are rolling in the money. If only it were so easy, right?

Well,

It can be done. I've done it many times in many different industries. There is no secret, but rather, it's just knowing what to do. I've made just about every mistake one can make with a website, but I learned from every setback. If you were only allowed to do one thing to get ranked for your site in Google, without a doubt, all you'd need to do is get links for your site.

Yes, there are many other factors involved in getting your site to a top position. But this is the most powerful way as of this writing to get a top spot in Google. It's not just enough to have links pointing to your site, but you need to have your keyword "anchor linked" to your site. Anchor linking is when you use your keyword phrase as the click-able text for a link. So, instead of saying "Click Here", you would use "Widgets" as the link text.

Now, another point of consideration is determining what keyword/phrase you want to use to get your site found. Most times, people impulsively choose a one word phrase. While this would be a great way to bring traffic to your site, would it bring targeted traffic, with people looking specifically for your product or service? Most times when people type in a one letter keyphrase, they are in the beginning of their search.

They may type in "Shoes", but are really looking for "Running Shoes". So, if you have a top ranking for shoes, do you serve that user's needs? Maybe, but they may also be looking for dress, casual, Women's, Men's, Children's, athletic, girl's, boy's, etc. This is why when you begin to optimize your site, you should focus on more targeted keyword phrases.

Suppose you sell a certain brand name of dress shoes. For this example, we'll call the famous brand XYZ. So, by getting anchor links as "XYZ Dress Shoes", you are already eliminating those users who are looking for another brand or line of shoe. Next, you need to make sure that the page that gets linked contains the on the page content with "XYZ Dress Shoes". If you would link to a page without relevant content, Google would view this link as possible spam, or more appropriately, irrelevant content.

Now, once you have compiled your list of keywords, you need to see which one are searched on the most. The best tool for this is WordTracker, and it is worth the tiny fee you need to pay to have access for one day. There are also free tools online that you can use, but WordTracker will give you the most accurate results.

Once you have run through your list of all your keywords, the obvious choice is to pick the ones with the highest amount of searches (and content relevant to your site!). The next step is to then begin the process of a link campaign. Now, I can already hear you complaining about doing a link exchange. This is only 1/3 of your campaign. The ideal method is to not only engage in a reciprocal link exchange, but to also engage in strategic linking.

Strategic linking is when you get a link to your site without having to return the favor. What's the best way to do this? Write an article just like this one. If I get one website to use this article and have it point to my site, I've just created another link to my site. Pretty easy, eh?

Since you have now engaged in a linking campaign, you should expect to see results in Google in as little as 4 days, and as far as 6 months. All of this is determined by where your links are coming from, and the popularity of the site from which the link came. Next, you need to get as many links as you can pointing to your site with your popular keyword phrase anchor linked to your site.

As I mentioned before, there many other factors that will only enhance your rankings in Google, but the implementation of a link campaign is the strongest method to get your site to a top ranking!

Why You Need Outbound Links

Just in case you've forgotten, an outbound link is a url that you have on your site that points to another website.

In today's Google PR obsessed Internet world, everyone is completely focusing on getting in bound links to your site. While you should always be on a mission to get more sites to link to yours, you must not forget their polar opposites.

Remember, by having outbound links from your site, you are in essence "voting" for the site you link to. This is part of the entire ranking algorithm process for all the search engines. The idea is, that if two sites are similar in content and design, a site with more links pointing to it would be considered more important by the search engine.

So then, why should you help out any other site? Actually, by carefully linking to other relevant sites, you are increasing the relevancy of your own site.

Pretend I have a pizza shop, and I am located in Anywhere, USA. It's a typical site that displays types of pizza, store location, hours, and coupons. I also know the power of outbound linking. For this case, I am going to link to 10 sites: Domino's, Pizza Hut, Little Ceaser’s & Papa Johns. Next, I link to 6 sites that are physically located in Anywhere, USA. (And their physical addresses are listed on their sites.)

Now, I will switch roles and view the site as a search engine spider. I navigate through the site, and determine that this site is about pizza. Then I find a resource page and discover some well-known links (Domino's, Pizza Hut, Little Ceaser’s & Papa Johns - and as the spider I know that these are major players in the realm of pizza). Next, I find 6 links to sites located in Anywhere, USA.

So, as a happy spider leaving the site, I now know that the site I just visited is about pizza (site content and links to the major players of the pizza industry), and that it is located in Anywhere, USA.

Next, I visit one of the 6 sites listed as a resource in Anywhere, USA. I find the local address, and it has the same zip code as the pizza site I was just at. Now I know how these two sites are related to each other.

Taking into account the fact that this local pizza shop has also linked to the major pizza chains, as the spider, I am lead to believe that this shop has relevancy to the zip code of Anywhere, USA.

So, as the spider returns the information to the database to be processed in the algorithm, it has pre-sorted some search results based on the links your site points to.

Another benefit of outbound linking is Geo Targeting, or Local search. There is a lot of speculation that local search is the next big trend in Search Marketing. While only time will tell, it won't hurt to have your physical address listed on your website for those who will be embracing local search.

As an experiment, I created a site with a very unique url (to avoid the possibility of people finding it by accident), and I made it only 1 page long. The only thing the page consisted of were 80+ outbound links to relevant sites in the SEO industry, tools, forums and some tutorials. When the PageRank was first updated for the site, it came out of the box with a PR of 3. It has since fallen to a PR of 2 (now that I’ve pointed a few sites to it!).

The whole point of this experiment was to see how outbound links affect your own rankings of your site. I was able to generate a PR of 2 based entirely on linking to authority sites in the SEO industry. So, take the time to link to some relevant sites, the big names (if any), and enjoy the power of the easy, outbound link.

How to Write a Better Web Page Title

Titles are everywhere. Some people are defined by titles, some people loathe titles, and others like giving titles. Why do we do this? With so much information getting processed by our minds everyday, we need a way to categorize these groups of associated content in a quick referencing way.

This is the same methodology a search engine applies when it crawls a page. When you title a page, you are telling a search engine or user what the page is supposed to be about. We've all seen the one sentence summaries of television shows on the T.V. Guide. It allows for quick referencing and decision making by telling us what the show is going to be about.

