Improve Your Website’s Link Popularity With Directory Submissions

Tips for Choosing a Search Engine Optimisation Company

The immense growth in the amount of time people are spending on the Internet, plus the rising cost of pay per click advertising has seen search engine optimisation become increasingly popular over the past 5 years. Many website owners today are investing in search engine optimisation which makes it harder than ever to achieve top rankings in search engines such as Google.

The traditional approach to search engine optimisation has been the process of selecting keywords, inserting meta tags and then building some links to achieve first page ranking results in Google. However, in today’s highly competitive online market this simplistic approach has been outdated due to increasing competition and the introduction of free tools such as Google Analytics which has made it easy to measure the impact of your SEO efforts.

On this basis Search Engine Optimisation should be considered as a strategy to drive qualified traffic to your website at the lowest cost. The definition of SEO success should be the amount “qualified natural search traffic delivered to your website” and not “rankings achieved”. There is no point being ranked in the Top 10 of Google if no-one is searching for or clicking on your search engine listing.

Are all search engine optimisation services the same?

The principles and promises of high rankings are all the same from search engine marketing companies however, like everything in business the results achieved from one company to another are considerably different. After all, search engine optimisation is a process of out-ranking another website, so your approach needs to be unique to be number 1.

When choosing a search engine optimisation you should ask the following questions:

- What are the traffic results the search engine marketing company has achieved for its clients?

- What SEO results has the company achieved for their own website?

- What is the company’s current client retention rate?

- What resources does the company have available to allocate to your project?

- What are the measures of success for your search engine marketing project?

- What % of the company is dedicated to search engine marketing?

Why outsource search engine optimisation to a specialist company?

The Internet is a serious sales channel today. Top rankings in Google and implementing a successful search engine marketing strategy can have a 6 or 7 figure positive impact on the profitability of your company. Asking your IT person or web design company to be responsible for your search engine marketing is a like asking your Office Manager to be responsible for business development and hitting sales targets.

Outsourcing your search engine optimization to a specialist company enables your business to cost effectively leverage the large investment that SEO company has made in developing its services. You can also access the intellectual property the SEO company has acquired from managing campaigns across their client base. These two factors alone make the business case very compelling for outsourcing your search engine optimisation campaign.

Last by not least when choosing a search engine optimisation company you should always negotiate a performance based contract, as this makes sure both parties work hard towards a mutually beneficial result.

Wishing you and your website online success in 2008

4 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

Tips for the Successful Link Building

At first I want to tell you something about link building basics. Link building is about getting inbound links to your website /link popularity building/ and it is one of the most important aspects when evaluating the quality of a website. Our intention is always to get more visibility and traffic to our website through these links. It is a part offpage search engine optimization /SEO/ and you have to do it, when onpage optimization is done correctly.

With link building you will improve your link popularity and that is important because every search engine /Google, MSN, Yahoo …/ now consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms. It is inevitable part for achievement TOP 10 position in search engines and for the good Google Page Rank as well.
For those who don’t now what the page rank is, here’s the explanation. Google is measuring the importance of the websites with the scale for ranking called pagerank /it is from 1-10/. When you install the Google bar, there you see the pagerank of your website, the higher is the better.

But now, let’s start with link building process. We know 2 types of link building in term of linking:
1. One-way link building
2. Reciprocal link building

The first one gives more importance but it’s harder to get. Here are some simple but effective tips.

1. Getting one-way link is not so easy, because your website must provide some useful and quality information for your visitors so they will link to your site without asking them. Be sure to always create on your website an important page and name it “Links to us”. It helps your visitors to copy and paste the HTML code to their websites; you can also create a small banner ad. If your information on your well designed website is interesting, useful and up-to-date people will certainly link to you without asking. These sort of inbound links are natural and valuable, but this is not the only method to get one-way links. Here is the next:

A, Submitting to the popular and niche directories /the most important free directory is DMOZ.org and paid Yahoo directory/.
Find for your website suitable directories and pages accepting your site. Put into Google, Yahoo and MSN the following word and keyword combination:

“add url” “your keyword” “no backlink required” ,
“submit url” “your keyword” “no backlink required” ,
“submit link” “your keyword” “no backlink required”

By typing these queries to Google you will directly find thousands of one-way links.

