Misrelate

So, you’ve just paid £300 - £10,000 for a new web site to be designed ‘registered your URL’ and now it’s sitting on the World Wide Web. All your new stationery and Business Cards give the Web Site address quite clearly. The designer assures you that it has been ’submitted’ to all the ‘Search Engines’ and, when you type in the address, there it is.

You’ve told your customers all about it and they visit it occasionally … No-one else seems to find it. No new enquiries and the visitor counter is moving slowly nowhere. Sound familiar?

What could have gone wrong? Was it all a waste of valuable marketing resources? Is the Web a wasteland and has the ‘dot.com’ bubble really burst?

The simple answer is that nothing has gone wrong, all that remains to be done is to ‘market your site’ effectively and the enquiries should come flooding in.

So let’s go back to good, old fashioned, Sales and Marketing basics - AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Unless you get the customers attention they won’t even know your Web Site exists and, if they don’t know it exists, how can they find it among the 2.6 billion other Sites on the Web!!

Entrusting the ’selling’ of your site to a Web Page designer is a little like expecting a printer to distribute your brochures to your prospective customers and waiting for the orders. The responsibility, therefore, is yours and you, or a member of your marketing team, have to grit your teeth and get on with it.

Interest, Desire and Action should emanate from the design and content of your Web Page, however the first step, Getting Attention, has to be done successfully before any of this can take place. This article focuses on this vital first step

How to get Attention on the Net

To get attention on the World Wide Web you have to get your site listed on the major search engines, and that means within the top 20 places, otherwise your prospective customers will find a similar product, or service, long before they reach you.

Imagine the Internet is like a giant Yellow Pages, with no index, wherever it falls open is where your prospective customer starts to look. It is therefore essential that your site is right at the top of the first page they see.

80% of all traffic to a Web Site is through the major search engines and ‘off-line’ marketing activity currently accounts for only 2% of ‘hits’. This will probably continue into the future, so no amount of advertising will bring the response that a search engine ‘listing’ will bring, particularly if you are using the Internet to reach the International Market.

To achieve a high listing you, or someone in your team, have to understand how search engines work and then adapt the web site to get their attention. Alternatively you could pay a consultancy to achieve the same results - however no-one will understand your customers the way you do therefore the time and effort invested in developing net skills in house would be worth it. In addition it would be more beneficial if the person selected were from a Sales and Marketing background, who knows the products, with a smattering of IT know how, than a ‘techie’ - After all, this is marketing.

However, a mistake often arises from a simple misconception. The customer you are targeting with the web site is not the end user - your product, or service, and the design of the site, once they get there is supposed to do this.

The customer for the web site itself is the search engine and its ‘buyers’

The ‘buyers’ fall into 2 categories Search Engine ’spiders’ or ‘robots’ who are totally logical, electronic and not very clever and Human reviewers who are not so logical, know what they do, and don’t, like and may be influenced by a snappy description. Let’s take each in turn

Search Engine Spiders

Spiders are computer programs that roam the World Wide Web ceaselessly, travelling from page to page of every web site they visit remembering every word on every page. They like pages that change and ignore pages that haven’t changed since the last time they were there.

They can only reach a Web site by one of two methods

1 By being told about it - this you can do by registering your site with the search Engine and, eventually, it will send a spider out to visit it.

2 By visiting a Web Site from a link that has been established from another Web Site that it knows about and regularly visits.

The First Rule, therefore, is to register your Web Site with all the major search engines and to begin to develop reciprocal links with other complimentary web sites. The more links you have coming in to your site the more important it must be in the eyes of the spider!

What do the Spiders look for when they visit a site?

Contrary to popular belief, they do not all look for ‘keywords’ - for instance the Excite, Lycos and Google spiders ignore keywords almost altogether - no amount of conjuring with keywords will get your site to the top 20 in these search engines. What will get your site higher in the ratings is the of the site and the of the site. You can check out what the and of the site are by selecting View, Source in the menu bar of your Web Browser - this shows you what the spider, not the visitor, sees.

