Small Business Design Resources

Keys to Search Engine Optimization:

You have built your website and published it to the web; you sit back and wait patiently but your site doesn’t show up in any major search engine. You might start to wonder; why won’t my website show up in a Google search? If you just sit and wait for your website to show up in a search engine such as Google, you might be waiting for weeks. If this is happening to you it’s time to review your search engine optimization strategy. Here are a few key pointers to ensure you are doing all the right things.

Getting your site to the top of the search engines is both an art and a science. Websites use crawlers and “bots” (short for robot) to crawl all the sites on the web. Using a complicated series of proprietary algorithms they assign rankings to web sites based on your site’s keywords. The phrase Search Engine Optimization refers to the art of building a site that ranks high in the search engines. To check your google ranking you can go to http://www.prchecker.info. Your site must be published before it will be ranked and it may take a few weeks after you publish the site before you have a ranking. That’s because it takes some time fort the search engines to find you. There are millions of websites on the internet.

The rank is based on a keyword or key phrase and how relevant that key word or phrase is to your site. So you may rank high in one key word and low in every other. The more narrowly you focus on a single key word or phrase throughout your site, the more likely you are to improve your ranking for that key word or phrase. The objective is to have your entry show up on the first results page for your chosen keyword or key phrase. You don’t need to understand exactly how search engine optimization works in order to get your site to the top, but you do need a few insights. Here are some tips that will help you improve your ranking:

1. Know what key phrases are being searched on
There is no point in building keyword density on words that no-one is searching for. Even if you get to the top of the rankings on that keyword, if no-one is typing it in, they won’t ever find you! A reverse search engine tool will help you optimize on what people enter in the search engines to look for your product. For example, “women’s clothing” is a popular search phrase, whereas very few people search for “blouse with white polka dots” even though it is a valid piece of women’s clothing. So you must find out what people are searching for.

Here are a few Google tools to help you out:
Search-based keyword tool
Google Insights for Search

2. Be relevant
This is perhaps one of the most important concepts to search engine optimization. Your keywords must be relevant to your website. And you must use them throughout your site, including in your web page titles, in your meta-tags, in your article titles and even, if you can, in your domain name itself. If your website sells pet products, and your keyword is “pet” you will be relevant, but if your website sells women’s clothing, and your key word is “polka dots” that won’t be so relevant because it is very narrow, so choice of keywords is very important. Now, if your website only sold items of clothing with polka dots, then polka dots becomes a very significant keyword. Again, you would want to make sure that there is a market for polka dots, by examining the reverse search engine results.

3. Use linking
When the search engines do their crawling, one way they “discover” sites is by following links from other sites. When you first publish your site, even if you have done a good job with search engine optimization, it can take several weeks for your site to show up in the search engines – sometimes three weeks or more. You can reduce this time by using a good linking strategy. Let’s say a web site with a high rank links to your site, then your site will be discovered more quickly than if there are no links pointing to it. It is important to link and be linked by sites that are relevant to your keywords. Linking to lower ranked sites that are relevant to your own is okay too, even though it may not help you as fast, but linking to sites that are not relevant to yours can impact your ranking.

So that’s the science of Search Engine Optimization, now the art comes with practice. There are many tools on the market that allow you to analyze the traffic to your website, analyze keyword density and even analyze the keyword density on your competitor’s site. One of my favorite tools is http://www.websitegrader.com website. So if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of Google at your first attempt, don’t give up.

How to Check Who’s Linking to your Web Site (Part 2)

I just found another way of how to know who’s linking to your site. This report even gives you the anchor text that’s used to link to your site.

Check this site out and plug in your own web site.

Go to www.backlinkwatch.com

How to Check Who’s Linking to your Web Site (Part 1)

We’re all heard that link building drives your SEO through the roof, right. But haven’t you ever wonder where those links are coming from? What sites give you the most backlinks? Well, it’s actually really easy to find out who’s linking to your site. It’s not 100% accurate, but at least it gives you an idea.

So let’s start with Google.