B, Submit your website to the article directories

Write an interesting article about your business or interests, but never trade in your article. Try to provide interesting information. If you don’t have time write or you don’t know how to do it you can hire some freelance writer who will do it for few bucks.

Search for article directories, simply type a query to Google:
“submit your article”,
“submit article”,
“add your article”,
“add article”

With these queries you will find hundreds of free article directory sites!

Don’t forget to promote your articles and website at digg.com, del.icio.us, technorati.com, furl.net, rawsugar.com, simpy.com, shadows.com, blinklist.com, my.yahoo.com, google.com/reader, my.msn.com, bloglines.com/help/share.

C, Submit your website to the forum sites

Another way to generate one way links is by participating in forum debates. There is also the possibility to leave your signature and URL. Many forums allow you to register, add a relevant comment or thread and sign your comment with a website. Some forums are so popular and visited that search engines visit them often and can generate a free traffic for you.

D, Leave a comment on other blog sites.

Search for the blog sites related to yours where you can leave a comment.

Type a query to Google:
“Leave a comment” intitle:”your keyword”
“Leave a response” intitle:”your keyword”
“Leave a comment” “your keyword”
“Leave a response” “your keyword”

Always read the corresponding article /blog/, make only on-topic and useful comment, but be careful not to spam.

If you have a blog site, be sure to submit it to blog directories.

E. Press release distribution

Next possibility to get one-way links and visibility is to submit a press release about your site to PRWeb, PRLeap. These sites distribute press releases to major news outlets and syndicates.

F, Email newsletter directory submission

Find email newsletter directories you can get the value from advertising in the newsletter and then benefit from the link in the website archive.

Some newsletter directories:
Ezine-Universe.com, Zinos.com, BestEzines.com, InfoBot.net, LifestylesPub.com, …

G, Buy one-way links

You can also buy links from high ranking sites. It can bring you some traffic and increase your page rank but have to pay for linking back from $10 – $200 monthly depending of the pagerank and position of your link on the website. Quality text links ads you can get from textlinkbrokers.com
There are lots of link brokers out there waiting to sell you a link from a high ranking site. These may have value but I like to look for well established, relevant newsletters that sell ads AND archive past issues on their website

H. Beware of Link Farms you may often heard about getting thousands links but it is not effective and that’s not the way to go.

2. Reciprocal Link Building

The easier way to getting links is asking website owners or webmasters for link back to your website for their link. Always put their link to your website before you asking for a links exchange. It’s harder to say no when you link them back.

To find your competitors backlinks in Goggle, MSN and Yahoo type the following:
Link:www.yourcompetitorwebsite.com try to get backlinks from these sites

Let’s see how to find another link partners in search engines:
“add url” “your keyword”
“submit url” “your keyword”
“submit link” “your keyword”
“your keyword” “link exchange”

Quality reciprocal links you can find by typing the previously mentioned queries in directory.yahoo.com and dmoz.org.

Link popularity building is not an overnight process; it has to be doing properly, continuously, day by day or week by week. You may use some link building software, but when you build links always vary the link building techniques and after 3 6 months you will see how your link popularity and traffic are increasing. You can check your link popularity at http://searchengineoptimization-submission.com/link_populariry.php