The Second Rule, therefore, is not to call your site by the name of the company ( as most businesses do) unless your company name is so well known that everyone will search for it, or the name of your company says what you do quite clearly and unambiguously. No-one cares who you are, it’s what you do for them, that counts. If this sounds a little like ’selling the benefits, not the features’ it’s meant to.

For example - imagine your company is called ABC Electronics and that you manufacture electric vehicles in the UK. Then the of your site could be ‘Electric Cars and Vehicles UK, ABC Electronics’

Anyone searching for electric cars and vehicles would find your site at the top of the list, or very close. Whereas if the site were called ‘ABC Electronics Limited’ it would come much lower in the Search Engine listings, if at all, unless someone searched for ‘ABC Electronics Limited’ and, bear in mind, the intention of the Internet is to reach a wider audience - if they knew who you were, wouldn’t they have already contacted you by other means?

Therefore the single most important part of marketing your site is getting the right. However the preceding sentence is written in invisible ink and most businesses will continue to ignore this simple fact.

The Third Rule is to beware of ‘frames’ within your web site, particularly the first page, since some of the spiders can only index what is inside the top frame and not the links you would like it to in the main frame.

If you need to use frames as a navigation tool then consider using a ‘portal’ , or ‘doorway’, page, or one without a frame, as the first, or entry, page of your site. This, at least, should be identified by all the relevant search engines. You would then link this page to the framed pages on your main site. This may result in some of the Search engines only listing one of the pages on your site, however that is a price you may have to pay.

The Fourth Rule is to ensure that the of the site, in particular the first paragraph of text on the page, contains some of the keywords and / or phrases that your prospective customer will be searching for.

There are some technicalities to observe, such as repeating the keywords within the between 3 and 7 times is optimum. Any more than that and the spiders will penalise you and possibly ignore your site altogether, any less than that and you are not taking full advantage of the spiders totally logical process.

Avoid having repetitive text the same colour as the background in the hope of fooling the spider - this is a myth and will result in the spider banning you from the search engine!

So, for the Electronics Company example above. If the text was to the effect ‘Formed in 1985 ABC Electronics is based in Andover, Hampshire, close to the M5, etc. etc.’ the spider will not find the words Electric Cars and Vehicles in the and therefore reduce your rating.

However if the said

‘Electric Cars and Vehicles (as a headline) - Formed in 1985 ABC Electronics is a world leader in the design and development of Electric Cars and Vehicles for the Armed Forces, Electric Vehicles for the Ambulance Service, etc, etc’ the spider would find a high ‘density’ of keywords in the and improve your sites’ rating.

The Fifth Rule is to understand and develop the sites Tags.

Tags are not as important, to some search engines, as the and keyword density of the , but they do include a variety of different items that some search engines and all human reviewers may see which include , , etc. If you employ a range of tactics it will increase your overall success.

This is now the place for on the site - these would be the words that your prospective customers would search for through the search engine. In doing this try to think the way the customer would think - in other words sell benefits, solve problems, anticipate the questions they would be asking. AltaVista and Mirago operate almost exclusively on and tend to ignore .

List all your keywords on a word processing page then prioritise them. What do you think will be the order that people will type in keywords to search for your service or product? Remember, try to think like your customers think, so, for instance, if you produce massage oil is it possible that they will type in sports injury (or injuries)? What does your product do, or solve, not just what is it.

The next step is to pluralise your key words, as in the example above if someone typed in sports injury and your keyword was injuries they would miss you. If you make orange, oranges then searching on either word will find you.

Consider putting in mis-spelt keywords if those words are commonly mis-spelt or mistyped for instance ’servcie’. This is to ensure that people who mis spell or mis type can also find you.