This is part of the reason why naming your page titles is so critical to getting your site ranked. I can't tell you how many times I have seen a site that had one of the following two titles throughout the entire site: "untitled" or "company name".

While having the company name on all the pages could be a potential branding strategy, chances are, most visitors to your site don't know your brand name yet and are looking for the product or service that you're selling. You could incorporate the company name into the title, but it should be placed after the main message you want to convey about that particular page.

Every page should have a unique title. While you may have a subject that needs to be explained over a few pages, you should use the page title as an index of information for the reader. Sites that sell multiple products should have a unique title for every product. If you can't make the time to make each page stand out, why would you expect that page to ever appear in a search engine?

If possible, you should try to place your keywords in the title, since this will help the search engine determine where your page should be ranked. Remember, the search engines rank each page individually, that's why it's so important to use proper naming methods.

When you determine which keywords to use, go for a 4 to 6 word title when possible. After 58 characters, the title in the search engine results page will be truncated and will not be visible to the reader. Also, the longer the title, the less weight is given to each word.

The entire time you are conjuring up titles, always keep the reader in mind first. While some phrases may rank well in the search engines, a reader may never enter that phrase and you'll lose that targeted traffic you were trying to reach. Sometimes the phrases work out well for both the user and search engine, and in those cases success is usually quick to follow.

43 Creative Link Building Tactics

Link building is an important signal for people and for search engines that the content being linked to has value. There are hundreds of reasons and ways for interlinking web content with the most common being a blue, underlined hypertext link from one web page to another. Since the links to company web site content are important both for driving traffic as well as a signal to search engines that can increase rankings and drive even more traffic, it’s important to acquire links on an ongoing basis.

If you’re grappling with ways to building links, here is a list of link building tactics to consider:

• Build and host useful tools

• Offer testimonials on complimentary services

• Widgets (and submit them to directories)

• Awards (badge)

• Contest (badge)

• Cross link web sites that you own

• Write reviews

• Promote content on social news sites

• Article Distribution

• Submit Blog & RSS Feed to Directories

• Directory Submissions

• Ads on search friendly sites

• Sponsor newsletters archived to the web

• Job listings

• Forum Signatures

• Classified Ads

• Publish comprehensive resource lists

• Post an ebook or substantial whitepaper

• Exchange links with marketing and business partners, clients

• Post surveys

• Write guest posts on others blogs

• Contributed articles to online publications

• Optimize press releases

• Comment on industry blogs

• Sponsor events

• Social bookmark your worthy content

• Speak at events and offer your PPT deck with links embedded

• Donate where a link of donors is published

• Interview industry pundits

• Transcribe video interviews to text as separate posts

• Apply for industry awards, web site & blog awards

• Ensure industry groups you’re involved with link to you

• Create a wiki and ask others to contribute

• Create microsites for causes, events, specific purposes

• Leverage your affiliate program

• Be a resource on Q/A web sites like Yahoo Answers (indirect)

• Slideshare and similar content hosting

• Monitor 404 stats and ask link sources to fix links

• Solicit links directly from sources

• Provide “link to us” content on blog and/or web site

• Leverage publicity and media relations for links

• Digital asset submissions: images, audio, video

• Social profile optimization

As long as a web site expects to attract visitors via search engines, there needs to be an intentional effort towards link acquisition on an ongoing basis. “Build it and they will come” simply doesn’t cut it when it comes to web site marketing.

TopRank Online Marketing is a specialist with link building and the process of content promotion is a large part of what SEO clients receive with our consulting services. However, if clients and TopRank SEO consultants are working together to build links in concert, the effect can be compounded and have an even greater impact on search marketing performance.

5 Basic Tips for Video Optimization

If you’re attempting to improve search rankings for your web pages, these days it’s no longer an option not to optimize digital assets. With search engines incorporating video, images and news into standard search results, marketers have the opportunity to achieve increased visibility by implementing video SEO principles.

These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos.

1. Optimize with keywords.
Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in:

• File name

• Title

• Tags

• URL

• Link text

Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You’ll improve the user experience and your search rankings.

2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites.
In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links. Remember these few points to maximize results:

• Don’t forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords

• YouTube channel pages — and those of other video-sharing sites — should be optimized, as well

• Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites

3. Implement a linking strategy.
Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include:

• Cross-linking to other videos

• Linking to videos from relevant web pages

• Linking to videos in blog posts

• Tweeting the video

• Linking to videos from social media pages

• Bookmarking the video

4. Encourage viewers to share your videos.
First thing is first — if you want users to share your videos, you must create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting, relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren’t likely to share it, let alone view it. From there:

• Allow and encourage users to comment on the video

• Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace

• Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed

5. Re-purpose your videos.
As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web:

• Embed videos in blog posts

• Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones

• Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages

• Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites

• Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your website

5 SEO Tips for Online Retailers

Online retail websites face a unique set of obstacles when it comes to improving sales through better search engine visibility. Repetitive product descriptions, a lack of content and frequent churn of products can all be hurdles to overcome. But with these specific tips for retail search engine optimization, online retailers can turn those challenges into opportunities and maximize their organic search traffic.

1. Add fresh content to the website. Many online retail websites focus on selling products rather than informing and providing value to customers, and hence severely lack content. It’s a good idea to include pages on a retail site that are purely content-based. Not only will informative, optimized content improve search rankings, it can help retailers sell more products by engaging customers.

Try these ideas for adding fresh content to an online retail site:

• Add customer success stories and case studies to the website.
• Create a blog to provide relevant industry news, tips and product offerings.
• Incorporate a resource section on the site with relevant white papers and other content.

2. Eliminate repetitive copy. Another issue online retailers face is that many of their products are significantly similar, with only slight variations. As such, product descriptions tend to use very similar copy. And if other retailers sell the same products, their descriptions are likely similar as well.

Avoid being penalized by the search engines for duplicate content by writing product descriptions that are as unique as possible. Highlight the most distinguishing characteristics of products to avoid duplicate copy. Lastly, ensure keyword phrases aren’t repeated too many times throughout descriptions. It’s an easy mistake considering target keywords are likely found in the name or description of most, if not every, product.

Not only will this technique contribute to improved search rankings, but user experience will be enhanced as well.

3. Draw traffic to static pages. For many online retailers, products are frequently added and removed from their website, some as often as every month or every week. Adding fresh content to a site provides SEO benefits, but removing it can quickly negate any advantages, as it takes time for search engines to index content.

