Devour The Web

Ask any business person who’s website is at the top of the search engines if his/her site is making money, and the answer is almost always “yes”.

An example is Glenn Canady, the author of “Gorilla Marketing” who employed only one of these strategies, and it made him over $1 million dollars.

The fact is, search engines can get you an enormous amount of traffic, and it’s traffic to your sites that’s free. However, in order to ethically and effectively market in the search engines, you need to use strategies that actually work.

Below are three different ways to effectively, and ethically, raise your rankings in the search engines. I’ve included seven different resources that you can use that will help you implement these strategies, and do it quickly and easily so that you can begin to see an increase in your traffic almost immediately.

1. Optimize your site.

To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you need to make sure that you are marketing using the right keywords. This means optimizing your site to make sure that the keywords you have on your site are the keywords that your site is actually optimized for.

Sponsored Links

There’s no denying it: Search engines are a dominating force on the Internet, with millions of people going online to search on their topics of interest every single day.

In fact, it was revealed at a recent industry conference that in June of 2005 alone, 10.5 billion searches were conducted online. That’s 10.5 billion searches in just one month!

And people are not just looking for information…

Experts at the same conference said that roughly 25% of all online purchases originate from search engines. So it’s crucial that your site gets the best possible position in the searches for your keywords.

But according to Market Position, a whopping five million pages are added to the Internet every single day. So if you plan to outrank your growing competition, you need to keep constant tabs on changes to how the search engines rank web sites.

However, you should also know that statistics show that most Web surfers never search beyond the top 30 results they receive! So getting ranked 43rd in Google is almost as bad as not getting ranked at all.

Lets get things straight. SEO is a very competitive market. If you have the time to promote your site and have the energy to work hard to get a good PR then this is for you. I have read many books on SEO and tried to get the best tactics to use. If you have already built a website there are two things you need to do. First is ON PAGE optimizing and the second is OFF Page optimizing. On page is basically getting your meta tags and description tags similar to the pages that you have built. One key thing to remember is try to use tags with the keywords in your content. For example: if you have keywords like "SEO consultant" in you content you should bold it and put alt tags around it. Try to do this to each keyword per paragraph, don’t over do it then google will think you’re a spammer. Build pages according to you keywords and description tags.

Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure we’ve got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, we’re mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

Here is a list of the best tools I’ve found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying

Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position.

How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.

Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is easily rectified.

Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be found within "The Robot Exclusion Protocol" which has now been adopted by all the major search engines.

There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site.

1. The Robot Exclusion File or "robots.txt" and

2. The Robots < Meta > Tag

The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)
This is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. Once created you must upload the file into the root directory of your website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Before a search engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content.

The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots Tag.

Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking.

However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives.

1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized

Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices:

- Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages.
- Use of cloaking
- Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google
- Web pages loaded with irrelevant words
- Keyword stuffing
- Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content

2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases

Search Engine Optimization nowadays has a lot to do with building inbound links to your website. Building inbound links is a cumbersome tasks and webmasters have always been looking for shortcuts to do this. Webmasters buy links (as advertising as an example) or contact other webmasters to exchange links with them. The need for inbound links has created a new business opportunity in the search engine optimization industry. The outsourcing of link building emerged from the fact that many inbound links mean a high search engine ranking and/or a high Google PageRank.

There are many different ways of building inbound links. Outsourcing this tasks can save the webmaster a lot of time but it comes with a price tag. Businesses offering to take over the link building process often maintain and operate a large network of domains and websites and just add ‘your’ link to their sites. These sites are often referred to as link farms.

Meta tags are an absolute must from a search engine optimisation perspective, there are many mistakes that can be made by not including these or even trying to ’spam’ the SE’s using them so heres a quick summary of the three main ones:

Meta Page Title Tag

The title tag is supported by all search engines and should be considered as the most important element in your optimisation process. Why is this you may ask? Well the page title is the first thing search engine spiders and human visitors will see. Your title appears at the top of the page in the browser and the title also becomes the clickable link in the search engine listings and should therefore be concise, accurate and include your keywords.

Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag is supported by most of the search engines, it is not as important as the Title Tag because the web page viewer will not see it but the description is sometimes used in the search listings under the title tag and as such should be an accurate and keyword driven description of what the page value is. Google usually uses an abstract of the page content and will use the description tag only if it cannot find enough on page content to form a page description.

MLM has been around way before the Internet. It is a few steps above a chain letter. Well, maybe more then a few steps. MLM has paved the way for people to have their own business. It can start out as side money and flourish into a very profitable business.

Now, you are probably saying to yourself "Joe, what do you know about MLM?" Well, folks in the early days I did MLM. Yes, I am a not proud of it. Not because it’s MLM but, because I wasn’t any good at it. Thank goodness though. I may not have found my calling in SEO if I did. What I am trying to say is…MLM is hard. Nowadays, they try to make it easier by offering you a cookie cutter site. What? A cookie cutter site? Isn’t that bad SEO? YES! MLM in their attempt to help their down-line are actually making it harder. You want to spend more time promoting your site by:

Writing content
Testimonials
Recommendations
Providing tips about the items or products
..and so on.

The Why

But what is the reality of reaching a number 1 position on any of the big three search engines ? Google, Yahoo, and MSN ? and staying there? Somewhere between a remote possibility to impossible.

Why? Because there are well over 16 million websites battling for the number 1 position on "any" given day. Talk about too much competition for one, unique goal. You’d have more luck betting on the lottery, a game of blackjack, or a horse race.

It’s true, my opinion runs against the tide of SEO advocates ? but let your own experience speak for itself. Are you number one on any of the big three? Do you understand the Google sandbox? Most people don’t. It is absolutely a waste of your online time to get caught up in this mania when there are sane alternatives available.

"So Gary, what’s the solution"? I am glad you asked. Let’s take a look at some "realistic" and doable activities that will bring you increased web traffic.

The How

You can…

1) Develop or buy a valuable, high demand product to sell (Ex: Microsoft Windows software)