However, a word of warning, the market leader in a particular product range is very low in the ratings on most search engines because their designer mis-spelt a keyword in the design of the web site. If you’re not sure whether or not this is true go to www.google.com and search for ‘veleting’ or the word Barnaley (for Barnsley) - It’s amazing what some people do

Also, it may be useful to include a ridiculous such as ‘agriptanch’, why? Because when you need to find out if your site is registered with a based search engine you simply search on ‘agriptanch’ and if your site is registered up it comes. If not you may have to re-register it.

The next step is to take a calculated gamble and opt for one of the following methods of using the keywords:

Target vs. Blanket

This is deciding whether or not to use a series of keywords that will cover everything anyone could possibly type in when looking for your product or service, or taking the gamble and knowing what he or she will type in and just put that as a keyword or phrase.

So, for example, if you dealt with a specific subject such as Sea Fishing then you may use just that phrase knowing that the majority of people who were searching for you would type that in as their query.

Target will bring you higher on a search engine listing but you have to be certain that people will search for exactly that word, or phrase.

Blanket covers a larger list of key words you will therefore be listed in more categories but lower on the listings for each, since the density is lower.

You are allowed approximately 200 per page, of course, if you choose to target the prospective customer you may only use 2 or 3 of these. Nevertheless the correct format for is word, comma, space e.g. “cleaning, upholstery, upholstery cleaning, etc”

The Sixth rule is possibly the most misunderstood rule of all : Spiders cannot follow graphically embedded links. This means that when your web page designer has put all those buttons and GIFS and animations on the page, if there are no text links to other pages then the search engine will only see one page. This means that if you have a 100 page web site, as far as the search engines are concerned you have given them a book with all the pages stuck together, unless they are linked in a way that the spiders can follow. There are very simple bits of coding that can be placed in the source code of each page to ensure the spiders access all pages.

There are other, more sophisticated ways to attract the attention of the spiders, such as the development and publishing of separate ‘portal’ pages, each directed back to your index page. However, by adapting the information above and applying it to your companies web site you will start to see a rapid increase in visitors and a promotion to the upper echelons of the ‘Spider’ based Search engines.

Human Reviewers

These are people who are either employed by the search engine company or are volunteer editors. They control what appears where in the King of all search engines, Yahoo, and in the human edited directory known as Open Directory. In order to attract their attention you need to develop snappy, factual, compulsive sales copy for the and the element of the web site.

Although these appear in the tags and are therefore unseen by the normal viewer, they are also the words that are used when registering with the Human edited Search Engines. they are the words that will entice them to review and, hopefully, categorise your site.

Restrict the to 150 characters, including spaces, it does not require keywords, but make it appealing to a human being since they probably see hundreds of sites per day. avoid phrases like ’simply the best’, ‘the only web site to visit’. Just like the editor of a newspaper, or magazine they are looking for interesting, quality, information for their clients who are the end users, the people who are ceaselessly searching the Internet for exactly the type of service, or product, you provide.

Finally

Whatever you invest in web site development is wasted money unless you are willing to ‘market the site’ to the Internet ‘buyers’. With 2.605 Billion Web Sites out there (yes it has increased by 5,000,000 since you started to read this article) it’s a little like throwing a pin on the floor, in a house, in London, and expecting someone to find it - without giving them the address.

Go back to basics in sales and marketing - identify the buyer, study the buyer, understand buyer behaviour and then make it easy for them to buy. And remember, if you have a 10 page web site that’s 10 opportunities they have to ‘buy’ since each can have it’s own , , and .

Ensure that you get the Attention of the Search Engine Buyers, work with your marketing department on developing a Site that Interests the end user, builds their Desire to buy your service, or product, and deliver a compelling call to Action that produces e - success for your on-line business.

About The Author

John Saxon is a Companion of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management and a Director of Fastlink Solutions Limited and Site-Pro Limited. He has had a number of articles published in different mediums including the internet and the ISMM Magazine. His web sites may be visited at http://www.fastlinksolutions.co.uk and http://www.site-pro.co.uk

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News broke this week that Yahoo has purchased the Inktomi search engine for around US$235 million. This is an interesting development in the search engine industry that may impact greatly on exactly where sites get their traffic from. Another new development in the past few weeks is the change to the HotBot service but first, I’d like to look at the ramifications of the Yahoo/Inktomi deal.

