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If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Dont submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like http//www.google.com hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one

HYPERLINK http//www.webposition.com/order/trial.aspWT.mc_idgoogle3A7Bifsearch3Asearch7D7Bifcontent3Acontent7D3A7Bcreative7D3Atrial3A7Bkeyword7DWT.srch1 http//www.webposition.com/order/trial.aspWT.mc_idgoogle3A7Bifsearch3Asearch7D7Bifcontent3Acontent7D3A7Bcreative7D3Atrial3A7Bkeyword7DWT.srch1

Or if you want professional help try the following sites

HYPERLINK http//www.addpro.com/professional_submission http//www.addpro.com/professional_submission

HYPERLINK http//www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html http//www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Dont use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies

Search Engines Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista Google, HotBot Excite/Webcrawler

Directories AOL Search Inktomi Lycos Open Directory MSN, Yahoo LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories

http//websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http//websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks 1 in a particular search engine could rank 200 in another search engine. New sites need not be submitted to search engines to be listed. A simpl e link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldnt be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 5

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3 and 5, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3 and 5.

Simple steps to check the density Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect. Go to the Edit menu and click Select All. Now go to the Tools menu and select Word Count. Write down the total number of words in the page. Now select the Find function on the Edit menu. Go to the Replace tab and type in the keyword you want to find. Replace that word with the same word, so you dont change the text. When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page. Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a linked site. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts dont include referrer logs but may be subscribedd for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these

FTP Explorer http//www.ftpx.com/ LogMeIn http//secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp SmartFTP http//www.smartftp.com/ FTP Voyager http//www.ftpvoyager.com/

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http//www.abacre.com/ala/ Referrer Soft http//www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/ Log Analyzer http//www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you dont have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that dont send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the users last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

Perhaps very few things can illustrate competition as vividly as the Web. After all, how can one website compete with thousands of other websites just like it?

If the attention span of an average Internet user is as expansive as a search engine’s listing, then there’s nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. Very likely, a person conducting a search on the Internet will probably just browse through the top 3 to 5 SERPs (search engine results pages) and stop there. Website that get buried in the 10th page and onwards will probably not get too much attention if certain measures are not undertaken.

Those measures are what are called search engine optimization (SEO). Experts in this field perform certain procedures which may be seen a “website boot camp” to get your website into fighting form that will compete in the top rankings of a search engine.

However, as it is with almost everything else, some shortcuts exist that are able to “cheat” search engines into placing a particular website at a high ranking, despite the fact that it offers no real information. These sets of shortcuts are called “spamming”.

SEO spam (or spamdexing) is a set of techniques that manipulate a website for the purpose of creating an unrealistic boost in its rankings on SERPs. Here are just some examples of some SEO spam:

1. Cloaking When a website presents a set of information to a search engine different from a set the user is seeing, then cloaking has been done. What usually happens is that the web page’s code is relevant to the user’s search keywords, but when the user visits that particular web page, he user sees a document that has little or nothing to do with his search.

2. Artificially networked sites There is really nothing wrong with creating links between one site to another so long as the links are relevant and serve to connect useful information.

However, spammers who perform this technique set up several web sites and link them together even the sites contain no real and useful information. The purpose for doing so is simply to create the illusion of a highly referenced site because of its density of links. If this is the case, then it can be considered spamming.

3. Blog and Forum Spam Online blogs and fora are a great source of information since it these formats are built to be updated within short intervals. This, in itself, what makes it a good reference for information, which is why search engines like to visit these sites and rank it well for the quality of information it holds.

However, spammers have taken advantage of this by flooding blogs and fora with irrelevant links to the websites they want to generate artificial ranking for. Not only are they cheating the search engine company by misleading a user to irrelevant information, they also interrupt the bloggers and the forum participants, which is downright rude.

4. Hidden text. Similar to cloaking, hidden texts are meant to make search engines think that a page is about one thing, while it is actually about another. But it fools the search engine this way: the text that the search engine is able to reads is camouflaged by making the text font color the same as the background. What happens is that the user is unable to read what the search engine saw, and therefore may be looking at a document that is not related to the user’s search.

Other techniques are to create small, imperceptible links that a user can accidentally click on, thus generating more hits for a website even if the user had no intentions of visiting that site at all.

By this time, you probably already know why spamming is done. It is a shortcut used by some unscrupulous website owners to make their website rank high on SERPs. Folks who pose as SEO experts use these spamming techniques to get money for doing little to no work.

Now that you know who they are, and how they do it, here’s why you should have nothing to do with spamming and the people who condone them.

The whole point of the Internet was to create a wealth of information that everyone can access and add to. The whole idea was to be able to create a place where information can be created and shared with others so that it can foster understanding despite physical borders.

Other results of this information have led to the development e-commerce and online businesses, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It still contributes to a community of information and sharing.