1. Go to www.google.com
2. In Google’s search box enter link: followed by your web site address and hit search.
For example: link:www.example.com
That’s it. Now you will see everyone who’s linking to your site come up in the search.

If your web site is fairly new and doesn’t get a lot of hits, you might not see any result come up from your search. Give it a try using Yahoo!

1. Go to www.yahoo.com
2. In Yahoo’s search box enter linkdomain: followed by your web site address and hit web search.
For example: linkdomain:www.example.com
That’s it. Now you will see everyone who’s linking to your site come up in the search.

The great thing about Yahoo!, is that it gives you more advanced options.
• If you would like to see the links that go directly to your homepage and not any other page, just select Except from this domain to Only this URL on the Show links pull down options.
• If you would like to see other sites that link to any page on your site, just select Except from this domain to Entire Site in the Show links pull down options.

You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing

I came across this video that is dead on about Inbound Marketing.

It’s By HubSpot’s Rebecca Corliss

Check it out:

Link Building 101 – How To Get The Most Links To Your Website In The Least Amount Of Time…

Pssst… I’m going to let you in on the worst kept secret of search engine optimization: It’s all about getting links to your website.

I’m serious. While on-page factors such as keyword density and title tags are rudimentary techniques that almost every new website has picked up on (quite a difference from three years ago), link building is something that still eludes many webmasters, and for good reason: It involves work.

In fact, search engine optimization is about 90 percent effort and 10 percent experience. You need experience to recognize which keywords are more profitable, which techniques you need to learn in order to get more visitors to your website, etc. etc. After learning all that, it’s just a matter of getting down to doing the work itself. And that is why search engine optimization software such as SEO Elite are so effective: They cut down on the sheer load of work involved and provide intuitive ways for you to use your experience and get the most out of your investments (in this case, your website AND your time!)

In this lesson I’m going to talk a bit about the techniques you can use to get more links to your website. There’s nothing special about them; they all involve some work, but they all pay off in terms of targeted traffic. In fact, that should be the prime goal of your link building campaign: Use inbound links to build traffic

All the strategies mentioned below can be used to get more links to your website. It goes without saying that the more of these strategies you use, the faster you’ll be able to get more links.

A common pitfall for most people new to SEO is that they often get sucked in by catchphrases such as ‘the best way to get links to your website’ or ‘the top 3 strategies you can use to get tons of links to your website’. The truth is that none of these techniques is the ‘best’. In reality, your website and your business model (in other words, the nature of your website-customer interaction) will determine the most fitting strategies for your linkbuilding campaign.

In fact, when you launch your linking campaign, you’ll probably have varying degrees of success with the strategies below. For example, article submissions are a great way to earn more subscribers to your newsletter, while affiliate programs work wonderfully well if you have a decent list of proven products (or a great product). The methods below are not separated in any specific way; I’ve listed the ‘free’ methods first and the paid methods later. Use this list as a reference through your link building campaign, and for best results, mix and match these techniques in the way they suit your website the best.

Just ask…

The traditional way of getting links is to directly ask potential link partners to link to your website. This can be a one-way link or a reciprocal link (more on reciprocal links later). The key factors here are to identify potential link partners and then to contact them and offer either a reciprocal link, an offer to their visitors, or both (we’ll cover paid links later).

Finding potential partners is a difficult business. It used to be that you would search on a major search engine like Google or Yahoo for your target keywords, and then check each website in the top 50 or top 100 listings manually, evaluating their similarity to your niche and noting their contact information. This is a tedious process, and is fraught with the primary obstacle of most link managers: ‘What if they say no?’

You could make them an offer they can’t refuse (which you will, and I’ll tell you how) but to improve your chances, use technology to your advantage. As before, use your target keywords to search for the top websites in your niche, but instead of contacting them, use a search engine optimization software to evaluate the back-links of a top website.

The idea here is to find out which websites link to the top competition in your niche – the websites in the top 10 or top 20 results for your target keywords.

