Keywords Are King!

Good keywords bring lots of traffic, bad ones don't. If you want free search engine traffic, the first thing you need to do is to find out what exactly it is that people are searching for in the area that you're focused on. Then you pick key words that relate to your topic of interest, and that people are really searching for. You can have the best content in the world, but if you optimize for the wrong keywords you still won't get that sought after traffic.

For example, let's assume I am going to build a site about water heaters, and I want people to come to my site. I need to find out what kind of information about water heaters that people are looking for so I can build pages optimized for the keywords that people are really using.

The first thing I do is go to a keyword tool to do my keyword research. There are a number of keyword tools online, my favorite is Wordtracker. Others include KeywordDiscovery, and the Google AdWords suggestion tool There is simply no substitute for doing your keyword research. With these tools you can put in a seed word or phrase, and the tools will provide you with lists of related keywords and keyword phrases that are searched for, and how many times per month they are searched for. Using these tools there are ways to estimate the size of the market for products and services, ways to optimize you web pages, find new niche markets, and much more.

With Wordtracker I find quickly that many more people search for "tankless water heater" than search for water heater...which surprises me. Nearly as many people search for "hot water heater" as search for "water heater". Wordtracker also informs me that there are far fewer websites trying to be ranked high for "hot water heater" than for "water heater". Ah-Ha! I'll be sure to optimize a few pages for "hot water heater". In fact, I find that the terms "tankless water heater", "tankless hot water heater", "tankless water heaters", "electric tankless water heaters", and "tankless heaters" all have more people searching for them than "water heater".

Single word keywords are very difficult to get high rankings for, so it's wise to shoot for longer keyword phrases. Three and four word phrases are what I use most often.

After finding out what information people are looking for, and what keywords they are using to find that information, you can build the appropriate pages and optimize them for those keywords that have significant traffic searching for them.

Now that we have our keyword list and we are ready to build our pages, where do we put the keywords?

The first and probably one of the most important places to have your keywords are in the title tag. This is one of the tags in the head section of the html code of your web page and lists the title that is displayed in the web browser. Internet Explorer displays this tag in the top bar of the browser window. It's very important that you always write for humans. The search engines are getting smarter and smarter, and they are looking for sites optimized for humans, not search engines.

Get some of your keywords into the keyword meta tag, not crucial but it won't hurt.

Make sure you have some keywords in your Alt tags for your images...don't overdo it though. Write it for humans, but try to work a few keywords in if you can. Alt tags are displayed as a popup when you pass your mouse over an image.

The Description Meta Tag is still a valuable place to use your keywords. Many search engines will look at the description Meta tag for keywords to compare against your body copy. Yahoo uses your description tag as the description of your site in their listings. Consider the description tag just like it is named, a concise description of your site. Keep under 50 words.

Your body copy is obviously a very important place for placement of your keywords. Remember, write for humans. If your keywords don't appear in your body copy, you won't place high in the search engine results for those keywords. Work your keyword into the text appropriately. Select one or two keywords and make the page specifically about those keywords.

Use your keywords appropriately for humans on your site where you can. This will increase your search engine effectiveness.

About the Author:

William Lund has been a webmaster since 1998. His website provides free information about website design, development, promotion, and monetization. For more about keywords and other website topics visit: Lund One Web Marketing and More. Mr. Lund Also has a blog: Pondering Everything.

SEO Software: What's the Best?

Using the right SEO software is one of the most important things you can do for your website's success but finding it is not always easy. The products you hear the most about are often just the most advertised and not necessarily the best, or at least not the best to fit your particular needs.

For the most part, just about any product can help you in some way unless it's a real piece of junk. So if you already have one and are not getting the results you want, try to spend a little more time with it and make it pay off. But if you are looking, read on. This article focuses on three that have helped thousands get the ranking they need. Even if one is not right for you, you can see what the top rated tools do.

But before we dive into the tools, let's look at why we need them. In short; using SEO software is like buying time and expertise. A good product will save you a great deal of time and deliver the results of a search engine optimization expert. If you have a lot of free time to learn and perform manual SEO, you can save a hundred or so bucks and do it all without a tool. If you'd like to see faster results and focus your time in other areas, it's probably worth the money to buy a good product. Of course with so many claiming to be the best, the hardest part is finding the one that will work for you.

Over the past nine years, as an SEO consultant, I've used over a dozen well known, and not so well known SEO tools. The results have varied from "Wow!" to "What a waste!" We'll focus on the "Wows!" , one of which is likely to do what you need; 1.) SEO Equalizer, 2.) Traffic Travis, and 3.) SEO Elitek (what SEO professionals use to get the best possible results in the least possible time.)

So here they are, arranged by cost starting with the least expensive...

1.) SEO Equalizer ($77)

Those new to SEO, looking for a jumpstart with SEO software have found a winner with SEO Equalizer. It became popular as an SEO spy tool and soon caught on as a great link building program and keyword analyzer. It provides an easy 'in' for anyone wanting to take control of their Web placement destiny. It's great for anyone who wants to minimize spending, boost ranking and does not mind waiting a little longer to see great results (as compared to the Pro Pick, SEO Elite below.)

Here's what it does best:

A.) Finds your most competitive keywords and phrases.

B.) Locates and analyses competitor sites.

C.) Builds and helps maintain link partnerships.

Quick to learn and easy to use, SEO Equalizer is also one of the best bargains at $77 for a full license.

2.) Traffic Travis ($99)

This is a one of those hidden gems you dream about finding. A great app that not a lot of people know about (probably because the name is not very descriptive.) With a price tag of about $100, Traffic Travis is powerful enough for professionals and easy to use for a website owner, new to search engine optimization, who just wants results with very little learning curve.