Here’s a bit of background information on how the Yahoo and Inktomi search engines work. I’m sure everyone knows Yahoo but not everyone may be completely aware of how their search engine works. Yahoo is a directory. This means that it is a categorised list of sites that are listed by human editors. Getting listed in the Yahoo directory requires a yearly payment for commercial sites. You can get listed for free if you have a non-commercial site but it is very hard to do and can take months. Yahoo provides additional results when you use their search function that come from Google. In the past, Yahoo has used other search engines to provide these results (including Inktomi) but has used Google for the last couple of years.

They initially used results from other search engines to just compliment their own. So, if someone searched for something that wasn’t in their directory, they could still get results. The way it worked was that they would provide results from their own directory first and then a user would click on “web pages” to get more results. Strangely, Yahoo actually changed the way this worked during the year so that the results from a search were a mix of listings from their own directory and Google with the Google results being the more prominent of the two. This has essentially made the payment of the US$299 per year for a directory listing an unnecessary expense. Many people still use the directory to browse for sites but, in my experience, more people use the search function.

Inktomi is a full crawler based search engine that provides results for other search engines. They do have a web site but no-one uses it to actually search - it’s more of an informational site. Inktomi’s results formerly appeared in many search engines but in the last few years, their popularity has declined. The main site that currently uses Inktomi is MSN but Inktomi only provides the fifth level of results. MSN provides sponsored listings from Overture, their own Microsoft sites, their own human edited directory results, LookSmart listings and then Inktomi. So, Inktomi does drive traffic to sites but far less than a search engine like Google.

So, what does all this mean to us? It’s hard to say at the moment but there are three options. Either nothing will change (which is unlikely), Yahoo will use Inktomi together with Google on it’s site or it will dump Google and use Inktomi for it’s search results. Yahoo actually owns part of Google, maybe 5%, so there is a chance that they will keep using their results for this reason. Also, Google provide far better results for searchers than Inktomi so Yahoo would be making a mistake to replace Google. But, apparently Yahoo is annoyed that Google has become competition to them through Google’s own site and that Google’s news search service is also providing competition.

Without a crystal ball, it’s very difficult to know what is going to happen but it’s worth making sure that you are prepared for all occurrences. There is really very little that you need to do because it is only the popularity of Inktomi that may change. Even without the searches from Yahoo, Google will still be the biggest search engine in the world due to the fact that it’s own site is very popular and it’s results are also used by AOL (amongst others). So, what can you do to get the most from Inktomi?

Inktomi is the only major search engine that uses meta tags. This is actually the reason that it is not as popular as before because meta tags allow webmasters to “trick” Inktomi into thinking a page has more relevant content than there really is. Therefore, Inktomi’s search results are not very good. However, as there is a good chance that Inktomi will now become popular again, you need to make sure that you have your meta keyword and meta description tags in place. Make sure they are relevant to the page that they are on - you don’t want to be caught “spamming” their search engine. The other thing that will probably make a difference is to get other sites to link to you. Link popularity makes a difference on all search engines except possibly AllTheWeb.

I’ll keep you updated here with any news on what Yahoo decides to do and any changes that I find out about the way the Inktomi generates results.

As I mentioned above, the other major search engine news in the last month is that HotBot has finally updated their site. HotBot is owned by Lycos and was quite a popular search engine a few years ago. It has become far less popular lately - since it was purchased by Lycos and was just left to “die”. It’s results largely came from a mix of the ODP, DirectHit and Inktomi. DirectHit has since become Teoma which is owned by AskJeeves but HotBot went for months after DirectHit ceased to exist saying that it’s results were coming from them.

So, HotBot has essentially become another meta search engine - like DogPile or Excite. It now works pretty much like Netscape does. A searcher can choose which search engine they would like their results to come from. The search engines that you can choose from are Fast (AllTheWeb), Google, Inktomi and Teoma. This may mean that HotBot starts to get some of it’s market share back but as webmasters, there is nothing that we can do to target HotBot. All we can do is target the search engines which provide it’s results.

