Choose the right keywords - To get listed correctly in the search engines each page of your site that you want listed needs to be optimized to the best of your ability. Since the keywords that you decide to target will be used throughout the optimization process choosing the right keywords is essential. If you choose the wrong keywords you will not be found in the search engines. If you are not found in the search engines how will anyone find your site? Since the keywords you choose to optimize your pages with are so important we have put together some tips to help you make sure that you make the right choices. You should utilize these tips when selecting keywords for each page that you plan to submit to the search engines. Think "specific keyword phrases" not "keywords". Why? Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines. You stand a far better chance to rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition . The resulting traffic, since it is more highly targeted, should also be much higher quality too!

Title tag tips - We recommend that you include 1-2 of your most important keyword phrases in the title tag, BUT be careful not to just list keywords. If you just list keywords you risk being viewed as a spamming the engines which can ultimately lead to you being blacklisted by the search engines. Your title tag should include your keyword phrases while remaining as close to a readable sentence as possible to avoid any problems. Make your title enticing! Don't forget that even if you get that #1 listing in the search engines your listing still needs to say something that makes the surfer want to clickthrough and visit your site. Since the length of your title tag could be a little long for some engines we suggest placing the keywords at the beginning of the tag when possible so that you do not risk having them cut off. Each page of your site should have it's own title tag with it's own keywords that related to the page that it appears on.

Meta keyword tag tips - Aside from what we mention in the other tips below you should only use those keyword phrases that you also used in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description, and other tags. Any keywords phrases that you use that do not appear in your other tags or page copy are likely to not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase. Don't forget plurals. For example, a travel site might have both "Caribbean vacation" and "Caribbean vacations" in their keyword meta tag to make sure they show up in both searches. If you know of a common misspelling of a popular keyword that could be used to find your site you should enter it in your keywords meta tag. For example, a travel site might use "Caribbean" in their keyword meta since it is a common misspelling for "Caribbean". Watch out for repeats! You want to include your most important phrases, but when doing so it can be difficult not to repeat one word many times. For example, "Caribbean vacation" and "Caribbean vacations" are two different phrases, but the word "Caribbean" appears twice. This is okay to do in order to make sure you get the phrases you need in there, but be careful not to repeat any one word excessively. There in no actual limit, but we recommend that no one word be repeated in the keyword meta more than 5 times. If your site has content of interest to a specific geographic location be sure to include the actual location in your keyword meta.

Meta description tag tips - Make sure you accurately describe the content of your page while trying to entice visitors to click on your listing. Include 3-4 of your most important keyword phrases. Especially those used in your title tag and page copy. Try to have your most important keywords appear at the beginning of your description. This often brings better results, and will help avoid having any search engine cut off your keywords if they limit the length of your description.

Optimizing Your Images "alt" Attribute - Did you know that any images on your page can help your listings too? Each image on your page can include a keyword phrase or two that relates to the image. This text will also show up & help those that may have their images turned off when visiting your site. This does not work for all engines, but it certainly does not hurt so we recommend you give it a try where you can. What it looks like: <IMG SRC="mainLogo.gif" width="10" height="10" alt="increase link popularity for webmasters">

Link popularity - A successful web site must have a high link popularity! More and more search engines rank your web pages based on the number of links that point to your web site. Google uses link popularity as the most important factor in ranking sites. HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi, and others also use link popularity in their formulas. If you want to have a successful web site, you must have a high link popularity. A high link popularity is important for a high ranking on search engines. The higher your web site ranks on search engines, the more customers you'll get.

Google says about link popularity: "You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has changed" That means: if your ranking goes up or down, you have to look if the number of sites linking to yours, has changed!
Yahoo says about link popularity: "As new web sites are added to the category and as other sites become more popular or less popular with users." That means: As more users link to this site with the rigtht categorie in the hyperlink (or the description) as more popular becomes this site!
MSN says about link popularity: "The more links pointing to a website the better is the chance to climb up the search results" That means: The more links from our link trade sites are pointing to your site the better your site will be listed in msn!
AOL says about link popularity: "Keep relevant text and links in HTML." That means: If AOL finds lots of links in your Html, they spider that links and if this links link back to you too, you will get a higher listing in AOL!
Northernlight says about link popularity: "We will also take into consideration how many other sites in our index have links to a page when determining the relevance." That means: We think that is self-explanatory! :-)

DO NOT DO THESE THINGS!

Don't use frames - Some search engines cant handle frames and their content.

Don't use excessive flash - Search engines cant read flash or pictures. You must have enough readable text, including your main keywords.