The second step is to make the approach, sell the idea, or like I said before, make them an offer they can’t refuse. Part of this approach is to ability to write convincingly (you’ll find samples online of successful link request emails) and it is something you learn with time – test your link requests by sending different letters and measuring the response and repeating what works.

The other half involves the offer itself – what your website (or you) can offer to the link partner that will compel him/her to link to you. If you’re looking for free links, this offer can include a reciprocal link, site-wide links or maybe just the quality of your website content. The idea here is to sell your link even before they visit your website to check if it’s worth linking to, and this can only happen if you can the right pitch.

Write an article

The idea is quite simple. To establish yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your field, you need to be able to project your knowledge beyond your own website. In this case it involves writing articles on a particular topic in your niche, and distributing them to article directories online.

While this is a crude approach, the method can be refined by offering an article to potential link partners – thus providing them with valuable content for their visitors. Article syndication is a powerful tool and if used properly can generate hundreds, even thousands of visitors for you.

A quick search within your niche can help you find article directories where you can position your article, but a better option is to look at content aggregation websites in your niche – sites which regularly post articles from off-site authors. This not only gives you a chance to build your links but also gives your reputation in this field a boost, something that you can leverage in later techniques.

Run an affiliate program

If you sell a product, or a range of products, or even a membership service, launching an affiliate program is the quickest way to get inbound links. Of course, you’ll need to promote the affiliate program beyond your own website, and you can combine the above two techniques to promote not only your website but also your affiliate program.

In addition, if you have an e-product (an e-book or software) and you sell it through a portal like ClickBank, you can be assured that your affiliates are managed directly through their website. In case you want to run your own affiliate script, you can find several for a low price and even some good ones for free.

http://www.easyclickmate.com is a good Clickbank affiliate script…

An affiliate program offers your visitors and potential link partners the chance to make money by doing a little promotion of your product. For other webmasters that could simply involve posting your link or even posting your article promoting your product on their website; a sure bet for getting a link.

Directory submissions and site submissions

Second-tier directories and niche directories are seriously under-estimated in terms of their impact on your website traffic. If you’re just starting out and looking for free traffic, steer clear of the paid listings of Yahoo and ilk and concentrate on smaller hubs. They may not receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every day, but if you can garner 10 visitors a day from one directory, and get 10 or 20 such directories to which you can submit your link, you have a free stream of 100-200 daily visitors for only an hour’s worth of work.

The same goes for submitting your website’s link on sites that have a ‘links’ page and require a reciprocal link in exchange. While this is not the best strategy to get links by, it will help you in the beginning to get some traffic and hopefully, natural links as a result of that traffic.

Paid links

If you’re looking for a high value link (for example a link from a PR 7 page) and your website is fairly new, you’re not going to get in through normal means. In this case, the offer involves money, and this can usually be judged through the site’s own advertising policies. Search the website for its media kit, or something similar. Alternatively, you can email them asking them about advertising opportunities on their websites. In this case being direct is the best approach, and will save both your time and theirs.

Of course, the catch here is the amount of money you’re willing to pay. Some websites charge a monthly fee, others charge a ‘per impressions’ fee (for example, your ad would be shown for 10,000 page views only). In these cases you won’t have much room to negotiate if you are just starting out, so it’s advisable to shun the big guns and go for the smaller fish – people who won’t ask you for too much money and will accept a combination of reciprocal linking, money and some other ‘free method’ such as an article submission. Once your website carries its own weight in traffic and Page Rank, you can target the PR 7 and PR 8 websites.

The advantage of such websites is the sheer amount of traffic they get. A news site in Pakistan gets about 60,000 page views a day. Even on a CTR (click-thru-rate) of 1%, that amounts to 600 visitors a day, or 18,000 visitors a month.

The question is, what will you do with this traffic? The possibilities are endless.

If you would like to learn more internet marketing strategies for optimizing the amount of money you make online, you can get a free copy of any of our best selling courses. Just tell us where to mail it and we’ll send it straight to your front door. Go here: http://www.bradcallen.com

by Mike Benner

Article Source: ArticleRich.com