About The Author

Sean Burns is the author of the WebmastersReference.com Newsletter - http://www.webmastersreference.com/newsletter. More than five years of experience in site design, marketing, income generation, search engine optimisation and more is passed on to subscribers - hype free. Sign up today to get real information of real value to webmasters.

seanb@webmastersreference.com

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Search Engine traffic has always been and continues to be one of the best ways to drive qualified traffic to a web site - it presents information about goods and services when the interest level is high and it can be acted on immediately. Up till now opt-in e-mail marketing has been an effective complement to search engine ranking campaigns; but the never-ending deluge of Spam is rapidly ruining the effectiveness of opt-in e-mail and helping to add luster to the value and cost-effectiveness of search engine traffic.

Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of search engine ranking methodologies is helping to raise the barriers to entry - as more businesses, ad agencies and SEO firms concentrate their efforts on creating highly optimized web sites, the competition for keyword rankings and qualified traffic is increasing significantly. The rules are changing rapidly and if you expect to succeed you must deploy a sophisticated methodology that blends technology and processes. Here is a list of five bottom line requirements that must be adhered to if you expect to generate qualified traffic:

Link Strategy: The web is maturing and search engines are putting more and more emphasis on link popularity or page rank or “PR” in Google’s vernacular; i.e. the number of web sites pointing back to your own. If you are to be successful you must develop and deploy a systematic process to establish links to your web site with others that are in your market segment and setup an outbound “link to” resources page via your own site. This takes an investment of time and resources - typically you need between 400-800 links back to your web site to achieve a good “page ranking.” Here is a link to an excellent detailed article on setting up an effective link popularity strategy:

http://www.website101.com/arch/archive143.html

Keyword Fundamentals: Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of any search engine ranking campaign - many/many companies waste significant resources optimizing for keywords that are either wrong; i.e. not targeted for their market or there is too much competition and rankings will never be achieved. You must utilize keywords that are targeted for your market and find those that can effectively drive page 1-3 rankings - WordTracker www.wordtracker.com has rapidly emerged as the defacto industry standard technology tool for researching keywords - we’ve used it for years and highly recommend this cost-effective and comprehensive service to our clients and business partners.

Keyword Saturation: Search engine “spiders” or “bots” are automated software applications that constantly roam the web to assess what is called “keyword saturation” via web site content (pages) to identify how a site should be listed in a search engine database. They typically look for 3-7% usage of keywords versus the text on a specific page - you must adhere to their standards if you want to achieve keyword rankings for your selected keywords. And, to further complicate matters, top tier search engines all have different rules for keyword saturation - we highly recommend and use this software application to help us ascertain and setup the correct keyword saturation for our client’s web sites:

http://www.se-optimizer.com/

Optimized Content: Highly optimized content is still very important as far as search engines are considered - the more search engine optimized content on a web site the better. Search engines prefer content that is thematically grouped, loads fast, is textual with minimal graphics, is highly optimized for keywords (keyword saturation fundamentals are addressed) and incorporates one or two of your primary keywords for a specific page in the page title.

Site Maps Essential: Site maps are frequently overlooked when search engine ranking processes are deployed. A site map not only serves as a quick reference and/or navigation guide for anyone visiting your web site but it’s also used by search engines to “crawl” (the action a spider or bot takes to review your web site) your web site to find pages and links. Make sure you include a basic site map in your optimization plans, it’s very important to help search engines navigate through your site.

About The Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com, a marketing services company which provides strategic and tactical marketing services exclusively to small to medium sized companies. Lee@intelective.com.

Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications - this article may be reprinted freely, provided this attribution box remains intact. (c) 2002-2003 by Intelective Communications, Inc.

