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"SEO Success: Attracting Search Engine Attention" Excerpts
from 
Once a website has been created and published, many new website owners think that the web development project is finished. But in reality, the real work is just beginning. In order to create a money-making site, traffic must be generated and driven to the website. There are several effective methods that can be implemented in Tier II of the SEO strategy to create this web traffic. While all methods may not be required to realize successful traffic generation, some combination of most, if not all, will probably be needed to create traffic, maintain traffic and finally, grow traffic to your website with long-term, lasting results. Consider implementing these strategies:
Dynamic content is necessary for search engine recognition, and by updating the website frequently, the search engines see your website as an active, not stagnant, website. How often should changes be made? At the very least, monthly. But the more frequent the changes, the better. There are some tried and true methods you may want to employ:
Monthly newsletter (or weekly)
Tip of the day that rotates to the page using a script from an existing database of information at your site.
RSS feed to public news feeds that update hourly or daily at the least.
Changes to contact information, staffing, clients, etc.
Checking links frequently to make sure that they are active and valid, and changing the link text from time to time will register as a change to the page.
Simple modification of content from time to time should be done in between these regular maintenance tasks which will update the website.
Good links management will result in a stronger weight given by the search engines for search positioning. The algorithms used for weighting one page over another require link popularity assessment for successful traffic to your website. Link popularity is also one of the main considerations for Google and Alexa Page Rank. How do you achieve link popularity? It can be tedious and requires careful attention to the selection of the links, but there are several means that can be employed:
Reciprocal Links: Search for relevant and desired web pages with which to trade links.
Purchase PageRank-based links: boost your relevance and weight in the eyes of search engines by purchasing links for a period of time, three to six months until you have achieved a better ranking.
List with directories: paid or unpaid directory listings that are relevant to your website will give your website additional exposure.
Anchor text: create the links with link text in mind, utilizing relevant keywords where possible.
PageRank consideration: link only with websites that have decent PageRank (PR); i.e., PR of 3 could be a minimum but a PR of 4 would be a better minimum requirement from those pages who want to exchange links with you.
Gather Opt-in Email Addresses: Utilize an email list subscription function on your website with the intent of sending e-newsletters and announcements on a regular basis. This subscription list can be used for several other campaigns, including the sale of advertising space in your newsletter.
Advertise on Ezines: Purchase sponsorship on other email lists where you can promote your product and/or services as well as links to your website in the process.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns with Google and Yahoo Search Marketing where you purchase advertising space based on keywords that are popular for your website if you are not in a saturated market. If your business operates in a saturated internet market, seek niche keywords for your PPC advertising. Determine your budget first and from there, you will know how much you can afford for the positioning you desire. It's all mathematical:
Price-Per-Click = monthly budget/number of clicks (or) Number of clicks = monthly budget/price per-click.
Some suitable combination of price and number of clicks based on your own budget will result in a campaign you can monitor and adjust as necessary. The important result to watch for is the conversion rate. How many paid clicks convert into the desired result; i.e., new contract, sale of product, sign up for e-newsletter, etc.
Remember, creating a website is only the first step. Driving traffic to your site is the next important task. Layout a plan of action and follow-through. You are not going to realize success until you spend the time and energy - or pay someone else for their time and energy - to get the job done.
"Effective SEO Tactics for 2006" Excerpts
from
Search engines are looking for unique and useful content information that is accurate and important to the people interested in
that field. Search engines also look for fresh content regular additions to your website, etc (this is why blogging
became / is such a huge craze). So let's put that all together:
Search engines are working towards fighting SEO spam bad, keyword stuffed content and link spamming by ... Devaluing the
"ranking boost" that these elements give. Penalizing the websites that are obviously spamming search engines.
The end result? ... Traditional link building is no longer your best bet to get high search engine rankings.
That's not to say that you should dump your link campaigns all at once and scamper for the hills links will continue to
have value within search engines and until the search engine algorithms develop well enough to distinguish between
"organic" linking and links generated through a link-building campaign (not easy to do at all, even with Google's or
Microsoft's resources), getting inbound links will stay the easiest way to bump up
your search engine rankings by several pages.