To maneuver around this roadblock, draw traffic to more static pages, rather than revolving pages. For example, instead of focusing SEO on individual product pages, focus on product category pages.

4. Don’t forget to optimize PDF product catalogs. For many retailers, it’s a common practice to offer a product catalog in PDF format on their website. When devoting time to optimizing HTML pages on a website, it’s essential not to forget about the catalog or any other PDF files.

Remember these key points when optimizing PDF files:

• Create text-based PDFs, rather than designing them in an image-based program, so that the search engines have text to read.
• Optimize as you would an HTML page, incorporating keywords in headlines, copy and meta descriptions, and including anchor text hyperlinks.
• Post a smaller sized PDF to avoid search engines – and customers – deserting the PDF before accessing its content.
• Remember to complete the document properties, particularly the title.

5. Optimize images for search engines. SEO doesn’t end with HTML pages and PDF files. Online retailers’ sites are full of images. Why not leverage those images to gain better search rankings? Including alt text and optimized captions can all contribute to improved rankings in the search engines. Plus, images found via the search engines have the potential to be shared and linked to across the web, also contributing to improved rankings.

Have you implemented creative SEO tips for ecommerce and online retail web sites? What tips would you add to this list?

SEO for Flash: 5 Tips and Best Practices

One of the most common issues for web sites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Web sites made entirely with Flash are problematic because there are often no links for search engine crawlers to follow or HTML text to copy.

According to the Opera (browser) developer center, somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files representing a lot of content that may not be included in search results or only partially indexed. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.

In the summer of 2008, Google announced it had improved the indexing of Adobe Flash files. Many Flash developers and SEOs across the globe could breathe an optimistic sigh of relief: Text in Flash files was now crawlable.

But what’s the whole story? Can a site be built entirely with Flash and expect to gain the same search benefits as an HTML site?

Consider these 5 points that Google makes in regards to SEO for Flash:

1. Google can crawl and index all of the text content users see as they interact with the Flash file. That’s a big step in the right direction, since ensuring a site is crawlable is the No. 1 SEO basic. A few points to keep in mind concerning SEO for Flash:

• Google maintains that the text in Flash files is treated like text in HTML or PDF files.

• If identical content is used in both Flash and HTML, Google will likely see it as duplicate content.

• If a Flash file is embedded in HTML, you’ll be able to add meta information, but the content will be indexed as a single item.

The below image illustrates how a Flash site was previously seen in search results (without meta description text) and how it is currently seen (with descriptive text):

2. Google can discover links within Flash files. In other words, if a Flash file includes links to your website pages, you can increase your odds of Google finding and crawling more of the site – just as is the case with links that appear in HTML and other files.

3. Google can index external content that a Flash file loads and associate it with that Flash file. This capability is an update from the summer 2008 revision. Previously, if a Flash file were to load an HTML or XML file, Google would not associate that external content with the Flash file. This new capability, introduced just this summer, allows external content to appear in search results.

The image below shows the results to the query “2002 VW Tansporter 888.” Before the introduction of the new Flash search capability, this result did not appear because the content is contained in an XML file loaded by a Flash file:

4. Google supports common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash. Another update from the 2008 revision, this capability also applies to SWFObject and SWFObject 2. Previously, if a page loaded a Flash file using JavaScript, Google wouldn’t recognize or index it.

5. Google can index sites scripted with ActionScript. That includes AS1, AS2 and AS3 versions. Google also maintains that is does not decompile Flash files or expose ActionScript code if it’s not visible to users.

All that said, Google’s ability to crawl Flash files is still evolving, so building a site entirely in Flash isn’t best practice. To create the right balance when it comes to using Flash and implementing SEO for Flash, consider these tips:

• Don’t use Flash as the navigation.

• Embed Flash files into HTML pages.

• Use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions.

• Don’t include an entire site in one Flash file. Instead, break the content into multiple Flash files with different HTML pages.

• Use Flash for design elements and less-important content, and use HTML for the most important page elements.

• Enhance web fonts in Flash files by using slfr, per a suggestion by SEO Zombie Blogger Justin Briggs. Because the Flash styles enhance the HTML content rather than replace it, the engines can still read titles.

For Flash optimization from the source, be sure to check out the Adobe SEO Technology Center web site, which was set up specifically to provide webmasters with what the challenges are and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.

While Flash, Ajax and JavaScript offer enticing user experience, they continue to offer a less than ideal experience for search engine crawlers. What tactics or best practices have you found in balancing rich media and SEO? Do you think it’s reasonable to for a web site to have an amazing Flash component and still be able to compete in aggressive search categories?

5 Must-Read Tips for B2B Search Marketing

Search marketing should be a top priority for organizations in any industry. But B2B search marketing efforts take a slightly different form than the tactics used in consumer focused SEO and PPC programs . Typically, B2B markets are smaller, products and services are more complex, and sales cycles are longer. Therefore, B2B marketers must think a bit differently in terms of target keywords, online content and link building.

TopRank has worked with many companies using search marketing to reach Business to Business audiences over the past 8 years and we’d like to share these 5 B2B search marketing tips that can help companies maximize their results:

1. For B2B companies, getting found is just the beginning. While B2C companies can reasonably expect to generate a purchase from a single site visit, the sales cycle for B2B companies is much longer. Once a prospect finds the B2B website via search, the real work begins to convert the prospect to a sale. Understanding the B2B searcher and their position within the sales cycle (Evaluation, Consideration, Purchase) is essential for creating appropriate optimized content to meet their needs.

Additionally, web sites focusing on reaching B2B audiences, must focus an equal amount of effort on gaining relevant search engine rankings and the stickiness of their site. Visitors looking for B2B solutions can be convinced to stay on a site longer by:

• Providing the information prospects need to assess the company and its offerings
• Relying on analytics and user experience metrics to measure stickiness factors, such as time spent on specific pages, clickthrough rates on calls to action and length of visits
• Ongoing heatmap analysis to ensuring that the appropriate links are included on the home page to lead prospects to the most important content

2. Content is key for B2B websites. For B2C websites, the majority of content focuses purely on product information. Because sales conversions for B2B organizations are based more on building relationships, content must position that organization as an industry thought leader and a trusted resource. Including video demos, case studies and newsletters on a site can help B2B organizations build relationships with their audience.