Do not use wrong keywords - Try not to use keywords which are not belong your sites content to trick the search engines and to get a better listing.

Do not reiterate the same keyword - Search engines notice that and your site will get a bad ranking.

Don't use tiny text or text with the same color as the background - This has often been used to keyword stuff a web page. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Don't use multiple instances of the same tag - For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Don't Submit identical pages - For example, do not duplicate a page of your site, give the copies different file names, and submit each one. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Your web site is a direct reflection of your business. If it is out-of-date, stale, inaccurate, unattractive, then this is exactly what your clients or worse, potential clients see. Image isn't everything, but it sure does make a lasting impression. What image do you want to convey to your potential clients?

Whether your site is designed by me, or not, one should think about what your web site needs. If the information just needs updating, it can probably take just a few minutes. If you have added a new division or section to your business, then additional pages might be necessary. Has you entire look changed? Then a total redesign might be needed.

Some clients of mine call me every week w/ small changes that they need. Some wait until I call them. Others never change anything. I compare it to maintenance of your car: - Some people inspect their car every week. If it needs air in the tires, they fix it. If the headlight has burned out, they replace it. If the oil needs changing, they change it. ... Some people wait until their car won't run, or they are pulled over by the Police for the headlight problem.

What kind of person are you? Call me ... I will help you get your site updated, so that you aren't pulled over by the "Web Police"!

Every search engine has it's own algorithm that determines the ranking of documents in search results. An algorithm is (in this case) a complex set of computer-based rules on how to interpret and rank web pages when users do a search for a particular word or phrase. For obvious reasons, search engines do not publicly reveal the detailed logic behind such algorithms.

However, there are a lot of similarities in the way the search engine algorithms work. In this tutorial we will give you an introduction to the most fundamental parts, which should be enough to get you on the right track. If you want to learn more about how search engines work or how to improve your rankings we suggest you visit Search Engine Watch [www.searchenginewatch.com] where you will find information on search engines and their rules.

We will take you through the three most important elements of search engine optimization:

2. Keep your website online It may sound too obvious but you have to make sure you site is accessible 24/7 365 days a year. With the billions of web pages search engines have to visit each month they usually only have time to request each web page once. If your web server is not accessible at the time the search engines visit your website, you won't get indexed.

However, if it has happened to you, don't panic! - Most search engines crawl the web on a regular basis. If some of your web pages have been dropped because your server was down, they will probably get back into the index the next time the search engine visits your website.

TIP: There are several online services and software packages available that can monitor your website and report any downtime there might be. If you experience drop-outs in search engines it might be a good idea to use one of these services to make sure your web server does not have too many prolonged drop-outs. You can find a list of many of the tools at ODP.

3. Text and MET A-data - Introduction to the "text and META-data" element

If you want good rankings in search engines than you need good content. Content is King!

The more good content you have the higher your chance of being found. It's like a ticket in a lottery. For each piece of valuable content you have, each web page of use to some users, you have a ticket in the "search-Iottery". The more tickets you have the higher your chance is of having someone click on your link.

On a web page some text can be seen as part of the visual presentation and some text is "hidden" from the normal visitor. META-tags, title-tags, comment-tags (something programmers use to help them navigate the code) and AL T -tags (text descriptions of pictures).

These days search engines have reduced the amount of importance they place on MET A tags, with the exception of the title tag. More weight is placed on the visual text- the text that users will see when they arrive at the web page. The title-tag is technically not a META tag. It is the most important HTML tag on your site. The title tag displays the sites name, which will appear in the top of the browser. All major spider- driven search engines consider the keywords found in this tag in their relevancy calculations. You should pay special attention to this tag, as it carries a lot more weight than most other objects of a web page. You can read more about how to write good title-tags in the next section.

4. Introduction to Keyword Research Before you start optimizing your website you need to know what keywords your target group is using. Your keywords are the words and phrases that people might use to find your products, brands, services or information, via search engines.

You can probably come up with a few ideas very quickly. If you run a travel portal, keywords such as: "travel", "vacation", and "holiday" might be good ideas. But there is more. In fact, a lot more! A deep research into the topic of "travel" would probably show more than 100,000 different keywords people use when they search for travel information. Does that mean you have to target all those keywords? No, absolutely not. You should use such research only as a good starting point. Use it to learn the search behavior of your audience. Find out what they call things, how they identify subjects, how precisely or broad they generally search.

You may find out that the majority of searches for "travel" come from people using combinations of "travel" and a certain city , country or region. Or you may verify that people use "travel" more than "vacation".