Traffic Travis is like the "Swiss Army Knife" of SEO software and has become known as the "Site Owner's Best Friend." Here's some of what it does...

A.) Finds, sorts and organizes your most important keywords. B.) Shows your site's (and competitors') rankings on major search engines. C.) Completes full SEO page analysis for any Website, so you can see what the top ranked pages are doing right for 'on page optimization' and how you can do even better.

D.) Helps build and manage backlinks (very important for Google.)

E.) Manages your Google AdWords campaign if you do PPC.

F.) And even builds online survey pages to quickly collect visitor feedback once they find your site.

It's tough to do an "apples to apples" comparison of this one with either of the others. It wears a lot of hats that Website owners can benefit from. Like SEO Equalizer, Traffic Travis has shown me slightly slower results than SEO Elite, but is a great value.

3.) SEO Elite ($167)

My first "Wow!" happened in 2005 with SEO Elite. This app was the first truly affordable piece of SEO software I came across that did all it promised. At $167 it's about half the price of similar products but packs a lot more punch. It has three things that impress me almost as much as the results it gets...

1.) No annual feës (unlike some that charge $100 a year in "subscription" fees.)

2.) Free upgrades for life (I'm already on my third version and it just keeps getting better!)

3.) No Questíons Asked, 8 Week Guarantee or full rëfund.

That's why I bought it. This is why I kept it...

Google results after the first four weeks:

# 1 Spots = 7

# 2 Spots = 11

# 3 Spots = 16

Links = 409 high quality inbound links obtained (extremely important to rank well on Google)

That was all in the first month and for just one site. In the three years since then I have received hundreds of additional top rankings spanning multiple sites.

Here are some of the things SEO Elite does very well...

A.) Let's you check your site's ranking for unlimited keywords on the major search engines.

B.) Tracks any changes in rank and notifies you.

C.) Finds the best possible link partners for your site, based on Google's standards.

D.) Shows which partners are still linking back to you.

E.) Performs backlink searches on all major search engines.

F.) Analyzes and compares special search commands on Google.

G.) Finds exactly which websites your competitors are advertising on.

H.) Helps you eliminate any penalized websites you link to.

If you need great SEO software, can invest $167 and don't mind spending a few hours mastering a new tool, SEO Elite is worth looking at. It's the most widely used professional SEO software package for a reason. For a very special offer on SEO Elite, Click here...

Getting the right SEO software can be the best buying decision you ever make for your website.

About The Author
Scott Jason has been an SEO professional since 1999 and has had the opportunity to see the release of new SEO software products first hand, often as a Beta tester. The founder of BestSEOcopywriting, Scott also servers as the software reviewer on several popular blogs.

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Search Engine Optimization: How to Do-It-Yourself

There have always been do-it-yourselfers succeeding at web promotion and search engine optimization. In fact, many of the established businesses offering web services today came from humble beginnings, perhaps nothing more than a college student with a laptop, an internet connection, and too much free time. The Web evolves as the result of the innovation and experimentation of individuals. The sharing of knowledge. The do-it-yourself attitude.

As text link brokers and mass link networking decrease in value and use in social media increases, it becomes more important for companies to have an internal approach and awareness of search engine marketing. Don't get me wrong; outsourcing to SEO firms is still a smart option. That said, making the most out of Web 2.0 usually requires some level of cooperation between SEO firm and site owner. You don't need to be an expert to know the basics of good SEO practices, and that added knowledge will be a great advantage whether you're working along side an SEO team, or promoting your own site in your spare time.

So if you're on a "need to know" basis with SEO, the following points should illustrate what an overall plan should include:

1. Create Search Engine-Friendly Content

Unique web content is your most valuable asset, and ensuring search engines can read it is crucial. Text embedded in images or Flash cannot be read, so make sure you use important keywords, headings, and hyperlinks in plain text form. Instead of using images as navigation links, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) makes it easy to format those links to look more like 'buttons', thus creating powerful anchor text as well as making it visually appealing. Use heading tags properly and don't try to hide keywords or text by making it the same color as the page background or shrinking it so it can't be seen. Make sure the keywords you wish to rank high for are used frequently in the page copy but within reason.

Now that you've created good content, is it actually being crawled? Copy and paste a page's URL into a search engine to see if it has been indexed. If you've just created the page, it may take a few days to show up. Aside from age, many factors can lead to web pages not being indexed by search engines, such as duplicate content (ie. a printer-friendly version of a page might be indexed and the normal version not, or vice versa); links generated by JavaScript instead of HTML; poor site architecture (ie. using too many sub-directories); lengthy, dynamically generated URLs using special characters; and orphaned pages.

2. Choose Your Keywords Wisely

One of the first steps of SEO, this one needs to be done properly the first time or all your future efforts and promotion could end up being wasted. Start by writing down general terms that describe your products, services or web content. Use keyword research services to investigate word and phrase variations. Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, and the Google AdWords suggestion tool are good starting points. The goal is to find those niche phrases that your target market uses to find sites just like yours and optimize your site for them. If the phrases do not get enough use by searchers, your profits from ranking for them will be low. At the same time, stay away from general terms that are tougher to rank for (ie. like "art", "computers", "business", etc.) as a great portion of the traffic will be irrelevant and you'll break the bank attaining such competitive phrases.

3. Get Others to Link to Your Site

In theory there are countless ways, some traditional and some quite innovative, to get other web sites to link to yours. In practice, it can be easier said than done. Google defines a link as it pertains to rankings and SEO as a "vote" from one site to another. The more quality votes your site receives, the greater chance you have of rankings well. If a well established site links to yours, that link carries more weight than one would from a mom & pop shop or less reputable page.