For one client in the B2B marketing industry, TopRank devised a blog strategy incorporating industry thought leader interviews. Insight was gathered from notable figures and shaped into keyword-optimized blog posts for a special interview series. This tactic contributed to a nearly 50% increase in organic traffic to the blog. More importantly, referrals from the blog to the corporate site increased by more than 140%.

3. B2B target keyword glossaries must be more robust. Clearly, targeting the proper keywords is essential to any search marketing campaign. But for B2B organizations, keywords need to cover a longer buying cycle, and therefore must often be more diverse than B2C target keywords. Prospects at the beginning of a sales cycle might use certain terms to search for information that differs from terms used by those ready to purchase. That variety of keywords must be supported by relevant content and link building as well.

For one B2B client, TopRank® Online Marketing devised a robust keyword strategy that considered audiences at multiple touch points to achieve significant results. The realization was made that prospects who are ready to buy typically use solution-based terms – either general or exact product names – in their searches. On the other hand, prospects at the beginning of the sales cycle use issue- or problem-based terms in their searches. The target keyword glossary, therefore, included both specific product terms and issue-based terms. This helped increase keyword referrals by more than 60%.

4. B2B organizations must think outside the box when it comes to link-building. Because B2B markets are typically smaller than B2C markets, there may be fewer websites capable of linking to B2B sites. Consider the amount of fashion-related blogs compared to food processing technology blogs. To increase the number of inbound links to their sites, B2B organizations must get a little creative:

• B2B organizations can approach their supplier networks for inbound links to their site.
• B2B organizations with a small target audience can create link bait focused on a different but related market.
• For very specific niches, a B2B blog audience can be widened by blogging about more general company-related issues.

5. B2B search marketing efforts have to speak to multiple entities within a business. Unlike B2C purchases, B2B purchases involve different stakeholders within a company. Each stakeholder comes to the site with a different set of expectations.

For example, a B2B site that sells recruitment software might be visited by a company’s HR manager to gauge the effectiveness of the software. A member of the company’s finance department might visit the site to assess the value of the product. In still another scenario, a member of the company’s IT department might visit the site to learn how the software can be integrated into the overall system.

B2B search marketing efforts must identify:

1.Who in the business is buying products/services on the website
2.The level of understanding stakeholders have about products/services
3.The jargon different stakeholders use to find products/services
4.The benefits that their business needs to receive from products/services

As you can see, there are some important considerations for B2B search marketing vs consumer focused audiences. The key is to understand the unique needs of the target audience, how they search, evaluate solutions, consume information and ultimately, how search affects decision making, both directly and indirectly.

What tips do you have for B2B organizations to add to this list?

Common B2B SEO Mistakes and How to Solve Them

Working with a variety of companies large and small, local and international, B2B and B2C, on SEO projects over the past 12 years has revealed a variety of common obstacles to success. For many reasons, B2B marketers often lag behind B2C in terms of tactics and adoption of new marketing technologies. The customer acquisition and buying cycle are very different for business to business than consumer oriented products and services.

Since SEO presents the biggest opportunity to generate a high quantity and quality of B2B leads, more B2B marketers are speeding up their ability to test innovative search engine optimization programs. Unfortunately, there are a mix of common mistakes that persist. Here are 5 common mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Using Keywords More Important to You Than Your Customers

It’s pretty common for some B2B web sites, especially those in the technology space, to over emphasize nomenclature, specifications and in some cases, cleverly named products or categories as attempts to stand out.

These product and service references are accurate to someone, but often not the buyer. In many B2B SEO programs, one of the most frequent exercises is developing insight into what customers actually think about an industry or a company’s products and services. What a customer might type into a search box on Google, Yahoo or Bing may very well be different than the language the company uses in it’s own marketing and advertising content.

Here are a few tips on researching the keywords your customers use to find your products/service:

• Brainstorm based on solutions & customer needs

• Identify what concepts are most relevant according to where the customer is in the buying cycle

• Conduct interviews or survey customers

• Review current web analytics for referring search traffic

• Poll sales & customer service staff for phrases used by customers

• Leverage social media monitoring tools for tags and phrases

• Review competitor web site content

Once you’ve created a glossary of key terms, you can organize them by category of the site and add metrics for Popularity, Competition and Relevance to guide in their use for optimizing existing pages and creation of future pages. A Standard Keyword Glossary can be created based on input to tools like Word tracker or Keyword Discovery. A Social Keyword Glossary can be created using social media monitoring tools that aggregate keyword clusters. Looking at both types of glossaries allows SEOs to find Cross-Over Phrases for social media optimization as well as standard SEO.

2. Content is Not Reachable by Search Bots

We’ve learned from persona experience and heard from people like Venessa Fox, creator of Google’s Webmaster Tools, that one of the most common issues with web sites performing poorly in search results has to do with barriers to getting crawled by search engines. Crawling of course, means the process of discovering links and content and then copying that content. If a search engine cannot follow links to your web pages or follow the links between web pages of your site, then it will be difficult for crawlers to find your content. No content means no presence in the search results.

Many B2B web sites are created with technological and design prowess that offer a good user experience and even better tools to manage content. But they often ignore the need for search engines to interact with content. We’ve run into situations where title tags are hard coded exactly the same for all pages of a site, or Ajax or Flash are used to create navigation elements within product categories that are seen as one web page vs 5 or 6. Multiply those missing 5 pages across hundreds of products and that’s a very large portion of content not being able to attract new customers.

Here are a few ways to avoid crawling issues:

• Avoid unnecessarily complex URLs & using session ids

• Do not publish multiple URLs to duplicate content

• Rather than use temporary redirects (302 or JavaScript) use a 301 redirect to point old pages to new pages

• Understand that if you site navigation relies on Ajax, Flash or JavaScript, you’ll want to provide an alternative text link navigation method.

Use Google’s Webmaster Tools or even those offered by Bing to see how their respective bots are interacting with your site. If there are crawling errors, they will be reported along with broken links and a variety of other useful feedback that you can use as a basis for implementing fixes.