Lee@intelective.com

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Search engine optimization is one of most popular online marketing tool for any website. With most websites looking forward to increasing the online sales of their products/services, search engine optimization can be a very cost-effective tool to target and procure your customers online. In this paper, we will discuss about search engine optimization, its benefits and how you can optimize your website for top search engine rankings.

What is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization (also known by various other names like search engine ranking, search engine promotion, website promotion, SEO etc.) is a method through which a website is given top rankings in various search engines. According to a recent industry study, 1 in every 20 people go to the second page of search results pages, but only 1 in every 100 people go beyond that. So, by top search engine rankings, we mean that your website should be within the first two pages of the search results, preferably in the first page (i.e. within top 10 rankings).

2. What are the prime benefits of search engine optimization?

Top search engine rankings result in more pre-qualified business leads coming to your website which in turn can convert to greater sales for your organization.

Search engine promotion is one of the cheapest methods of advertizing for your organization. Compared to advertizements in the newspapers/magazines or in the television, search engine promotion costs many times less and can bring more traffic to your websites, thereby providing greater ROI.

Search engine optimization enhances online brand identity of your organization.

3. What are the key factors for your website to have top search engine rankings?

Search engines change their algorithms frequently, thereby forcing the search engine optimization companies to re-strategize their search engine optimization techniques. However, the following attributes are basic and play a major role in procuring top search engine rankings.

a. Keyword Research - Keywords play the most vital role in your search engine optimization campaign. Keywords (can be 1, 2, 3 or more words) are the search terms which a surfer types in the search box of a search engine to reach your website. Let us consider that you are an “India-based Outsourcing consultant” interested in optimizing your website for top search engine rankings. The following are some of the keywords which surfers will type to reach your website -

Keywords

bpo

bpo india

bpo outsourcing services

business outsourcing services

business process outsourcing

offshore companies

offshore outsourcing

offshore outsourcing services

offshore services

outsource india

outsourcing companies

outsourcing consultants

outsourcing india

outsourcing services

outsourcing services company

Keyword research tips -

• Always target keywords that best describe your products/service.

• Try to find multiword potential keywords compared to single keywords.

• Try formulating keywords which give answers to as “why/how/what …….?”

• Utilize your server log files to know what your customers searched most while visiting your site.

• Use keyword generator softwares like Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) or Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

• Include popular common misspellings (e.g. viagra typed as viagara etc.) in your keyword list.

b. Title of the webpage - …… - Title has a deep impact on your website’s search engine rankings. Experience shows that most companies use the following as title of their index page which can prevent them from getting top search engine rankings.

Welcome to the website of XYZ.com

For example, let’s continue with the above example of “India-based Outsourcing consultant”.

An ideally optimized title should contain the top 3-5 keywords of your business, e.g. outsourcing consultants, outsourcing india, outsource india

Optimized Title - Outsourcing Consultants, Outsourcing India, Outsource India

c. Description Meta tag of the webpage - Description of a webpage also plays important role in getting top search engine rankings.

Optimized Description - Develop a suitable description based on your top 3 keywords

d. Keywords Meta Tag of the webpage - This meta tag was of great importance at one time. But rampant manipulations (i.e. multiple, often non-relevant keyword stuffing in the “keywords” tag), leading to abuse has resulted in search engines giving lesser importance to “keywords” tag while ranking sites. Nevertheless, you can always place top 3 - 5 keywords of your site in the “keywords” tag.

Optimized Keywords -

e. Importance of Content/Keyword-enriched optimized pages for top search engine rankings -

Well, if there is one aspect which holds supreme importance in search engine, specially in Google ranking, then it is this. Yes, content! The popular industry say - “Content is King” was perhaps devised by watching Google’s love for content. Develop content based on the top keywords related to your business. While developing content for your web pages, keep in mind the keyword density (KD).