If your site has useful content and is doing something unique, you're already ahead of much of the competition. People need a reason to link to your site, as very few will do it out of the goodness of their heart. Trading links can work, but link exchange networks have decreased in value and won't be of much use in competitive fields. Buying links, if you haven't heard, is a big Google no-no. While entire articles could be written on this topic, here are a few popular methods of acquiring incoming links:

- issuing company press releases with a link back to your site
- submitting to reputable business directories such as Yahoo! and Business.com
- be active on related blogs by commenting and exchanging ideas
- if you have clients with web sites, ask if they would mind adding your link in a "partners" section
- participate in relevant forums and discussion boards with a link in your signature
- write and submit original articles to web publications in your field with a link in your bio
- get involved in social media and bookmarking

4. Join the Social Media Revolution

The collaboration between Internet users and the development of online communities is at an all-time high. Social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Furl, Reddit, and Technorati offer users a way to store their favorite pages and media online, and share it with others. These services also provide a way to promote your own content or create a buzz over a product or service. Creating a Myspace page or Squidoo "lens" is also a way to network and share information.

However, if your goal is to generate sales then you must offer something without the promotional hype. The reality of social media is that popularity is based almost entirely on public interest. If your information or media isn't unique or of interest to anyone, you cannot force success using social media communities.

The key to using social media and bookmarking sites to your advantage is to not be shy. Network with other users, bookmark and share useful content, create eye-catching titles for your entries, and tell your friends and co-workers to vote on content you have on these sites.

These four points are a general guideline to follow for SEO. Search engine optimization experts and firms are a good outsourcing option in competitive markets, while the DIY attitude can yield great results for web site owners with smaller marketing budgets. If you're in the latter group, hopefully this helps get you started.

About the Author: John Metzler has held executive positions in the search engine marketing industry since 2001. He is the Founder of FreshPromo, a Canadian-based SEO firm and updates his blog regularly.

Meta Tags Can Help Your Organic Search Results

It is widely believed in the search engine optimization community that the title tag is the most important on-page element for obtaining good search engine rankings. Despite this belief, it is amazing how many websites do not include title tags at all on their pages or use non-descriptive title tags such as YourDomain.com or just the word "Homepage". Although not thought to be as important, the meta description also plays in important role in obtaining organic traffic. Not surprisingly, many websites fail to include meta descriptions on many or all of their pages.

Loading up the title tag on a web page with relevant keywords and phrases will help that page rank better in the search engine results pages when someone queries those words and phrases. It is also important to keep in mind that most search engines display the title tag in their results as the linkable element. Most search engines will bold keywords in the title if those keywords are used in the active query. This draws the user’s attention to those listings and further increases the chances of a click through.

Before you add every keyword related to your industry into your title tags, you should know that Google will currently only display up to 66 characters in their listings and Yahoo 120 (note: these numbers can change at any time). Also, if the title looks spam to you, it probably also looks like spam to the search engine. If you limit your title tag to less than 120 characters and keep the keyword relevant with the content of the page, it is unlikely that you will have any page penalization problems. Also, consider putting your most important keywords near the beginning of the title tag. As an online retailer, this means putting the brand or manufacturer of the product that you are selling as one of the first keywords in your product detail title tag. Brands are widely searched and ranking well for them can be a boon. Finally, as another best practice, make sure each page on your site has a unique title.

Meta Descriptions are often, but not always used under the linkable portion in the search engine results pages. As with the title tag, it’s a good idea to include many relevant keywords in the description as those are also often bolded by the search engines. Putting compelling copy in your meta descriptions can also increase the likelihood that your result will be clicked. As with title tags, make sure every page on your site has a unique description.

Title tags and meta descriptions are often overlooked because they don’t display in the content area of the browser. Although they are just one piece of a well optimized page, taking the time to add them can have a profound impact on the amount of organic traffic you receive from search engines!

Successfully Optimize Your Website For Google

In the field of SEO, people are hell bent on impressing the boss of all SE's. Be it in terms of backlinks,PR,listings or SERP'S (Search Engine Ranking Positions). But then not all succeed. The reason Google is not another ordinary Search Engine. Every time it crawls to cache your page or to update PR and backlinks it changes it's algorithms leaving one and all confused. So in this particular article lets discuss some basics that one has to follow to get indexed and rank well in Google.

Let's start with a website that is fresh,completely new and has just got it's w3c certification done.How are you going to get it indexed by Google so that it cache's your content on a regular update. There has always been countless discussions by people regarding this particular topic,yet the problem hasn't faded away.

The concept isn't still clear to all. So I just felt to put in three simple steps that would help out the newbies with their websites.

1)First, make sure that your web site mentions the phrases you would reasonably expect an interested party to search for, as regular text in your HTML, not as a picture of text. 2)Submitting your site to Google is not recommended at all and considered a flaw in SEO because this way you are actually telling Google yourself that your site is "new" on the internet. Remember, Google is not just another search engine. Instead it's based on a lot more complex and "logical" algorithm.
3)Ask the webmasters of related web pages and sites to link to your pages, and encourage your readers to link to your site. This will bring people in directly, and it will also allow search engines like Google to find you.

Now once you get going you would obviously want to feature in the Good Books of Google so that every time it's spiders crawls it caches your page.To get it done on a consistent basis you have got to understand the modus of search operandi of the spiders.Google Results are based on 4 major criteria

1)Keyword density
The density of keyword affects the ranking of your page. The higher the keyword density the higher is your rank so one should always include a 30-40 word paragraph containing key-word rich content, thus increasing the keyword density.

2)Keyword prominence
The keywords you have chosen should appear in title, Meta and H tags with some occurrence in the body also. So you should not define Google without putting the word Google in the body of the definition. This means H and P tags should go hand shaking with each other.