However, for SEO purposes, that brings us back to square one. We like things to be easy, but we also want things to
work well. If link-building is a good tactic, but not the best tactic (especially when everyone and their mother is
getting a few hundred links every month to their 30-page AdSense websites), then where does it leave the rest of us?
The answer lies with what the search engines have been saying all along quality content, wrapped around quality, organic links. Let me explain that.
Search engines have taken two specific measures to improve their results and reduce commercialized
spam from their search engines:
Link pages are being "identified" as such and therefore are being considered as low-quality links (you'll remember from
Link Building 101 that the quality of the link is a big factor in how much it improves your website's rankings). Some
of the identifying criteria for a link page are: the number of links on that page, the ratio of text to links on that page, and
relevance of the link, which I explain in the next point. Search engine algorithms are currently looking at the context that
the links are placed in (i.e. surrounding text as well as the page's keywords) to measure the relevance of the
host site to YOUR website in other words, checking the text of the page your inbound link is placed on to find out
whether that site is relevant to your industry / niche. This leads us to the following conclusions:
The linking page must have as few links as possible. The links should be focused on as few sites as
possible (to funnel the value of the link page). The links should be surrounded by "relevant" content. The linking page
should contain "quality" content (written for human reading rather than written for search engines there's a sharp difference
between keyword optimization and keyword stuffing). Now you must be wondering...."is there a point to all this?" And
I respect that, because this is exactly what internet marketing and SEO gurus have been saying for a long time nöw. Just
like I often ask myself:
Once you've completed this page, contact link partners in YOUR niche not direct competitors obviously, but complementary businesses (if you sell information books on candle-making, your ideal link partners would be informational websites on candle-making), and make them this pitch:
"Are you looking for a quick and easy way to boost your search engine rankings? Search engines demand relevance, they demand quality, they demand freshness. I'd like to offer you the chance to do a valuable exchange I'll provide you with an optimized article on a subject relevant to your business, and in return all I ask is that you allow me to place some links to my website on the page. In fact, you can even plug in your own links affiliate, to your own website or any other website."
Search engines are wising up to article submissions just as they started combating link spam a year and a half ago at any rate, article submissions are marketing tools / branding tools, not pure SEO tools.
SpyderTrax - Track SE Spiders & Robots From
www.DarrinWard.com/
 Have
you wondered ... "Is there was a way to track which search
engine spiders & robots visit my site?" ... "How often do
they visit?" Here is an easy way to find out.
SpyderTrax will allow you to track some of the major search
engines (incl. Google, Altavista, AllTheWeb, Inktomi etc.),
without too much difficulty. If you go
here, you will see the stats page for my site, since
January 2004. I installed it and it took about 20 minutes.
For those clients who I have hosted on a Bizux server,
below are the links to your stats. (Naturally sites that
I installed this script very recently will have a few visits
from the SE robots, but older sites will have MANY). For
those clients who are hosted on a different server, this
script MAY work on your server, it may not.
September Search Engine News From
www.searchengine-news.com
Google - Although not anything conceptually new, we feel it worthwhile to point out that Google is clearly tracking which search result listings are being clicked. Of course we can only guess what Google is doing with this information. We suspect they are (at least) tracking what pages are getting clicked on most frequently within their results. If so, it's reasonable to believe the most clicked-upon pages will receive a bit of a boost in the rankings. All the more reason to whip your search engines results descriptions into enticing copy so searchers will be compelled to click your listings.
MSN - Earlier this month we had Google roll out Google Talk. Now, Microsoft has gotten into the red-hot Internet telephony game with their purchase of Teleo, Inc., a company with technology that lets users make phone calls using their computers.
Yahoo -Yahoo rolled out a simple way to submit large numbers of web pages to their search engine. It's very similar and appears to be a simplified version of Google Sitemaps profiled recently. Now you can simply create a text file of URLs you want crawled, then submit it to Yahoo via their "Submit Your Site".
Yahoo Search Marketing - Yahoo Search Marketing geared up to compete with Google AdSense this month by rolling out their own version of an AdWords-style contextual ad system called Yahoo Publisher Network.
Ask Jeeves - As we anticipated in last month's Updates, Ask Jeeves released their own PPC program this month.
336-408-9075
Rich@RichsWebDesign.com
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