3. Lack of New Content

If you read Online Marketing Blog with any frequency (and we hope you do) then you’ll know how we feel about content for marketing B2B companies. A longer buying cycle for most B2B products and services requires more content to educate customers, help them evaluate their options, consider choices and ultimately, make purchasing decisions. Many B2B SEO efforts focus on optimizing existing content without a content marketing strategy that defines and editorial calendar for producing new content. Blogs have been our tool of choice for managing and promoting B2B marketing content to attract customers via search, links and mentions within social media and networking sites.

Along with the creation of new content is the issue of site architecture. Managing content along with the interlinking of keywords to pages helps search engines find pages and infer meaning. Fresh, themed content along with a logical site structure using categories, sub-categories and appropriate links between them can make a tremendous impact on search engine driven customers to a B2B web site.

Each new web page, or digital asset for that matter, that is optimized, published and included in a search engine’s index can serve as a potential entry point for prospects, customers and even journalists and potential employees. Many companies in the business to business category publish large numbers of documents in PDF format. Those can be optimized with keywords and links just like any other document. The same goes for whitepapers, archived newsletters, press releases, past webinars, case studies and content used to describe online demos.

However, do not create and publish content just for the sake of adding more “hooks in the water”. Pages and media should have a purpose and should be mapped out in the keyword glossary and managed with a content editorial guide. Search performance is greatest when you optimize content for customers first, search engines second.

4. Keywords Missing in Content and Text Links

Content alone does not solve SEO challenges, since customers search using keyword phrases. The keyword research conducted in the first recommendation should be used to “optimize” web page content and any other file formats (PDF, DOC, PPT) or media (images, video, audio) that can be found in a search engine. A general guide is to optimize for 1-2 phrases per web page, document or digital asset.

Here are some basic on-page content optimization tips to guide the usage of keywords:

• Title tags

• Headings

• Paragraph titles

• Keywords in body copy

• Anchor text in links

• Image alt text

Ideally, the content management system would be modified to prompt users to use keywords in these areas when new pages are being created. Dynamic keyword insertion tactics can also be used to help automate keyword placement in Title tags and the alt text of images, for example.

We’ve worked with many B2B web sites that have great content, but are missing keywords where customers and search engines need them – especially in links between pages. Adding keywords to the link tells both web site visitors and search engines the topic of the page being linked to.

As far as links go, one of the most often missed opportunities is to encourage keywords in links from other web sites to B2B content. Many marketers complain that they don’t know where to get incoming links for B2B pages outside of paid directories, link swaps and social news/bookmarking/profile sites. Basic backlink analysis on sites with active PR, Advertising and Marketing programs will frequently reveal anchor text of incoming links to be the company name.

The core strategy that we follow whether the site is focused on B2C or B2B customers is to create, package and promote content that’s worth linking to. However, no one will know to link to great content unless you promote it. One of the most effective ways to do that is by developing social distribution channels.

Here are a Few Examples:

• RSS

• Twitter

• Facebook & LinkedIn status

• Facebook & LinkedIn groups

• Social News, Networks & Media: Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Flickr, YouTube

One of the best ways to acquire keyword rich links from other relevant web sites to B2B content is to ask! For example, when Public Relations staff coordinate the publishing of a contributed article or have secured a media placement mentioning the company, they can also remember to ask the journalist to link back to the company site. The worst the editor can say is no, it’s not our policy to link out. Press releases are common link building tactics as are guest posts on other industry blogs. The other best way to acquire B2B links is to create unique and often humorous or compelling content that gets shared and linked to by others.

Check out this post on the TopRank Marketing site for even more link building ideas, 43 actually!

5. Not Monitoring KPIs and Ongoing Optimization of Content Marketing

Each phase in the buying cycle presents different needs for the buyer that’s using search to find information and solutions. Monitoring key data and interactions that are not necessarily conversion or sales focused can provide helpful insight into what content or link sources are helping to move the needle in the right direction. Meeting the needs of searchers with the right content can be measured in a variety of ways according to what’s being offered.

A few KPIs to pay attention to include:

• Keyword sourced traffic

• Branded vs non-branded keyword traffic

• Pages indexed, popular entry pages

• Crawling errors & Webmaster Tools Reports

• Rankings relative to your own site over time

• Inbound links: quantity, quality, longevity

• Link traffic

• Social media citations & traffic

Of course, reaching goal pages & conversions are part of the B2B search marketing feedback loop to guide future optimization as well. For one of the best resources on the web for measuring web site performance, read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Blog.

Through ongoing monitoring, keyword performance trends, cyclicality and new opportunities will be revealed. Adjusting certain optimization and linking efforts can improve performance and provide new channels of search traffic.

For an experienced search marketer, these mistakes are very simple and fundamental. In fact, they’re really the tip of the iceberg. However, our agency receives multiple inquiries every day from companies that suffer from these core SEO issues. Every day, week, month and year that goes by presents the same types of issues and until their solutions become as common as the need for a contact form and a home page on a web site, they will continue. No matter how long that takes.

If you’re a business marketer, what are some of the common SEO issues you’ve experienced with B2B web sites?

Social Bookmarking Concept and How it Works?

Social bookmarking is a free and easy way to help to help promote your online or off line business. The basic idea of social bookmarks is you join a social bookmarking service and share your bookmarks with other members. Naturally the first site you will want to bookmark would be your business web site.

Most social bookmarking services are free and all that is required is an ID, password, and email address. Once you've signed up with the bookmarking service you will want to set up your profile page for the service and add important information for your business such as your web address. A very important part of social bookmarking is when you bookmark or favorite' a web site you will be asked to add keywords or tags.

Keywords are words that correspond to your business or product. These are words that someone looking for your type of business would type into a search engine such as Yahoo and Google. When bookmarking your site and adding keywords related to your business you will be connected by those keywords to other similar businesses.

You don't want to stop with just your business web site though. As you visit other sites online you will want to bookmark other sites such as web sites of businesses that provide materials used in your business or equipment you may use. Just like when you bookmarked your business web site you will want to add keywords or tags to the site.

Del.icio.us (pronounced delicious) is one free to join social bookmarking service. Once you join Del.icio.us you will be directed to install two buttons on your Internet browser. This social bookmarking site has become one of the most popular because it's so easy to use. Once the buttons are installed on your browser you simply login and then surf the net. When you see a site that pertains to your business just click the button, add a keyword or two and that site is added to your bookmarks.

