Devour The Web

Little do you know but you too could be making mistakes with your website that are costing you your search engine rankings.

Goggle and the other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to keep pace of search engine spammers. Some novice website owners may be like me and be making big mistakes in the eyes of the search engine bots which will lower their search engine ranking or blot their website right out of existence from everyone except those people that have been given their website URL.

Let me tell you my mistakes and what I’ve learned from them… In 2000, I started a small research vineyard. Soon I wanted a website to tell people about it, advise others how to grow grapes, and get my research information out to the public.

I was on a shoe-string budge so I learned HTML myself. My website was quickly posted to one of those “free” website hosts. Two months later, my website was hitting the top “5″ in the search engine rankings for all of my keywords. I had lots of relevant content which made this possible. I was in heaven!

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The new MSN Search is quickly gaining popularity among internet search engine users. Google still being the #1 search engine with Yahoo in #2, and MSN in a strong #3. Each of the three major search engines has their own unique algorithm, and MSN is no different. Over the past several months I have had amazing success with MSN. With a few tweaks and tricks I have all of my sites ranked top 3 (mostly #1’s) with my targeted key words. This article will give you a quick look at how I have managed to rank so high so often.

Choose Your Key Words

In order to fully succeed with msn, you have to target your key words carefully. For example, if you have a forum which is targeting video gamers, you would likely target a key word phrase such as "video game forum." By targeting a specific key word, or phrase, you give your site direction, which will make ranking on search engines much easier. If you are unsure of which key word(s) to target check out this key word suggestion tool from Digital Point.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/?keywords=fgfgf

Add key Words To Your Title

We’ve all heard that familiar expression, "Good things come to those who wait". Whether you’re waiting for your Heinz ketchup to pour out onto your burger (remember those commercials?), waiting for Christmas day to open your gifts, waiting for summer vacation to be let out of school, or waiting in line at the DMV? well, maybe not the DMV, good things will come if you simply allow them to come in their own time.

Under normal circumstances that expression is simply not true. You’ll still get your ketchup if you shove the butter knife into the bottle, dragging it out onto your plate; open all your gifts on Christmas Eve; skip that last few pointless days of the school year; or get into the express line at the DMV. The real lesson behind the cliche’ is that patience is a virtue.

One instance where it’s is true, that good things come to those that wait, is when you are performing search engine optimization. Unlike placing sponsored ads via Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing, where results are almost instantaneous, the long-term return on investment for SEO is considerably better than most other forms of on- or off-line advertising. Unfortunately, SEO does not produce instantaneous results. And yes, patience is still a virtue.

Increase Your Google Page Rank!

Page Rank. We all know what is. We all want to rank higher. Higher rankings mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To web masters it means achievement. They have accomplished a move in the right direction. A high page rank to a website owner is money in the bank. It is also an impressive accomplishment. To other website owners your page rank may be a source of envy.

To Google your page rank means quality, importance and relevancy. It lets Google know you are a viable resource and a valuable asset. Google takes your Page Rank and combines it with their text-matching techniques. This, combined with a page’s content and the content of the pages linking to it, determines if your site is a good match. So, a higher Page Rank will certainly help you on Google.

As for surfers. Most of them could care less about your Page Rank. In fact, many of them don’t even know what it is. However, those that do use it in a different way. Some use it as a way to unofficially gauge your credibility.

Google is the major search engine webmasters have to deal with in regards to gain traffic from a search engine. Yes, Yahoo and MSN are big, too - but they are only follow-ups compared to Google’s popularity. While you can gain significant traffic from these 2 great search engines, having a good spot in Google is critical for a website’s success.

Google PageRank is one visible sign of how well a website can do in Google. It is by far only one indicator and not the one sign of success in Google. The quarterly updates to the Google Toolbar show how websites can move up or down in the popularity rankings. PageRank is calculated by how many other websites link to a certain website. A combination of own PR and if a link is related to the overall category a website is in, will determine how valuable the link is and what PR a linked to website will eventually gain from it. The hunt for links to a domain is a task for every webmaster who wants to have a successful website.