3)Page rank and back links
The more site links to your site better is the page rank of your site and more relevant your site is. Google also takes into consideration the words [or Anchor text] that appear in your back links

4)Content
Some say that the Content of your site is the king, but for me it's actually the crown which the webmaster wears if his site has the right content. Build the content and users will be interested just be reading it. Once you successfully optimize for Google there would be one final frontier that you would have to conquer for making your website a grand success and that is traffic.

Once that is achieved your website will start featuring in the front page of Google for the keywords you have and hence start getting more traffic and visitors. Here are some simple steps follow them and simply implement them when you do the seo for your website.

1) Insert keywords at right place on your meta tags.
2) Name your Images with Descriptive Titles and alt text.
3) Use relevant text on your website.
4) Use Ad sense to assess overall content relevance.
5) Optimize Your Title and Meta tags.
6) Use anchor text keywords in links.
7) Submit your website to search engines and directories.
8) Content updates
9) Internal Linking Structure
10) Link Building

Search engine optimization is an ongoing practice. Continue to focus on keyword density, link building and quality content. The result will be improved search engine result placements. Google, watch out!

Five Tips for Improving Search Engine Placements

You all know how much I love expert advice related to Search Engines. In this feature post, learn about five key strategies for moving up all of the major search engines.

1. Title Tags

The single most important “on page?factor affecting search engine rankings is the title tag. This is a snippet of code in the header section of a web document. The title of a web page is given great weight by the search engines, and for lesser competitive keyphrases a good title tag alone may be enough to catapult a page to the top of the engines.

One common mistake made is that a website is created from a template in which all of the title tag information is the same from page to page. This can not only get your pages thrown into the supplemental results, it is an example of extremely poor individual page optimization.

Individual page optimization basically means that each page of your site should be individually optimized for the contents and target keyphrase of that page. Chances are that you desire to attract visitors using a variety of keyphrases. If you use the same title tag throughout your site, you are missing out on a wonderful opportunity to do this.

The title tag of each page should be individually optimized for the keyphrases that you are targeting for that page. Repetition should be avoided. For ecommerce websites, each product page should contain a unique title tag reflecting the specific product featured on that page.

For example, let’s say you sell a large inventory of widgets of various types and sizes. The title tag of your home page should probably contain the word “widgets? Then, each individual product page should contain more information in the title tag pertaining to the specific product, such as “Large Red Widget ?Model ABC123? or something similar. This allows users searching for specific model numbers, or manufacturer names, or even more general terms like “large red widget?to land on a page specifically relevant to their search engine query.

2. Rich Content

If you are not including key phrase rich content on each page of your website, you again face a risk of having your pages thrown into the supplementals, or having your pages outright rank poorly for your target key phrases. Be sure to include at least one instance of the key phrase you are targeting for that page in the body text of the page.

A rule of thumb I use is to first go through and select the key phrases you are targeting for each page. Then, optimize the title tags accordingly to reflect this. After that, write rich, unique content for each page, and be sure to include at least one instance of the title tag content in the body text.

A common mistake in this area is to write generic page content, and simply replace the target key phrase on each page. This type of methodology adds no real value to individual pages of your site and is almost certainly going to result in your pages get thrown into the supplementals on grounds of duplicative content. It is not enough, therefore, to have generic content which is the same on each page, with a mere substitution of the target key phrase.

For example, a real estate agency wants to be at the top of the engines for searches in all 50 states. They create generic content such as:

“We are your [state name] real estate experts. Browse our [state name] real estate listings to find your perfect [state name] home…”

The firm then creates 50 individual state pages, with the exact same content and only the state name changed. This will not work. Each page needs to have unique, rich content, and so in the example above, we would need to create 50 original pages of content rather than using a simple “find and replace?methodology.

An ecommerce site should write rich descriptions for each of their products. A common mistake I see in such sites is that individual product pages contain little or no written content aside from the product name and a picture. Be sure to write at least a paragraph on the features and benefits of each product in the product description field.

3. Blog

Your competition is blogging, so it’s time you jump on the bandwagon. There are a number of reasons to blog that directly relate to search engine considerations. Google and other engines generally prefer sites with fresh content over stale sites. This means that ranking well involves the regular creation of rich content, and typically this is done via a company weblog.

Blog articles should be useful and informative and should not be considered necessarily self promotional. Using the real estate example above, the agency should write general interest articles on buying and selling homes, how to select a realtor, and the like. It should avoid writing articles touting the benefits of the firm itself ?blog articles should not be press releases (although it is okay to repost the occasional press release in the company blog). The reason for this is that general interest articles (such as the one you are reading right now) are much more attractive link bait (see next section) than are articles on how wonderful your company is.

Additionally, once you have started blogging, you are opening yourself up to link bait and social media opportunities as described below.

4. Link Bait

Generally speaking, the more links you have to rich content on your site, the better off you are going to be in the engines. The creation of a blog is a wonderful way to attract links. Other ideas for link bait include video, images, sound clips, press releases and the like. Contests, quizzes, product reviews, top 10 lists (or in the case of this article, a top 5 list), and how to articles fare very well. Also, the provision of useful tools can be a great way to attract links.

In the example of the real estate agency, a tool likely to attract links would be a free mortgage calculator. Offering such a tool on your website can attract the attention of other sites in the form of links, increasing your reputation and pagerank, which has a direct impact on higher search engine rankings.

Be sure to create link bait on a regular basis through the regular creation of content, of whatever form you choose.

5. Social Media

Now that you have created all this wonderful link bait in the form of blogs, videos, tools, and the like, you need to make sure to get the word out about it so that people know it is there. Social media has already become one of the most powerful ways to spread the word. Social media is loosely defined as any sort of user driven content. Famous examples include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia, and the like.