How To Choose the Best Blogging Site

Blogging is very popular today. The two main blogging platforms are blogger and Wordpress. The platform that will work best for you depends on many factors. Learning the advantages and disadvantages of each will help you make that decision. Blogger allows you to put up a blog quickly and easily. There is no need for you to have a website or a domain name. Blogger hosts the blog for you. Registration is free and takes only minutes. Once you are registered, you can immediately begin to set up your blog. Templates are provided for you to use and can be easily changed at any time to give your blog a new look. For more details go to www.greatblogbox.com.When you add a post, you simply name it and, if you have a website, link it to your site so visitors can easily visit your site by clicking on the title. Type in your text and preview it to be certain it looks good. Then publish it. Your blog is now live. If it’s this easy, why would you not simply choose Blogger and be done with it? When you get done posting, you need to ping your blog. Let blogging networks know you have just updated your blog. You can do so by going to Pingomatic and entering the name of your blog and the URL address of your blog. Click on the websites you want to ping and you’re done. If you don’t take time to ping, there’s a good chance no one will find your blog. This pinging is not hard, but it is an extra step you need to take when you post, unless you are posting for just family and/or friends. The fact that Blogger is hosted at Blogger also means they can delete your blog at any time. You don’t have total control over your blog. Chances are this will not happen, but it does tend to make many marketers worry a bit. Wordpress, on the other hand, is hosted on your hosting service. You use your domain name and the Word press blog is in its own folder. You have total control over your blog. Once setup, it is very easy for you to post to it. You go into the administration area and write a post. When you are finished, you click to publish it. If you have setup Word press properly and have listed auto posting at Pingomatic, your post will automatically be pinged to the blogging networks. You do not have an additional step. To know more about it simply visits www.bloggers-guide-to-profit.com. There are also many templates for you to use and it is possible to configure these templates to fit your needs. Once again, you have more control. However, Word press can be a little complicated to install and, to take full advantage of it, there are many different plugins you will need to install as well. This can be a bit of a daunting task and something you might not want to be bothered with. You do have to have a domain name and you have to have web hosting set up. These costs may limit the number of different blogs you might want to publish, whereas Blogger allows you to make as many blogs as you want on different subjects and you never pay anything. Some people have blogs using both platforms. You need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each and make your decision accordingly, the best way is to dive in and give it your best shot.

Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips for 2008

As the online consumer becomes more powerful and in control, the focus for internet marketers should moved towards non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns. Online Consumers have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

1. Optimise your website’s content

2. Create a content development strategy for your website

3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign

4. Publicise your website through article marketing

5. Develop a social media marketing strategy

6. Create a Company Blog

7. Experiment with video marketing

8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing

9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing

10. Create an effective email marketing strategy

Let’s look at each of these in more detail:-

1. Optimise your website’s content:

First and foremost, get your website content right. Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines. An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.

2. Create a content development strategy for your website:

In addition to optimising the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously increase your website’s content on an ongoing basis. All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimised for the search engines.

3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign:

When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website. Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

4. Publicise your website through article marketing:

Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicise your website and to increase the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Make sure to publish the content on your own website before submitting it to article directories and publishers. Make it easy for the reader to bookmark your content on social search engines by including a bookmark button at the end of each piece of content.

5. Develop a social media marketing strategy:

Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential component of online marketing and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation. The social media revolution has been known to increase traffic to websites substantially.

6. Create a Company Blog:

In the past, corporates have been focusing marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has changes significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. More and more companies are starting to realise the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.

7. Experiment with video marketing:

There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing.

8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing:

Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.

Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online.

9. Discover the benefits of mobile media marketing:

Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognise the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that there websites are mobile-friendly. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.

10. Create an effective email marketing strategy:

Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.

To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, increase revenue and magnetise your customers!

What Does Seo Mean?

Every new webmaster will eventually run into the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer) when he or she is working on marketing a website. This term can be generic and decisive all in one study.

The term came around at about the same time as the Search Engines started to take hold. Infoseek was one of the first broadly used search engines and the SEO crowd quickly grasped onto designing the sites with SEO as the main intent. The first technique was to simply stuff keywords for the sites into the Meta-tags. This design allowed webmasters’ new sites to go to the top of the search rankings.

Infoseek and the other search engines quickly began working on systems to overcome the stuffing of web-pages with SEO work. This has now cascaded into an all out war between the search engine companies and those proclaiming to be SEO experts.

This war has those that contend that natural web design rules. You design the site for the surfer to browse and review. You pay a small amount of attention to the Meta Tags and the search engines. The individuals pushing the no SEO work are web purist in a sense. They contend that if the browsers can read and display the web properly then the site is adequate.

The middle ground group will argue that SEO techniques are well known and can be utilized to drive the rankings of a site in the search engines. They will use relevant URL’s for websites, write unique content for the sites, write articles to submit for free distribution, and even utilize unique file names for their pages. Each of these is considered natural and common for creating websites. These items also are SEO approved and prevent banning of your site.