So you have a site concept developed that you are ready to start writing great content for.

So what’s the next step?

It’s time to develop your ” master keyword list ” which you will use to craft your WebPages. These are the words or phrases you would like to get ranked high in the search engine’s for and get the free targeted traffic that this will bring to your website.

It is not enough to simply “pluck” words from the air and start writing your web pages. You need to carefully select which words and phrases to target.

Food for thought:

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What if there are already 10 billion web pages about your chosen keyword(s)?

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Do you think a small business owner can compete with large companies who invest millions of dollars into their SEO strategies for highly competitive, high traffic keywords?

Obviously the answer is no but there is a bright side to the equation if you are willing to invest time into researching your keyword phrases carefully. You will want to choose “niche” keywords that offer a combination of high traffic and low competition.

Time is a factor

To obtain positive results is not very fast to achieve. It always takes time to reach a good ranking on search engines since there are millions of web pages to be indexed in their databases. So it takes approximately between six months & one year to see ranking results according to new strategies set by search engines specifically Google, taking into consideration of doing the least effort to reach so. At frequent basis you will need to add new fresh text content & resubmit every time a significant change is done to your website. Always make sure that the submission process is done manually otherwise the automated system could lead your site to become penalized since spiders have the capability to identify them.

How search engine spiders index pages

Spiders are completely automated programs made by search engine companies in order to web crawl pages then take keywords & index them in databases to return the search results you find. The conclusion above explains that spiders do not understand anything about what your site says , they ranking system is done automatically, therefore before any submission action takes place make sure the guidelines are followed properly.

This is the second part of an article series in which you’ll find many tools that you can use to monitor your site’s search engine position and see how your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts are coming along.

The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I’ll point you to one of the master lists when we get into more general tools in part three.)

Using Your Google Site Information Page

I’ve covered this in an earlier article, but just in case you missed it, we’ll go over it again briefly here. (If you need more help following along, you can listen to one of my recent podcasts for a convenient audio walkthrough.)

Open up your browser and go to Google’s home page. Type in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com you’d type info:exactseek.com. You can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider.

When you were just a young and precocious student of marketing, someone explained to you how to market to humans. “Know your target audience!” said the experts. “AIDA method!” they pressed on.

“Attention. Interest. Desire. Action.” You know this old drill. “Make it happen in the minds of your hungry buying prospects!”

Then you went to the web. Ah, web marketing… a horse of a different color. Now it’s all about the Engines. What do the search engines want? What are those crawlers looking for?

So you switched gears, forgot about your old friend Aida, and started shelling out bucks for SEO experts to tweak your website. You signed another fat check over for a long list of email addresses. You paid for expensive programs so that you could slut your company name and logo around the net! You even dished some dollars for that danged popup campaign… something you swore you’d never do…

All of this SEO stuff can’t be a bad thing. But did you forget about your target customer? He’s still a HUMAN. So as much as you want to leverage your search engine strategy for the most exposure, don’t forget to send some marketing love to the human beings who are seeing your ads all over the place.

Web marketers, do you hear what I hear?

“Click-click BOOM”

That’s the sound of your new linking strategy that’s going to positively blow your competition clear out of the water.

Click-click BOOM.

That’s your target customer, doing her thing, clicking on your URL and dropping onto your landing page, where she is about to be converted to a loyal paying customer for life.

Set your sights on the target customer.

Nowadays, the term “target audience” is so overused that it’s become trite and meaningless. But the fact is, targeting your ideal prospects has never been more crucial to the success of your web based business. On the web, you’re competing with the ENTIRE GLOBE… so if you don’t zero in on that single prototype who’s juiced for what you have, you’re wasting precious time and energy sending your message to the wrong eyes and ears.

So: pick a customer. Zero in on his wants and needs. Speak in words he can understand. Then, sell him something he can USE.

Choose your marketing weapon.