Furl is another very popular bookmarking site. Furl works very much the same as Del.icio.us with one button to install and works with all the popular browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Netscape. Where the networking really comes in is when other people find your bookmarks and decide to network with you this means they like your bookmarks and want to keep track of any new sites you may find. You will do the same also find other people who have bookmarked several sites of interest to you and your network starts to grow.

By being professional about your bookmarks, adding comments along with well chosen tags others will start to recognize you as an expert of sorts in your business field and you will find through your bookmarks you will start networking and sharing tips, products, and other things that pertain to your particular business.

If you would like to take social bookmarking a step further you may be interested in a service called Squidoo. Squidoo was started in 2005 and is a great place for business people to share their expertise. How the site works is you sign up for free and then share your knowledge on topics pertaining to your business. You share by writing what is called Lens on Squidoo and these Lens are available for others to read. By sharing your knowledge others will want to be associated with you, will recommend you to others, and all the time will be adding to your business promotion. Squidoo also have groups where you can join together with others with similar business interests thus building a network.

Social bookmarking is one of the easiest ways to promote your business online without having to spend money on advertising. Yes, it may take a little bit of your time but it can be well worth your efforts particularly if you are a small business owner with a limited advertising budget.

How to Use Digg to Drive Traffic to Your Website?

There are a lot of social bookmarking and social networking sites on the World Wide Web that for some web users out there you would have no idea which one is really helpful to create the traffic for your website. Well worry no more fellow bloggers and web savvy users, here comes Digg. Digg is just one of the largest social networking sites available on the World Wide Web. Knowing that fact alone allow me to answer one question that is probably going in on your mind right now: how to use Digg to drive traffic to your website?
These are the things I’ll be talking about. These are the basics and you need to know these. If you can become a pro at these few things then you’ll reach the front page one day.

1. Add friends on Digg
2. Digg other’s stuff
3. Get to know the diggers
4. Now submit yours and spread the word

1. Add friends on Digg
Okay you just joined Digg. Now you need to start adding some friends. See if anyone you know is using Digg. Add them. Go to the front page, go to the profile of the users that submitted the stories and add them as friends. And also add some of their friends as your friend.
Now you should have a bunch people on Digg.

2. Digg Other's Stuff

Don’t just expect everyone to help you. You need to do something for them first. Digg their shit! Diggers will shout to you requesting diggs on a particular submission (and sometimes on a few). Digg it for them and shout back saying that you dugg it. This is how you make a nice Digg buddy. Moving on to #3.

3. Get to Know The Diggers

People aren’t just going to help out random people. Sometimes they do. Most of the time they don’t. If they knew you then they would obviously digg your stuff more. So, you need to go and add your “digg buddies” on MSN.

Also add random diggers. See who’s digging your articles and check if anyone dugg a lot of your stuff. Shout to them and just say hi and ask them to add you on MSN or whatever IM you use. Some diggers also leave their email addresses on their profile (so check for that first).

4. Now Submit Yours and Spread The Words

Yeah its time for you to make submissions. So, do that and then share it with your friends (there is a button for that). Write something nice and convincing (so that people digg it). And don’t forget to ask your Digg buddies (on MSN) to digg it. They’ll do it for sure (since you’ve been so helpful to them). And if you think your article is great then ask your buddies to share it with their friends.

One more thing. Only submit your masterpiece and send one shout per day. There are people on Digg that send out requests for diggs like 5-6 times a day. Now that’s just annoying. I usually ignore these people (and I’m sure most of us do the same). Just remember not to bug anyone on Digg!

Offering Free Reprint Rights-Why Would I Do That?

The point of writing and distributing articles is to raise the amount of traffic that your website receives, to establish yourself as an expert, and increase your sales. Writing and submitting your articles is not always enough. You have to make your articles viral.

A viral article is an article that you write once and distribute to the various article sites on the web. Then, ezine publishers, blog writers, and website owners in the same field as you will find the article and post it on their web page.

From those three sources, other people with the ability to portray your work will also pick it up and publish it as well. From there it just keeps spreading, making the sky the limit.

In the future, you could come across one of your articles on a website. You may have written that article two years ago and somehow it ended up on the website you’re searching. You may be shocked to see that the website owner only recently added your article to their site. If you conduct a search five years from now, you would be astounded by how well traveled the article will be.

This whole process of the article becoming viral will never happen if you do not take the correct steps to make it possible. This is done easily by including a notice on the bottom of the article that gives readers the permission to reprint the article free of charge if the article remains unchanged and includes the resource box.

It is really that simple. One tiny sentence at the bottom can change the face of your online business. To ensure the spread of your article, make adding the reprint permission to the bottom a required element of the article. Some people may be hesitant to copy the article because of copyright infringement. This way, everyone interested in copying the article will.

Submitting Your Articles

Once you know that your article conveys everything that you want it to, you are ready to submit it to article sites. These sites are sometimes called article banks or article directories. Each one will have its own separate rules for submission.

First of all, be prepared because most of the sites will require you to register. It is free so there are no financial worries. You may want to make a document that you can copy and paste from. It should contain your name, telephone number, email address, and website address, as well as the username and password you decide to use.

Before you submit your article(s), be sure to read the submission guidelines for each site. Many of the article submission sites will allow as many articles as you want while others will only allow one or two a week. Some will not allow articles done with software so do some research. It is very important to follow all of the guidelines because you may be banned from the site. You do not want that to happen because you will not be able to get any exposure for your website.

Your article will be published in its entirety on most article banks while others will only post a link to your article, which will need to be on your website. You should still use a copy and paste file to fill out submission forms. Typing in the same information can be tiresome and become pretty irritating. This way, you only have to paste the information or you can have software do it for you. Some sites will store your author’s information for you. You might need to alter this information to fit the subject matter, such as products or websites.

After you submit the articles, you will receive a lot of email. Many people start a different account for these emails. Make sure that you can access this account because during registration on some sites, you may be required to confirm your registration.

SEO Terminologies

Anchor Text
Definition : The visible text for a hyperlink.
SEO Use : What anchor text appears in links pointing to your web site is really important in the process of Search Engine Optimization. e.g. if your web site is about network monitoring the anchor text 'Network monitoring site' will help your rankings more than the anchor text 'Some site about something'.
Example : The anchor text for Online SEO School is 'Online SEO School'.