On the other side of the fence you have individuals using SEO as their main driving factor for their website design. They will utilize any tactic possible to gain in search engine rankings. Many of these tactics are considered black hat SEO techniques. They will include hidden text, cloaking, spam-indexing, meta-tag stuffing, keyword stuffing and many others.

When the search engines discover the use of these techniques you will be quickly de-indexed, and your search results will drop from the web. Just ask BMW how that affects your rankings, as they were dropped from Google’s searches for utilizing blackhat techniques in 2006.

Blackhat techniques will typically yield a faster return on your website design as they intentionally drive search engine traffic. However, if your site continues to show these items, at some point the search engines will key on this characteristic and ban you from the rankings.

SEO can be a decisive subject on the web. Every website designer and wannabe designer has their stance on what SEO actually means. Making the subject even more decisive is that no-one actually knows the algorithms that Google, MSN, and Yahoo use. So, getting banned for black-hat SEO techniques by one search engine may not affect you in the others.

Types of link building strategies

A site alone cannot achieve the desired marketing success without using certain website promotion techniques. Link building is an effective way of promoting and publicizing a website in the World Wide Web. There are different types of link building techniques and strategies which could help in getting higher rank in the search engine rankings. Proper selection and their usage help in extended web traffic and higher ranking, thus building brand recognition and greater profit. Let’s have a look at different types of link building techniques used by SEO expert:

1) One-way link building
Here one site gets a link on another website due to the quality and usability purpose and not for the business purpose. The website whose link is posted need not provide exchange link of the site on which it is posted.

2) Reciprocal link building
Another widely used strategy of link building is ‘reciprocal link building’. Here there is link exchange between two websites on one to one basis. But one has to be careful in choosing the reciprocal partners, as fraud webmasters can take undue advantage of it. It is advisable to look out for quality partners and review their requests for links exchange before finalizing.

3) Article submission
Article submission in various articles directories is a sure shot method to build effective link building of your website. You can write one article per day or as much as you want and do directory submission of articles. Submission can be done in many directories altogether, where one-way links are given to your site from the articles. Other sites that use your articles also provide one-way link to your site from other websites.

4) Press release submission
Press release submission in various press release directory and leading news site is a best way to get natural back links from your press release articles. You need to write press release article about your new product launches or news releases in your industry.

5) Triangular OR three way link exchange
Here there is one-way link exchange between three websites. For example- site X gives link to site Y, site Y to site Z and site Z to site X. Thus all three sites have one-way links.

6) Social bookmarking and Social networking
Social bookmarking and social networking is one of the best ways to get back links and more visitors to your website. As per my experience it will send more traffic that will help to increase conversions.

There are many more link building techniques which are useful to increase link popularity of your website. Quality link building is far better than quantity link building, so keep working on quality link building and achieve better search engine rankings.

The Only 3 Rules For Writing Articles You Need

Writing articles is nothing more than common sense coupled with a spell-checker program and a little imagination. Plus, the 3 Rules I am about to share with you. First, though, let me tell you about how a high school dropout learned how to write by copying former CBS News Anchor, Walter Cronkite and by using his local newspaper. All he did was apply the “3 Rules for Writing Articles”.

I know you want to know the rules right now, right? First, these are not my rules. These are rules known by all good writers. I didn’t invent them. They were taught to me and I simply use them every day. Here they are:

Rule #1 – “Tell them what you are going to tell them”. This, of course, is your headline like my headline – “3 Rules for Writing Articles”.

Rule #2 – “Tell them”. I am already doing that, right? I started with the first sentence at the beginning of this article and I am telling you right now!

Rule #3 – “Tell them what you told them”. This is the summary, a sentence or sentences that bring the whole point of the article into focus to give you something to remember. That comes at the end.

What about the high school dropout? He simply took a cheap tape recorder, recorded Mr. Cronkite’s newscast every evening, played it back and typed exactly what Mr. Cronkite said. He studied it to see how the three rules applied. He did this over and over and over until he could write his own version of the story. When he felt confident he showed his work to his wife and best friends for critique. He even recorded himself saying the stories into that little recorder, over and over and over. His dream was to be a radio newsman.