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon are wonderful ways to get the word out about your content. If you have a number of images (such as product images in an ecommerce site), image sharing sites such as Flickr are useful. Contests and quizzes are great fodder for social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Yahoo360. Video content can be promoted through YouTube, MetaCafe, AOLVideo, and similar sites.

The point is, the more you promote your wonderful link bait, the more people will find out about it and link to it. Put your content to work for you!

About the Author

Matt Foster is the CEO of ArteWorks SEO, an internationally recognized search engine optimization firm. For more information, please visit www.arteworks.biz.

Ward Off Negative Press With SEO

Is there something out there about you or your company that you wish would just go away? Let's say that one of your clients is having a difficult time in the SERPs. Imagine they have a disgruntled customer who's created a hate page about them and it's ranking number one in Google. The client has come to you wanting to know if you can use your SEO skills to push the negative page down the SERPs and restore their online reputation. "Sure!" you say.

So what do you do? You write positive blog posts about your client or you hire other bloggers to do the same. You write articles optimized for your client's main keywords and submit them to highly-trafficked sites in your client's industry. You promote them via social media. You make sure the new posts are Dugg, Stumbled, Sphunn etc. You feed a good news press release about your client into the social media vortex and let it take hold.

Once the ugly page has been pushed off the front of the SERPs, you continue to watch the blogosphere closely for any negative comments about your client and make sure they don't rise to the surface again.

The use of cascading style sheets can provide a tremendous benefit to your website. Learn the value of CSS in this helpful post.

CSS style sheets have made it easier to handle web pages during web development. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets as the name suggests is a style sheet that allows you to easily link to other documents in your website. It allows you to retain control over the various elements in different web pages of your website.

CSS only defines the structure and content presentation of a website it has nothing to do with the design of a website. A single CSS sheet can control the font, positioning, colour and style information of an entire website.

9 advantages of using CSS

* Web pages are easier to load and uses less bandwidth

CSS style sheets are preferred by web developers for website development because they are lighter than table layouts, which consumes lots of bandwidth. The style sheet is downloaded only once and stored in the cache memory, so subsequent pages load faster.

* A CSS style sheet compliments well with HTML

HTML is insufficient when used independently in website development, but when combined with CSS they can result in technically stronger web pages.

* CSS allows you to position your element anywhere in the webpage

Web developers love to use CSS because it allows them to position their element where ever they want in the web page. If during any phase of web development the developer feels that particular links or columns are not going well with the situation then it becomes easier for them to position them easily using CSS. CSS reduces the risks associated with maintenance of the website.

* CSS is compatible with all web browsers

CSS is combined with HTML or XHTML by web developers for web application development because it is compatible with all web browsers. The sites that use CSS appear similar in all the web browsers.

* CSS can be used to create print friendly web pages

Most of the web developers love to use CSS for building their HTML based web applications because they allow them to create print friendly web pages. These web pages can be easily printed. The colours, images and other things which are difficult to be printed can be eliminated and printed easily.

* CSS style sheets allows the user to customize the webpage

Now days many websites allow the user to change the layout of the website without affecting the content. The CSS style sheets which are stored externally allow the user to make requisite changes by themselves. Most of the modern browsers give user the liberty to define their own style sheets like changing some font properties etc.

* CSS style sheets makes it easier for your website to feature in search engines

The CSS style sheets are favoured by web developers because they allow them to position their elements as per their wish anywhere in web application. Positioning helps to project the main contents first, so that it is easily captured by web spiders. CSS also gives cleaner HTML codes thus cutting down the job of web spider to search the real content from junk code.

* CSS allows the web pages to have absolute consistency

One of the reasons for using CSS during web development is that they allow consistency to all web pages. All the expressions and texts will get their characteristics from external style sheet. Web developers need not to worry about the change in characteristics of the elements because they can be easily altered at any stage of web development by using CSS.

* CSS lends portability to content

By using CSS you can make separate style sheets for different media. This provides you the great flexibility in presenting your content. CSS allows you to redefine the characteristics of elements in a website to suit the need of the situation. For e.g.: A separate style sheet will allow you to redefine the characteristics of certain elements so that they are easier to be printed. Also the user will never come to know that you had restructured the characteristics for their benefit.

CSS is created to make the things easier for your website and also to give you control over different elements in your website. Utilising benefits of CSS will give you popular user friendly web pages.

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About the Author: Sigma InfoTech is an Australian based Website Design firm, specialising in Website Development, Web Developer, Website design, Application Development Australia. Write editor to webmastergrace@gmail.com your comments and suggestions will be highly appreciated.

How To Improve Your Rankings With The Help of Sitemaps

A sitemap is a little-known secret to enhancing your Web site's position in the search engine listings. No, it's not a killer secret that will draw in thousands of new visitors overnight, but it is an important addition to your tool set, and not hard to implement. This article will tell you why you need a sitemap, and how to create one and submit it to the search engines.

The term "sitemap" can refer to two different things. Many large, complex Web sites provide a visual sitemap that visitors can use for quick navigation, if they already know roughly where they want to go. If your site is large or complex, you should provide one of these sitemaps for your visitors.

But this article is about the other kind of sitemap: The kind that is made for the search engines, like Google, to use in indexing your site. There are several forms that these sitemaps can take, but we'll get to that a little later.

First of all, let's consider why you even need a sitemap. Google and the other search engines will index your site even if you don't have a sitemap. However, there are four main advantages to having a sitemap:

1. If your site uses non-HTML links, such as Macromedia Flash menus or JavaScript menus, the search engines will not be able to follow these links, and so they will not find all of your pages. A code-driven site must use a sitemap.

2. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are more important, and which are less important. This prevents the less important pages from competing with your own pages in the listings.

3. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are updated more frequently than others. This enables the search engines to ignore your static pages, increasing the likelihood that they will have the most current data on your most dynamic pages.

4. A sitemap enables you to tell the search engines when you have added or updated your site's content. To some extent, this puts you in control of making the search engines aware of your latest content. Of course, it doesn't force the search engines to do your bidding, but it tends to make it easier for users to find your new pages more quickly.

So, what is a sitemap?

As mentioned above, there are many possible forms of sitemaps, but we'll concentrate on the most useful kind, the XML sitemap format created and promulgated by sitemaps.org. This protocol, currently known as "Sitemap 0.90," is maintained and endorsed jointly by Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask, so you know it is pretty much a universal standard.

An XML sitemap consists of a list of pages on your Web site, and standard information about each page. Don't worry about the technical details of formatting the XML. We'll talk about tools that will create this for you in a moment.

There are three things to notice about each entry:

1. LastMod. Tell the search engines the last date (and time) you changed this page. That will tell them which ones they ought to index right away, and which ones they can ignore.

2. ChangeFreq. In case you're not updating your sitemap all the time, this will give the search engines a clue as to how often they ought to check each page.

3. Priority. This tells the search engines the relative importance of this page, compared to all the other pages in your site.

In assigning a value for "Priority," on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0, determine which pages are most important and which are least important within your site. We're not telling the search engines that this "Services" page is in the 80th percentile of all pages on the Web, but it is far more important than the "Index" page within this site. That's where we want our visitors to end up.

It's easy to identify pages within your site which are lowest priority. Some examples:

- Privacy Policy - "Contact us" - "About us"

Please don't misunderstand this. It's not that your "Privacy Policy" page is unimportant and so you might as well not have one. It's that your "Privacy Policy" is important enough to take for granted: Your visitors will find it when they need it. But for search engine purposes, you'd rather direct them to the pages where you actually do your business.

So, how do you create a sitemap?

There are a number of software tools that will create a sitemap by reading your site's content. You will have to adjust the results, especially the "Priority" settings, but most of these do a pretty good job. Search the Web for "sitemap generator," or for any of the following specific free tools:

- SitemapDoc - XML-Sitemaps - AuditMyPC Google Sitemap Generator

And once you have your sitemap, what do you do with it?

There are three things to do, in sequence:

1. Place the sitemap file into the root directory of your Web server, alongside your main "index" file. And each time you update it, place the new copy there.

2. Notify the major search engines of your new sitemap file each time you update it. For Google, this means to submit it from within "Webmaster Tools." For other major search engines, search on that search engine for "submit sitemap," and you'll probably find where to enter the URL of your sitemap file.

3. Place a reference to the sitemap file in your robots.txt file, as "Sitemap: http://www.marketingscoop.com/sitemap.xml". This will make sure that any search engine will find it, even those that you did not submit it to directly. You only need to do this once, unless you change the name or location of your sitemap file.

Once you have your sitemap created and submitted, don't forget to maintain it. Each time you add a page to your Web site, add it to your sitemap. Each time you update a page on your Web site, update its "lastmod" setting in your sitemap. Try adjusting the "priority" of your pages from time to time to see if it improves the performance of that particular page. And each time you modify your sitemap, resubmit it to the major search engines.

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About the Author: Charles J. Bonner is the founder and principal project manager of www.FreeLanceSubmit.com. For a complete list of resources for creating and using sitemaps, visit http://www.FreeLanceSubmit.com/ArticleBuildASitemap.htm.

Here are some helpful SEO techniques you can begin using right away...Good strategies for search engine optimization should be fully implemented and include:

1. Credible domain name

Acquire a domain name that is not too long or difficult to remember. It should relate to the content of your web site. Within the domain name, there should preferably be keywords that a crawler will understand. Abbreviations, dashes, underscores, numerals and other meaningless characters should all be avoided. Always opt for a .com name if possible, simply because it is a more common term that customers think of.

2. Titles should be rich in keywords

The titles for all of your pages should be keyword-rich. They should be easily understood by visitors, and more importantly should contain keywords that will relate to whatever your customers may want to search for. In search engine optimization, search engines often use the [TITLE]; element as the text for their link to your site. Emphasis is placed by search engines in this area of optimization because it enables them to determine the relevance of your page to a visitor's search. The titles for your pages should preferably be less than 50 characters including spaces. This enables you to select a title that is precise, and one that will not be truncated in search results for reason of length. For immediate impact, include your call to action, so that attention of visitors can be captured.

3. Include META elements

Description and keyword properties should be included in your headers' META elements. META name="description" content="[brief description of your site]" is often used by search engines to find out what your site is all about. It will be beneficial to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. You can think about how they will go about searching for information, and you can subsequently choose appropriate terms that will capture traffic to your site. A great research tool to use is Wordtracker.

4. Quality of content

It is imperative to provide good and rich content on your web site. The content should always be keyword-rich, as this facilitates good classification of your pages by the search engines. It must be interesting and entertaining. Quality is the keyword as far as content is concerned. This is one strategy for search engine optimization that should be given heavy consideration. Content should therefore be fresh and should never be a duplicate. Search engines now include in their search algorithm ways to effect measurement of freshness of content on all sites. Do note that spiders cannot read images, so remember to use <> tags for images if you need to use them to increase your site traffic.

5. Links leveraging

Web sites that get incoming links do get a higher ranking. If these incoming links originate from a site with higher ranking and which perform well for key phrases that are related to your content, these are good links of quality that will push up the ranking of your site. They will greatly benefit your site. It will be to your advantage to request them to link back to your site. Everything on your site must be properly linked; all links must be functioning, because this will enable all of your content to be indexed. This shows a good strategy for search engine optimization in operation.