A Unique Visitor
Definition : A new computer or person connecting to your Website.
SEO Use : The number of unique visitors to a page increases the page popularity.
Example : You are a unique visitor to this page.

Algorithm
Definition : The formula used by Search Engines to determine how any web page will rank in its search results.
SEO Use : Understanding a Search Engines algorithm helps you rank better in its search results.
Example : Google's algorithm gives weightage to incoming links to a page.

Bot
Definition : Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web.
SEO Use : The way a Search Engines bot looks at your webpage affects your webpages ranking. Example : The name of yahoo's bot is inktomi slurp.

Back Link
Definition : Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called inbound links or IBLs.
SEO Use : The number of IBLs to a page increases its popularity with the Search Engines.
Example : If you link to this page for the phrase Rank Ahead then thats a IBL from your page to ours.

Blind Traffic
Definition : Lesser quality traffic to a web site gained by misleading promotions or by spamming search engines.
SEO Use : Identifying sites from which you get blind traffic can help you save money spent on misleading promotions.
Example : If you are software vendor and someone visits your site through a link he saw in a hair salon's web page, thats blind traffic.


Clustering
Definition : Phenomenon in which a Search Engine lists two or more pages of a web site for a search query.
SEO use : More the number of your pages listed for a search query, better your chances for getting clicked.

Cloaking
Definition : An unethical SEO practice. It involves a different version of a web page being presented to each search engine spider. Each different version of the web page is optimized for the search engine spider it is presented to (i.e. exploiting its weaknesses).
SEO use : You can be penalized heavily by the search engines for doing it, so don't do it.
Example : For example the Yahoo spider will be presented with a web page optimized for the Yahoo spider.

Doorway Page
Definition : A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific key phrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors.
SEO use : Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Directory
Definition : A directory is a web site that contains a categorized listing of links from around the web.
SEO use : Search Engines use information stored in the directories to rate pages.
Example : The directory DMOZ is used by Google.

Ethical SEO
Definition : It is SEO executed without resorting to underhand or illegal activities that may cause your web site to get blacklisted by the search engines.
SEO use : UnEthical SEOs can get your sites banned from a search engine forever.

Filter Words
Definition : Words such as; is, am, an, for, do, was and the. Words that search engines consider irrelevant as keywords.
SEO use : Using less of these words in your websites helps increase the keyword density of your original keyword.

Gateway Page
Definition : A gateway or doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific key phrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors.
SEO use : Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Google Dance
Definition : "Google dance" is an unofficial term coined to refer to the period when Google is performing the update to its index.
Definition : While the update is in progress, search results for each of Google's nine data centers are different. This can cause fluctuations in your ranking in google.

Hits
Definition : Requests made to your Web site server.
SEO use : The more the hits the more popular you are.

IBL(InBound Links)
Definition : Any link on another page that points to the subject page.
SEO use : The number of IBLs to a page increases its popularity with the Search Engines.
Example : If you link to this page for the phrase Rank Ahead then thats a IBL from your page to ours.

Keyword
Definition : A word with particular importance to the theme of a site. For example if a web site provides information about Formula 1 racing then important keywords would be 'Ferrari', 'Monaco', 'Schumacher' etc...
SEO use : SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and key phrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.
Example : A keyword for this page would be "SEO".

Key Phrases
Definition : A group of keywords put together make a key phrase.
SEO use : SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and key phrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.
Example : A keyphrase for this page would be "SEO Glossary ".

Keyword Density
Definition : The number of times a specific keyword appears on a page compared to the number of words on a page.
SEO use : Higher the keyword density better your chances of ranking ahead for that keyword.

Keyword Research/ Keyword Analysis
Definition : The process of analyzing a subject area or web site with the goal of identifying keywords that best describe the subject area/web site.
SEO use : Identifying keywords that have low listing but high search frequency can help you optimize your pages better.
Example : Wordtracker.com and Oveture.com provide useful keyword tools.

Keyword Stuffing / Keyword Spamming
Definition : The process of stuffing a web page with keywords related or not related to the theme of the web site in a high amount as an attempt to influence/trick the search engines
SEO use : While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (i.e. lists of disconnected keywords).
Example : Wordtracker.com and Oveture.com provide useful keyword tools.

Link Farm
Definition : A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity (or PR).
SEO use : Engaging in a link farm is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Link Popularity
Definition : The popularity of your web site in the eyes of the search engine, based on the quality and quantity of links to and from your web site.
SEO use : More the link popularity better your ranking.

Mirror
Definition : In SEO parlance, a mirror is a near identical duplicate website (or page). Mirrors are commonly used in an effort to target different keywords/key phrases.
SEO use : Using mirrors is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Meta Tags
Definition : Meta Description Content, Keywords and Title are used in the head section of websites. There are 50 or 60 other tags but these are the 3 most commonly used. Their purpose is to provide extra information about the web page i.e. metadata. The most influential tags for search engine ranking are the Keywords tag and the Description tag.
SEO use : They are very important when it comes to listing your site in Search engines.

Natural Links
Definition : Links pointing to a web site created because someone found the web site useful and decided to link to it i.e. linked to it naturally.
SEO use : These types of link are very powerful in the link popularity stakes as they identify a web site that is worth linking to and therefore has a better chance of being a quality resource of information. To increase your chances of earning natural links make sure your web site has a lot of quality content that is better than the competition.

Off-Page Factors / Elements
Definition : Elements that are outside the direct control of the web site developer and are influential in determining search engine ranking.
SEO use : Search engines are relying more and more on these elements when determining ranking because they are more resistant to spamming / abuse.
Example : Links pointing to a web site and anchor text in links pointing to web site.

On-Page Factors/Elements
Definition : Elements that are within direct control of the web site developer and are influential in determining search engine ranking.
SEO use : These elements are prone to keyword spamming and other similar forms of abuse so the search engines do not look to them as much as off-page elements when determining ranking.
Example : META tags, page text, title tag text, site link structure

OutBound Links
Definition : Links within a web site that are pointing to outside sites.
SEO use : Do not affect link popularity but care must be taken not to link to a web site that may get you banned

One-way Links
Definition : Links to a web site that are not reciprocated i.e. no link exists to the web site that is doing the linking.
SEO use : These type of links are powerful in building link popularity.