Our high school dropout also took the daily newspaper and re-wrote lots and lots of stories, reorganizing the facts, creating his own catchy headlines. Most important? He applied the “3 Rules for Writing Articles” to every article. When he had articles he had some confidence in, he showed them to his wife and best friends for critique. He followed the 3 Rules for several months, working on his writing after getting home from his regular factory job in the evenings. He did this for hours and hours and hours. Practice, practice, practice!

So, where did all this hard work get him? You will be amazed.

Our high school dropout landed a part time job on Sunday mornings as a on-air newsman at a local radio station! His writing and a passable radio voice got him that job. His fellow factory workers laughed at him. Made jokes. “You? C’mon, get real!”. But, did he quit there? No! He kept working on his writing and voice delivery. Hours and hours and hours!

Within 3 months he was full time on the graveyard shift. He quit the factory job. About 3 months later he was on days, Monday through Friday, in prime afternoon drive-time! Within 2 years he was a local TV News Anchorman! Two years later he was Anchorman and News Director! Now, I must point out another key factor in his success. Many professional broadcasters and writers helped him grow along the way. He was never afraid to ask for help on how to improve his writing and delivery on-air. Pride never got in his way. The pro’s were more than willing to offer advice and valuable tips! It was better than a college education.

Now, you may be thinking, “Jim made this guy up. This story can’t be true”.

Well, friend, that high school dropout is me! My broadcast news career spanned more than 15 years. I won several national and local news awards. On my main blog (see Author Box), you can see a photo of me posing with Walter Cronkite in a promotional session for my news program. I also have promotional photos with Dan Rather and Diane Sawyer and photos with many other famous people. I have interviewed every type of news maker from Presidents to killers and rubbed elbows with the rich and famous.

Am I bragging? Maybe. But, the point is, the “3 Rules for Writing Articles” plus determination and practice helped me to become a successful writer and news reporter. They can help you, too! I have given you the starting point. It’s up to you. By the way, you can find other writing guides on my main blog that will help you become an accomplished writer as well.

And, in case you have not guessed, that last paragraph is the “Tell them what you told them” rule!

Yours for success!

Jim DeSantis

Link Building Makes your Website Popular

Link building and link popularity are an essential means for search engine optimization. The passion and effort to build quality links in your website will definitely earn your website a good ranking in search engines. It is an essential marketing tool for any website to market their products and services. The increase in the number of good quality links to your website results in improving your search engine rankings.

Some potent and effective links from popular website can help your website rise to the top in the search engines. Link building is the first and foremost strategy that websites opt for after submitting their website details to search engines. It plays a very important role in popularizing a website on the World Wide Web. It is also true that if numerous websites are linking to yours then you will definitely get lots of traffic on your website. Precisely, more traffic will bring more money and will also expand your business.

Link building can be done by diverse means some as reciprocal links, regular links, newsletters, directories, search engines. In fact it is a search engine optimization technique where every website owner tries to build relevant and quality inbound links to their website. It is also very essential to take care of the quality and quantity of the link that you provide for the website.

Basically there are three types of link building. These are reciprocal, one way and three way link building. Reciprocal link building is an approach considered by many website owners. Through this you provide your own link to other website and other website also gives their link to you. So, here the links are reciprocated with each other. This helps in bringing fame and popularity to both the sites.

One way Link Building is the means through which you can promote your link to other website. It is a great way to improve your link popularity and get a high ranking in the search engines like Google, Yahoo. It is more difficult to obtain than traditional reciprocal links, but surely gets a good ranking among the search engine results in the long run. The services include providing free content, such as access to articles, e-books, directory links, blogs, and business directory links.

Links must be used for the right purposes pointing the online users and make sure that you provide useful and relevant information to the search engines. The links can be bought, sold, traded and can be even received or given for free. A link should be Build focusing the web users. The creative and attractive links are rich in keyword which also serves the purpose of advertisement.

As we know that web exists on links. A systematic approach and a strategic link building process are very essential for an online business to survive. A good strategy for this will bring huge traffic to your site and will also improve your ranking in the search engines. This is also done to improve your website’s link popularity. It brings huge traffic to your website and makes your position strong in the market. Not only this, it also increases your profit margin and taking your business on new highs.

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