6. Site registration

Your site must be registered with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) once it is sufficiently optimized. Instructions given by each search engine are different from one another, so it is important to follow instructions closely, to avoid having your site improperly indexed. For best results, do it right - straight from the beginning.

7. Play it smart

Ensure that your site can be easily indexed by search engines. Your pages must be crawler-friendly. Avoid the application of spamming strategies such as irrelevant metadata and hidden text. Better be safe than sorry. Play it smart when you are in your zest aiming for higher search-engine rankings. Avoid strategies that offer the easy way out for getting good ranking.

8. Virtue of patience

Patience pays. It may take some time to reach Google No 1 spot. The time spent on search engine optimization for your web site will definitely not be lost just because the top spot is not reached yet. There are still numerous other ways of capturing traffic besides performing a little more tweaking of your site.

In conclusion, your web site must be optimized for search engines, as this will help you secure a better search result, better site ranking, and not forgetting increase in site traffic. For your desired results, you will need to apply the strategies for search engine optimization listed above.

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About the Author: Jeremy Long Chia Teik - For latest updates on how to increase traffic, raise page ranking, write effective articles and powerful squeeze pages, create explosive blog marketing system, learn about viral marketing, and bring in massive income from your internet marketing business, please Click here.

Blogging Scores Big on SEO

Do you have your own blog? If not, you may want to consider the impact blogging can have on your search engine rankings. One of the best ways to create good search engine results is through relevant content. Blogs let you do this quickly and easily. Using tools like WordPress or Blogger are great for getting your blog (on any subject you choose) up and running.

Once you've established a blog, be sure to submit a Technorati Profile and submit your blog using SocialPoster These tools will signify the search engines that your blog is out there and to being spidering the site on a regular basis. In blogging, when search engines spider your site, its called a PING. With each ping, your content gets indexed.

Over time your blog will gain a favorable Google PR and you can use that to attract external links and transfer the google PR to your main website. Learn more about Blogging at MarketingScoop.com

What is Google Everflux?

What is Google Everflux? In this post from Titus Hoskins, you'll learn about "Everflux" and what it means to your SEO efforts.

Is it just me or has Google gone into overdrive? As a professional full-time online marketer I have to keep my mind firmly placed on what Google is doing. As much as I try not to because Google has probably driven more people around the bend than Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz put together.

Like any professional marketer, I monitor my numerous keywords on a daily basis - especially my major targeted keyword phrases that bring in the most sales and subscribers. For years now, I have had top rankings in Google for my chosen phrases; they move up and down, but mostly they don't leave the first page.

However, lately I have been noticing a lot of jumping in the top listings. Links out of nowhere are comfort. Even six months ago the Google main index seemed to be a whole lot more stable than it is now.

Within the past months, rankings within Google have become more dynamic, more fluid. They can change from day to day, what some people are calling Google Everflux. This is very similar to the old Google Dance we used to have a few years ago...when Google would update or refresh its index about once a month. Now Google is stepping out on that dance floor every day.

Once upon a time, your keyword rankings in Google didn't change that much. Every four or five months Google would do major updates where your keywords and your site's PageRank could have a major jump or fall in Google's index. But have things changed? Has the whole ranking process now been speeded up? Has the Google Index now become more fluid, more dynamic, changeable daily? Updating, fluctuating on the fly?

appearing, links being dropped and my own links moving up and down much too quickly for my

Inquiring minds want to know...

Keep in mind, Google Everflux is not a new term. As far back as July 2002 there are references in Webmasterworld to the Google Freshbot and Google Everflux. This term referred to the re-freshing of the Google Index.

Unlike many SEO theories and assumptions, the Google Everflux is the Real McCoy. That is if you can believe the Google Guy, and there's no reason not to take Matt Cutts at his word.

In his site or blog - www.mattcutts.com - he describes what is happening here. In a response to a comment on his blog on January 1, 2007, he gives this answer:

Quoting Matt Cutts: "...I'm not trying to side-step the issue. I believe that a data refresh, which used to be every 3-4 weeks, is now happening more like every day. So the changes in ranking that some people were seeing on the 17th or 27th during the summer months can now happen every day."

Even more telling was Matt's response to another person's summary of these changes within Google.

Senaia said: "So the Index Update is what people use to call Google Dance, when it was on monthly bases. Now it's on daily bases and they call it Everflux.

Backlinks update and Pagerank update are also types of data refresh.

So, the big scary updates like Florida... are Algorithm updates?"

Matt Cutts said: "Senaia, that's not a bad summary. Florida and Jagger were changes in our algorithms to score documents, for example."

However, is the current Google Everflux a more souped-up version of this re-freshing process? Google in fast-forward? On speed-dial?

Regardless of the rate of change, Google Everflux is important simply because Google is so important to any webmaster or site. There's no denying that, whether you love it or hate it, Google will deliver the most search engine traffic to any webmaster who gets top rankings for his/her keywords. The other search engines shouldn't be ignored, but most of your search traffic will come from Google. According to Nielsen Stats in February (2008), Google had around 60 percent (58.7 - 4.5 billion Google search queries) of the traffic on the web.

But 60 percent is not the true percentage; from close examination of my different sites' traffic logs I know Google gives me around 90 percent of my search traffic. Maybe I am over optimized for Google, but even when I manage on rare occasions to get number one rankings in all three search engines for a minor keyword, Google is still the one sending the most traffic.

Since this search traffic is extremely important to my livelihood, I keep a close watch on my major keywords in Google. Movement up or down just a few places means an increase or decrease in my traffic. Google has changed. It is not the same search engine it was 6 months ago. Not by a long shot.