Mathematically speaking, Keyword Density is the ratio of the total number of time a keyword is repeated divided by the total content words. Since KD is normally represented in percentage, the above figure is to be multiplied by 100

For example, if you have developed a web page of around 250 words on the keyword “search engine optimization”, and that particular keyword (search engine optimization) is repeated 10 times, then

Keyword Density (KD) = 10/250 * 100 = 4%

As a thumb rule, Keyword Density of an optimized page for top search engine rankings should vary between 2 - 7 % (this figure varies among different search engines)

4. Submission of Keyword-enriched optimized pages - After you have finished content development for the optimized pages based on the keywords targeted for top search engine rankings, submit those pages to various search engines.

1. Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

2. AlltheWeb - http://addurl.alltheweb.com/add_url

3. AltaVista - http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new

4. MSN - http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

5. Role of Link Popularity in top search engine rankings -

Link popularity has assumed tremendous importance for getting good ranks in Google now a days. In fact, what started as a friendly reciprocal link exchange program among various webmasters has now become a sub-industry within the SEO industry itself, with thousands of link farms popping up every day! Yes, if you are interested in getting top ranks in search engines, especially Google, then you must pay effort in building up links for your site.

Create a html page, preferably named as “Resources/Links/Partners” and place a link of this page from Index Page of your site. This page should never be more than 1 click away from the index page of your site, else webmasters won’t be interested in participating in the reciprocal link exchange program.

Target both “industry-related” and “non-industry-related” websites as your link exchange partners. For example, if you are providing outsourcing services, then try getting links from “industry-related websites (i.e. websites dealing with outsourcing services, maybe your business rivals!). This is important, because if 10 of your rival sites give links to your site, then Google will surely pay importance to your site, because getting links from rival companies are difficult. Your site MUST be of some high caliber, else the other 10 sites won’t have linked! Also, try procuring links from top ranked general informative websites as well.

Always exchange links with websites which have high Google PageRank (PR) of at least 4, the more the better! (both Index Page as well as Resources/Links Page of the Link Partner’s site should have PRs of >=4) [PageRank is a proprietary tool that Google uses to determine the importance of a page and varies in a scale of 0 (least important) to 10 (maximum importance)].

Have a link code ready for participating in link exchange program. Here is a sample link code for an India-based Outsourcing consultant.

- Indian outsourcing consultant providing guidance to companies willing to set up outsourcing centers in India.

Always prefer a text link (as given above) in comparison to a banner link, where your chance of Google and other search engine spiders finding the potential keywords is limited only to the “alt tag” of the banner. Also, Google pays importance to the text of the incoming link/anchor text (i.e. the incoming link text must contain high potential, relevant keywords), so develop a link text with title (”indian outsourcing consultant”) which will help you in Google Ranking.

Refrain from javascript link code because Google spider finds it difficult to index.

Key SEO Factors

• Targeting the right keywords for your website

• Title of your webpage

• Description Meta tag of your webpage

• Keywords Meta tag of your webpage

• Quality, Informative Content

• Link Popularity

Conclusion -

With Google’s numero uno position in the search engine market being threatened by arch-rivals Yahoo! [bought Overture, the largest PPC search engine recently, who in turn bought Altavista and Alltheweb] and Microsoft’s MSN [believed to be developing its own search engine], it is no doubt that the search engine industry is going to experience tremendous changes in the next few months. The recent Google “Florida” Update is just one of the many upheavals that we may be witnessing in an industry where the only constant factor is the “change”. However, the various techniques outlined in this paper are basic and are we believe that following them you will be able to achieve top 10 ranks in Google and other search engines.

About The Author

Prabuddha S Raychaudhuri is the Founder & CEO of Search Engine Optimization Guru Pvt. Ltd. (http://www.searchengine-optimization-guru.com), a premiere Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEO/SEM) consultancy firm, catering to clients which range from Fortune 500 to small home business start-ups. Our services include Top 10 Google and other search engines rankings, Pay Per Click (PPC) targeted traffic campaign, Paid Listing Management, Keyword Advertizing. Prabuddha holds a Bachelor Of Engineering (B.E.) in Construction Engineering and can be contacted at prabuddha@searchengine-optimization-guru.com.

prabuddha@searchengine-optimization-guru.com

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