Focus on a few keywords for each web page - In most cases a web page will only rank well for a few keywords -the one that search engines determine to be the most important for that page. If you run a travel portal you cannot expect to rank well for the thousands of travel related keywords people are using if you only optimize your front page. Instead, you have to optimize each of the web pages on your website that have content people are looking for- the keywords you have developed through your research.

5. Important places to use your keywords - Search engines weight keywords according to their placement on a web page. There are some spots that are more important than others -places where you should always remember to use the most important keywords for each web page.

6. Link-Popularity

The link popularity element measures the number of links between web pages on the Internet. There are two kinds of links to focus on: inbound links and outbound links -links to your website and links from your website. You can look at inbound links as a form of vote. If site A has a link to site B it is a vote A makes for B: "Look at that site, there is something good here!" The more votes B gets from other sites the more link-popularity B gains.

Now, each of the websites that votes (have outbound links) are actually delegates as they themselves have a number of voters behind them -the websites that link to their website. The more voters they have behind them, the more weight their vote carries on other sites. So the most popular websites have the most link-popularity to pass on.

Some search engines can "understand" the theme of related web pages. For such search engines inbound links from thematically related websites might get a better scoring. Outbound links are a bit different. They work similar to references in a scientific report. If you have references to the right authorities in your profession it shows that you know what you are talking about. You acknowledge the "masters" and thereby put yourself in a category above the ones that don't.

TIP: Not all links count the same! Links from recognized authorities in your industry count more than links from a small private website on a free host.

Do not use free submission software or services to submit to hundreds of thousands of free directories and search engines just to gain more inbound links. Links from most of these places won't do you any good and there is even a risk that some of the links you get this way will harm your rankings.

Do not participate in organized exchanging of unrelated links between websites -so-called link farming, to boost you link-popularity factor. Most search engines consider that to be spam. Instead, focus on getting inbound links from relevant major players in your field -they are the only ones that really count.

7. Ranking Analysis - Introduction
Don't get obsessed with rankings! Yes, it is important to have good rankings for your primary keywords but there are better ways to monitor the results of your search engine optimization campaign than ranking reports. One of the best ways is through traffic analysis as described in the last section. With the right reporting tools you will be able to see what search engines visitors came from and what keywords they used to find you. That is a lot more useful to determine the true value of your work.

Rankings changes all the time Rankings can change any time, any day, hour or minute -and they do. Sometimes you don't even get the same results from a search engine if you test it at two different locations at the very same time. If you want to make ranking reports using automated tools or services you should be aware that they only reflect the situation the second the report was made and from the location it was connected. From another location at another time the results might look very different.

1. No SEO practitioner will intentionally do harm to a client.
2. No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any specifically published and enforced rules of search engines or directories.
3. No SEO practitioner will intentionally mislead, harm, or offend a consumer.
4. No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any laws.
5. No SEO practitioner will falsely represent the content of the client site.
6. No SEO practitioner will falsely represent others work as their own.
7. No SEO practitioner will misrepresent their own abilities, education, training, standards of performance, certifications, trade group affiliations, technical inventory, or experiences to others.
8. No SEO practitioner will participate in a conflict of interest without prior notice to all parties involved.
9. No SEO practitioner will set unreasonable client expectations.
10. All SEO practitioners will offer their clients both internal and external dispute resolution procedures.
11. All SEO practitioners will protect the confidentiality and anonymity of their clients with regards to privileged information and items implying testimonial support for the SEO practitioner.
12. All SEO practitioners will work to their best ability to increase or retain the rankings of client sites.

Overture - Overture removed the max bid information from their search results. We suspect it was because "bots" were mining that information so they made changes to eliminate the unwanted traffic.

Inktomi - November 20th Inktomi announced Web Search 9 – a new set of features for both the users and web site publishers. Important points we've gleaned from their press release are...

Yahoo - Who knows why but Yahoo decided in October to bury its own directory listings and display Google's as the default search results. Otherwise, nothing has changed at Yahoo in the past 30 days. Regarding Yahoo renewals... Worth noting, however, is that if your directory listing comes up for renewal in January then you might think twice about it. Remember, renewal is automatic unless you tell them otherwise in advance. According to Yahoo's terms of service, you've already given them permission to charge your card the $299 annual fee.

AltaVista - AltaVista Trying Harder - November 9th AltaVista introduced a number of changes geared to stem the steady loss of site users. First, they revamped their logo, dumping their familiar mountain top, and they've simplified their pages by reducing the advertising clutter. In regards to search results, Overture still provides the top four "sponsored listings" as well as the right hand column of ads. Now spidering PDF Files

Lycos - No relevant changes this month.

ODP - No relevant changes this month at ODP.