About this author
The author, 2008 Titus Hoskins is now a full-time web marketer who regularly sells 1000's of dollars worth of affiliate products/services each day. He owns and runs numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: Good Marketing Tips Blog or http://www.marketingtoolguide.com

Top 10 Search Engine Strategies For Your Website

Although the concept of search engine optimization can be somewhat complex, there are a number of basic search engine optimization techniques you can use to improve your organic search results. Keep the following in mind when trying to achieve top rankings for your website.

1. Meta Tags. Meta tags are simple lines of code at the top of your web page programming that tell search engines about your page. Include the title tag, keyword stag, description tag, and robots tag on each page.

2. Create and update your site map. Developing a site map is a simple way of giving search engines the information they need to crawl your entire website. There are plenty of free software packages on the web that can help you generate a sitemap. Once you create a site map, submit it to Google and Yahoo.

3. Ensure that all navigation is in HTML. All too often, navigational items are in the form of java script. Even though navigation technically still works in this format, it’s not optimized. Create your navigation in HTML to enhance internal links throughout your website.

4. Check that all images include ALT text. Your image’s alt text is spidered by search engines. If you’re not including your keywords in alt text, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity for improved search engine result placements. Label all of your images properly.

5. Use Flash content sparingly. Content generated through java script or flash is a big no-no. Some webmasters like to use flash because of the presentation. If you must, use it sparingly, but only after your site has been properly optimized with basic search engine optimization in mind.

6. Make sure that your website code is clean. Keep in mind when optimizing a web page crawlers are basically only looking at your source code. When programming your web pages, having W3C compliant code can make all the difference. Run your code through a W3C validator before promoting.

7. Place keywords in your page content. Search engines scan your website and web pages for keywords. Shoot for a keyword density of between two and eight percent. Google likes your page to be at the lower end of this scale and Yahoo at the upper end.

8. Submit your website to search engine directories. It’s always a good idea to let large search engine directories know that you’re out there. Submit your website URL to directories like Google, Yahoo, and DMOZ.

9. Build links to your website. Consider building a link exchange program or create one-way links to your site using articles or forum posts. All major search engines value the importance of your website based on how many others websites are linking to it.

10. Stay the course. Good optimization takes time. People expect to see results immediately. You may very well see improvements in a short period, but reaching the number one position takes time. Be patient.

Learning to optimize your website for search engines takes time and patience. Start by applying basic search engine optimization principles. If you’re new to website optimization, or even a well seasoned veteran, begin by prioritizing which pages are most important to you and go from there. Soon you’ll find yourself moving up the rankings.

Page Rank: Why Its Important For Building Traffic

Google PageRank is important in building traffic to your website for a number of reasons. Before we discuss why, here is quick heads up on how it works.

Page Rank is based on links between your site and other sites, in fact specifically between web pages, since it is links between individual pages rather than complete websites that interests Google. That is because Google lists individual pages and not domains. There is a formula that Google uses to determine the value of each link to your site, which is based on the PageRank of the web page providing the link and also the number of other links leaving that page.

You can see the page Rank in the Google PageRank bar on the Google Toolbar - it is the green bar that shows a numerical value of 0 to 10 when you hover your cursor over it. This value is logarithmic, which means that if it takes 10 links to reach PR 1, then it takes a lot more to reach 2. If Google uses a logarithmic factor of 8, as it might do (nobody knows), then it will take 8 links to your site to get to PR 1, 64 to reach PR 2, 512 to PR 3 and so on. This is very basic, since, as I have stated, it also depends on the PR of the page providing the link and the number of other links leaving that page.

Here are the top 4 reasons that in my opinion help most to generate traffic and make you money:

1. The higher your Google PageRank, then the higher Google is likely to list you in the search engine results pages. Google take the view than the more other websites link to yours, then the more relevant your web page must be to the topic in hand, otherwise they wouldn't link to you. In fact, the links are to specific pages in your site, not to the site as a whole, which is why it is called 'Page Rank' and not Site Rank.

2. The higher the Page Rank, then the more relevant other people will consider any particular page on your website to be. They will feel more confident that if they visit your site they will have their questions answered and find the information they are looking for.

3. A high Page Rank shows that you have a high number of links on the pages of other websites. There is then the possibility of others clicking on these links to get to your website.

4. The higher your Page Rank, then the more people will want you to link to their website. That means that they too will be likely to visit your site. They will also offer you a reciprocal link if you want one, and that too will provide you with more exposure online.

They are all different URLs that will lead somebody using them to your domain. However, search engine spiders see them all as different URLs, and if you use different ways to write your home page URL, then they will all be listed separately, and all be given a different Page Rank. Thus, the page rank for any one of them will be weaker than your page would have been if you had used only the one way to express it. Get into the habit of expressing your domain in only one way.

There are other ways in which poor use of your website URLs and also injudicious linking policies, can harm your Page Rank, but the main point that should keep in mind is that the your page rank applies to each page individually, and you get a share of the Google PageRank of the page that provides you with the link. If that page has a PR of zero, then you get nothing.

In giving my reasons for page rank being important in building traffic, I should stress that it is not one of my more important ways. However, Google takes notice of your PageRank, otherwise why would it bother giving you a Page Rank in the first place. For that reason alone it is well worth building up as many links back to your webpages as possible, not just for the traffic, but also to keep your website in the public eye.

It is the Home Page that is highest listed on most search engines, and also the page is given the highest PageRank, so if you can persuade others to link to your home page in return for a link from a page internal to your site, then that would be a good deal, and is what you should be trying for.

Don't ask me though, because I would a link back from your highest Page Ranked page!

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About the Author
Page Rank is an important property of your website, and for more information on internal and external linking strategy check out Pete's website Improved Search Engine Rank where you will find many other SEO tips.