Image courtesy: SEM Basics

I found a very interesting SEO software while I was surfing through the internet. It is called the “SEO Elite”. I will explain its details in this post. If you are interested in buying a good and efficient SEO software to automate the hard SEO process which will reduce your time and money, I recommend this as a good one.

As I have explained you earlier, you must do a background study on any website which sells products online. Otherwise there is a great chance that you will lose your hardly earned money. Therefore first I checked its Google rank. It is 5/10 currently which is an indication of high traffic to the website normally at least few thousands per day. If this website is doing a fraud, they won’t have this much of traffic and a page rank. I also checked the website with Alexa.com and its rank is 16,167 which is a global rank, also indicating a high traffic website. Following is the traffic chart of SEO Elite from Alexa.com for the last 6 months.

Here’s a small extract from the product website. There are many explanations in the website. If you are interested, have a visit and explore yourself. I wish you good luck on your SEO work.

Here’s a small extract from the product website. There are many explanations in the website. If you are interested, have a visit and explore yourself. I wish you good luck on your SEO work.

It’s a piece of cutting-edge technology powered by the cries of regular people just like you and me who were sick and tired of being kicked around the internet by their competition and the “big” SEO firms.

I say “big” because after I released this software to the world, a whole lot of things have changed online because…

Big SEO Firms Have Lost Their Iron Grip!

They no longer control the masses - they no longer control YOU.

…Because this incredible software has empowered the average person, any person, including you…to take command and control your internet traffic with just a few clicks of your mouse!

Image courtesy: Erling Steen

If you have read my previous posts on SEO, you might remember that I mentioned somewhere that we can’t optimize a webpage 100%. Even if we can do that, it won’t be a successful effort as the search engines don’t like fully optimized web pages. They always try to find the webpage which satisfies maximum of the searcher’s requirements, NOT the best optimized page. In this post I will explain you about the mistakes that you must avoid when doing SEO.

If your website page title and <H1> header has the same word phrase exactly, all the links to that page in other web pages of your website and links to that page from other websites contains the same word phrase used in the Page title description, the search engine bots will identify that you have done SEO more than required. They will degrade your search results and the frequency of crawling will be reduced. You have to make sure that you don’t do this mistake.

There is another concept called “Avoiding poison words”. Poison words are a set of words that search engines don’t like to see in a web page which have been used for SEO purposes. For examples, words like “link exchange”, “add URL”, “Forum”, “Guest book” or “link partners” which are commonly used in link building. If you want to use these words, make sure that you use other words for this. I hope that you can find many other words or phrases as the English language has many . Then you can avoid the bad reaction of search engines for poison words.

Google is more interested on improving their search system to facilitate informative search while Yahoo is more interested in business search. You have to consider this also when doing SEO according to the niche of your website.

You must always try to make a natural appearing website with SEO techniques used, rather than a highly optimized one. If your website can provide valuable information that people like, they will definitely link you back. By doing this you can build a good brand for your website and which will ultimately improve your ROI (Return on Investment). What I believe most is that, as long as your website appears natural, informative, original and useful, you will find new visitors and loyal customers. If you do SEO more than needed and copy others work, you will lose everything after some time.

I hope that you gained something from this post. In the next post, I will explain you about the www and search engines.

Rank of a website directly shows how important the website is and the frequency of the people who access it. There are many websites dedicated to rank every website in the internet according to various ranking formulas and algorithms. Therefore the rank of a website definitely varies from a ranking organization to another. But there are mainly two organizations to find a reasonable rank value where most of the people around the globe trust. As I promised you in the earlier post, I will explain how to find the rank of your website or another website using these two organizations. It is very important to find the rank of another website when you plan to purchase a good or service (for SEO, to register in paid web directories and to publish press releases).

The first rank I recommend is Google. The Google’s ranking algorithms are so complex and changing time to time. It is the most respected in the Internet as far as I know. There are many websites who shows the Google page rank of a website by asking to enter the URL of the website. But we can’t be 100% sure about their accuracy. My advice is to download the freely available Google toolbar for your web browser (offered for Firefox and IE). After downloading and installing it, restart the web browser. You will find the Google toolbar attached to your web browser as follows.