Query
Definition : A search for a word or term in a search engine.


Ranking
Definition : The position within search engine results that a web site reaches for a particular search phrase.

Reciprocal Links
Definition : A reciprocal link occurs when a web site links to a site and in turn the linked-to site links back to the linking site i.e. the link is reciprocated by both parties.
SEO use : They aid in driving traffic to a web site and in some cases also add to site's link popularity .

Robot
Definition : It refers to software programs that scan the web also called spider or bot. It is important that your web site is indexable by a spider otherwise it may not visit some pages. A common method used to ensure that it indexes all the most important web pages is to include a site map on your site.
SEO use : The way a Search Engines bot looks at your webpage affects your webpages ranking.
Example : The name of yahoo's bot is inktomi slurp.

Robots.txt
Definition : Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
SEO use : You can specify what pages to index or what search engine spiders are allowed to index the web site e.g. you can specify that Google's spider is allowed but not Yahoo's spider. Useful to stop a web site from being indexed by accident if it is still under construction of if you want certain areas of the web site to be hidden from the spider.

Search Engine
Definition : A database of information retrieved from indexing web pages from all over the web.
Example : Google, Yahoo, MSN

Search Engine Optimization
Definition : The process of modifying a web site's content, structure and link popularity to maximise the chances of a higher ranking within search engine results.

SERPS
Definition : Acronym for Search Engine Result PageS
SEO use : The higher your website ranks in SERPS for your keywords the more the visitors your website will attract.

Spider
Definition : It refers to software programs that scan the web.It is important that your web site is indexable by a spider otherwise it may not visit some pages. A common method used to ensure that it indexes all the most important web pages is to include a site map on your site.
SEO use : The way a Search Engines bot looks at your webpage affects your webpages ranking.
Example : The name of yahoo's bot is inktomi slurp.

Site Map
Definition : A special page on a web site that contains a tree-like representation of the link structure of the site.
SEO use : It allows a search engine spider to index all the most important pages of the site with ease because it can access them all from one page. A link to the site map should be clearly accessible/indexable from the home page at least.

Stop Words
Definition : Words such as; is, am, an, for, do, was and the. Words that search engines consider irrelevant as keywords.
SEO use : Using less of these words in your websites helps increase the keyword density of your original keyword.

Spam
Definition : In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page.
SEO use : Spam could be ground for banning .

TITLE Tag
Definition : The TITLE tag is used to specify what text appears at the top of a browser window when visiting a web page. It also appears as the link text when your web site appears in search engine results.
SEO use : Title Tags influence rankings to a good extent, so spending time on them is worth it .Ensure that the right text is in it (i.e. include keywords / keyphrases relevant to the web page).
Example : The title tag of this page is "Search Engine Optimization - Common SEO Terminology" "Online SEO School - Learn Online Search Engine Optimization Free"

TITLE Text/Attribute
Definition : Text that be attached to any HTML tag and appears when the mouse is positioned over the relevant tag content.
SEO use : If used properly it can influence Search Engine Ranking.
Example : It works on a similar principle to the ALT Text/Attribute. Example: TITLE="website example">A Website

UnEthical SEO
Definition : The opposite to Ethical SEO. It involves employing underhand or illegal activites to increase search engine ranking.
SEO use : UnEthical SEOs can get your sites banned from a search engine forever.
Example : Cloaking, GateWay Pages etc are examples of unethical SEOs..

The Principle of Your Articles in E-Commerce

Tips For Writing Articles

Some people make writing articles much harder than it really is. If you understand the rules of proper grammar and you have a word processor with a spell checker, writing articles will become quite easy and fast. Here are some tips that are sure to help you out.

1. Don’t create too much difficulty for yourself. This is the most common mistake made by article writing beginners. First off, think about what you want to say and start writing. Do not stress too much about spelling and grammar. Just try and finish the thought you have in your head and fix the other mistakes at the end.

2. Do not get too stressed over the topic. Since you already know what it is you want to sell, you should look at your service from the view of the customer.

3. Visit the forums where your customers take part and figure out what their questions are. From there, base your future articles on their questions and try to answer them within those articles.

4. Make sure your articles are the right length, not too long or short. Keep your articles from three to seven hundred words, with most of them between three and five hundred. That should be your optimal length. Your word processor should have a word counter, so stay within these boundaries.

5. Do not send your article right away. Come back to it later and read it over to make sure that you have said everything that you wanted to. Make sure your article is selling nothing. These types of article will scare off potential customers.

6. You are selling an article, not a newsletter. Remember that.

7. Try and stay focused. Your articles must stay on track. If you do not, your articles will show it.

8. Try to write like you talk. Treat it like you are talking to a close friend. Do not try to fit words in that you do not regularly use. Use your everyday language and your personality will shine brightly. When your personality shows through in your articles, you will be taking the first step towards building relationships with your readers.

The Types of Article Mistakes You Want To Avoid

Article marketing can be very easy and effective but there are mistakes that can ruin it all. You will want to avoid these at all costs if you plan on being successful with article marketing. The following mistakes can cause you to lose some of the credibility you have worked so hard for. Your credibility is pretty much all you have in the world of Internet marketing. There are ways to protect your reputation and prevent an eventual downfall.

• Do not let the letter become a pushy sales letter. Readers are not stupid and can recognize these types of articles right away. These articles will be a failure.

• Do not make your articles too short. They need to be at least three hundred words.

• Always check your spelling and grammar. Poor spelling and grammar makes you look uneducated.

• Don’t add a sales pitch to your resource box.

• At all costs, avoid hype in your headlines and in the article itself. You should also avoid subjects that you haven’t researched. You will run into someone who knows the facts and will call you out on the facts that aren’t stated correctly.

• Do not plagiarize. This is copying someone else’s work word for word. Do some research and write the article over what you have learned, not what someone else has. You should take pride in the fact that the writing is original and one of a kind.

These tips should keep you from making some of the most common mistakes made by new article writers. Being successful with Internet Marketing can be the break your business has been waiting on. If used correctly, you can boost your sales and credibility in a few short weeks. You will want to remember these tips and try not to make some of the mistakes that others have. Learn from other people’s mistakes and do your Internet advertising right, the first time.