Now you are ready to find the page rank of any website you prefer. All you have to do is, go to the website you like to find the page rank. After it is fully loaded look at the small horizontal box in the Google toolbar as follows.

If Google has started ranking for the website you accessed, the box will appear activated and if the website has a rank > 0, it will be displayed in green color. When you take your mouse over it, it will show the page rank as a fraction of 10 (Ex. 1/10, 2/10 to 10/10).

Oops! I forgot to tell you about the Google rank range. Google rank starts from zero and ends with 10. If the website has a rank 10, it is the best (I couldn’t find a website ranking 10 up to now.). If the above mentioned box in the Google toolbar is inactive, most probably the website is new. Otherwise it is not publicly listed. You have to e careful when you pay for these kinds of websites. My personal advice is to find a website which has a rank greater than or equal to 5, if you plan to pay for a good or service offered online.

The other most respected ranking organization is alexa.com. It is more informative than the Google toolbar. But the ranking algorithm and criteria is different from Google. The websites having higher ranks in Google also have higher ranks in alexa.com normally. Therefore any respected and trusted website will have similar rankings in Google and alexa.com. Those ranks will not be the same. But both will show higher ranks for trusted and famous websites. Alexa.com shows a graph of website traffic for any website which is among the top 100,000 websites. It also shows the number of visitors from each region/country. And there are many other statistics displayed. With alexa.com, you also have the facility to compare traffic of multiple websites up to 5. This is a very good feature provided there if you are in a situation where you have to make a choice from multiple numbers of websites. I used this technique to find my webhost as I had to make a decision to choose a web hosting company from multiple websites.

If the website you wanted to find the rank shows higher ranks in both Google and alexa.com, you can trust it. I advise you to find traffic details of it using alexa.com ranking as it will show you the recent progress or decline of traffic of that website. Always try to choose a website which has a steady traffic. It is better not to choose new websites for your payments.

Now you know how to find the rank of a website and sometimes you might find the page rank of this website :-). You won’t be able to find a higher rank as this is a new website. But I hope that you will trust me on the future information that I’m going to provide freely. In the next post, I will move back into SEO and I will explain you about the most common SEO abusing methods which will affect your website badly.

Image courtesy: мarcos

If you have read my previous post, you will remember that I mentioned about the importance of having links to your website from other websites. Registering with directories is a way of link building. But it is not the most productive way. In this post I will describe you how to build links with other websites. This is actually the most important part in SEO. Therefore you must put a very good attention on this topic.

The success of link building is having a good content and good communication skills. As I mentioned you in an earlier post, you must have a good content in your website in such a way that other webmasters will like to link to your website. The design of your website will also play a significant role here. It is not bad to say that “Content is the king” for SEO. Make sure that your content is really yours. Many people who wish to become internet giants, copy others content and put them in their websites. They might be successful to some extent. But they won’t be able to reach their dream as they are cheating and they don’t provide their legitimate content. The copyright laws are very strict these days and they will be banned if proven that they copied.

Register with forums, community networks and websites and always try to give something useful and valuable in the discussions, comments and blog posts. Write articles to ezine websites like ezinearticles.com and articlebase.com with links to your website following their guidelines. When you participate with the above activities, always find high ranking websites. I will describe how to find the rank of a website in the next post. Then your website ranking will increase more compared to low ranked websites. Participation in forums will also help you to understand the customer needs of your niche. You will find new business ideas from these.

Press releases are another efficient way of building links to your website. Press releases are available in free or paid format. There are many service websites who take your press release and submit to many press release websites which saves your time and money. Most of these services charge a service charge. But if you can afford, these are very efficient in releasing press releases. Some free press release services are also effective as far as I know. The best way you have to do is, surf through the internet and find these websites. More you submit, more will be the links to your website which results a higher rank. Press releases are the best way of promoting your new product and services. Any time you submit a link, make sure that you put your best key word phrase there.

If you are in a very competitive market, you may consider of renting links and building link networks. This will help you to be more competitive with your opponents. But never do illegal things to make your website highly ranked. It won’t do any good for you and you will lose everything you have now.

Find the websites in your niche and try to exchange links with them. You must maintain a good communication to do this. I recommend you to read my article “How to write professional emails” before sending emails to other web masters. First add a link to the website from your website. Then contact the webmaster of that website by sending a professionally and politely written email indicating that you have put a link in your website and you will be grateful if he or she can add a link to your website. Also mention that, if you don’t receive an email from him or her within a specified time period (normally 48 hours), you will assume that your proposal is rejected and the link will be removed.

I hope that you gained a good knowledge on how to build links to your website. One thing I have to mention here. Don’t expect quick results for your actions. It will take some time for your methodologies to work. And if you have some luck, the time taken will be little less. Therefore I wish you good luck on your link building effort. In the next post, I wish to explain you how to find the rank and reputation of a website.

Image courtesy: wvgasguy

In this post, I will explain you how to optimize your whole website for search engines for a better ranking and traffic. And I will also explain you on registering with web directories which is a very good source of traffic. Always keep in mind that I’m explaining you the most proven methods in website optimization. As we all are aware that the internet technology is changing and improving, the techniques might change and improve. But these basics won’t change. It’s your responsibility to learn those new optimization techniques and apply them to your web page.

As I explained you in an earlier post, the design of the website plays a major role in attracting visitors. Therefore you must design your website properly and cleanly. Use CSS as much as possible as CSS makes your website more stable in the aspect of design. The best practice is using a single separate CSS file in your website copy. Another thing that you must do is link to other pages and main pages within the content of any page as much as possible. This will keep your visitors in your website for a longer time. Always try to link trusted and reputed content pages of other websites which are relevant to your niche. Visitors will love this and they will understand that your website is not only business oriented, but informative too. By doing this you can build the trust of your customers.

Always try to use a description when you link to another page or any other component. For an example, let’s assume that you are linking to a page related to “Free offers”. It is more efficient to use a phrase like “Here are some free offers” (ie. <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/free-offers.html”>Here are some free offers</a>) rather than the URL as it is (i.e. <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/free-offers.html”> www.yoursite.com/free-offers.html </a>) or a word like “Here” (ie. <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/free-offers.html>Here</a>).

A sitemap is a very efficient way to make your website friendlier to search engines. Then the search engines can spider through your whole website very easily. You have to consider about the navigation of the website also. The best method is using text based navigation. If you use image based navigation to make your website more attractive, always remember to use an alternative text (i.e. <a href=http://www.yoursite.com/abtUs.html><img src=http://www.yoursite.com/aboutus.jpg alt=”Home page”></a>). You can use a background image and text navigation.

Another important thing is a breadcrumb. If you use a descriptive breadcrumb with the relevant keyword or keyword phrase, the search engine would love to crawl through your website as it helps to understand the structure of your website. And it also helps the visitors and customers of your website. You can do it in an informative way as I mentioned below.

Home page -> Main page -> Page 1 -> “you are here”

Actually it’s your imagination to be more creative, but make sure that you follow the basic guidelines. These are the main things you must do to optimize your webpage. I will update you on the future development techniques of this part.

Let’s move on to the submitting of your website to search engines. I assume that you have followed all the steps I mentioned up to now and your website is hosted after many cycles of full vulnerability and quality checks. Always keep an updated copy of your hosted website with you. If you want to make changes after hosting, first do it with your local copy and test it properly before uploading it into the server to go live. Now you have an optimized and completed website hosted and ready to do business. What you need now is the traffic as much as possible. Without traffic, you are completely lost. The first traffic generators for your website are web directories.

Web directories can be divided into 2 major parts as free and paid. Free directories are less effective compared to paid directories. But the free directories are not 100% useless. If you do a Google search for free web directories, you will find many. There is no point of mentioning some of them here as those will change with time. Some directories offer both free and paid services. But they give a higher priority for paid listings. My advice is to use these directories as much as possible according to your budget for marketing of your website. Make sure that you add your website in categories which are relevant to your niche for a higher traffic. Higher the number of links to your website from other websites, higher the search engine ranking and traffic. It is simple like that. Therefore try to make links to your website from other websites as much as possible. If you pay for listing in a directory, make sure that you pay for the high ranked websites. You can have a higher rank if you have links from high ranked websites.

I think that I have covered all the important parts in website optimization and registering with web directories. In the next post I will explain you how build the links to your website from other websites, which is a very important segment in SEO.