However, spamming is fundamentally profiting at someone else’s expense. A spammer profits by using other people to make his website rank higher than others without taking the necessary time and effort to make his website useful and relevant as what others have done.

It speaks poorly of website owners who see nothing but their own bottom lines in using the Internet. It is basically exploiting the trust and the willingness to share, which made the Internet such a promising venue for everyone.

Finally, it demeans honest SEO experts who take the time and effort to produce quality website and make it a point to follow the rules. Search engine marketing is helping to level the playing field so it can allow businesses of any to advertise right along side each other. And that is a commendable thing, which everyone should gladly support.

Search engines, on their part, are developing smarter technologies to detect spamming techniques in order to give users the best list of information from the Internet. Eventually, the spam methods mentioned above may be eliminated. But it is very likely other more sophisticated ones will come up. On your part, you can report spammers to these search engines when you encounter them. The more people like you who do this, the easier it will be to apprehend these cheaters and make it more difficult for spammers to do their thing.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A spider is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the sites Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so dont create a site with 500 pages

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

Originally conceived to be something like an online journal for individuals has become yet another tool businesses can use to market themselves online. Web logs or blogs are now being used not just for the sheer purpose of writing, but also as means SEO (search engine optimization) experts use to increase a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERP).

An interesting thing about keeping and maintaining a blog (also known as blogging) is that anyone can blog. What will make a blog more successful than most is simply a keen sense of its target readership. Of course, it will not harm the blogger (a person maintaining a blog) to possess a few basic skills navigating the Internet and creating links to other rich in keywords, which is basically what search engines look for in ranking web pages in its SERPs.

That said, here are some tips to make your next blog an effective SEO tool.

1, Choose a Theme (and Stick to It) Most blogs never gain a real readership because it simply is a mishmash of a writer’s thoughts, with very little coherent theme to bind the entire blog together. If the blogger does it for the sheer purpose of a journal, there’s really nothing wrong with that.

However, as an SEO, a blog has to have a theme that will tie all the posts (individual articles) together. This is because instead of just looking for keywords, a search engine will also assess whether the page just happens to have a lot of keywords mentioned in the post or whether the entire blog is about the topic it is searching for. The former will rank less than the former in the SERPs. Given this point, it will do you well to pick a theme that you are interest and won’t tire of writing about.

2. A Place You Can Call Home Working alongside the idea of a theme, When creating your blog (whether with your own domain name or an a free blog site), give it a URL that has words related to the theme. For example, if you are going to blog about bonsai making, try to use words that are related to that in your blog’s URL (such as www.bonsaienthusiast.com). Name your blog using words that are relevant to your theme as well. Search engines look at these things as well to determine how high your blog could possibly rank.

If you are blogging on a hosting site, it is possible to have your blog delegated into a proper category. This will help make a search engine easier to find your blog given that the category is strongly related to themes and search keywords.

On a related note, your individual posts should also be titled with words that are closely related to your theme. Again, working on a blog with a bonsai theme, one post could be titled “Miniature Trees: How to Get Started” while another one could be “Selecting the Right Pot for a Bonsai”. This will give your posts a URL that is rich in keywords, which helps in a page’s ranking on SERPS (but you already know that, right?).

3. Link And it Shall Be Linked Unto You Another thing about blogs that SEO experts are finding to become a great advantage is the fact that blogs make it easy to link to other blogs, which in turn makes it easy for other blogs to link to you.

This is yet another criterion a search engine uses to rank a particular page in the results pages. The more incoming links it possess about the keyword in search will increase ranking status because the page shows that a lot of people think what you’ve written is a good source of information.

So when writing on your blog, be sure to take the time to read other people’s blogs and other online articles related to your theme. Create links to them so that you point your readers to more information. This will increase the chances of other people creating links that will point to your blog.

4. Keep it Coming Since blog content is so easy to create, search engines scour blog sites very regularly. That means if you keep on creating new content on a regular basis, search engines will have to keep up with what’s new on your blog.

By regularly creating fresh content on your blog, search engines will tend to look to your blog first before others that are not maintained and renewed as regularly as you do. It helps in the rankings as well, which is the whole point of this article, right?

These tips are just to get started on using a blog for SEO. As you go along, you’ll find more tricks of the trade that will help you push you up the ranks on SERPs. Of course realistically, don’t expect to rank on the top 3 pages on your first try. But give it a few weeks. And for as long as you keep to the tried and true principles, it may not be that far until you’ve captured a good ranking for your blog.

Just dont focus on the home page, keywords and titles. The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings cant keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you dont really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products Do you discount prices or offer coupons Are your prices consistently lower than others Is your shipping price cheaper Do you respond faster to client questions Are your product descriptions better Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitors To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed – or should I say misdirected – to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.

One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.

Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam.

Overtures HYPERLINK http//inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ http//inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesnt tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type Computer, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word Computer was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly computer game was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.

Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include, Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position. Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once. Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page. More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

Guidebeam HYPERLINK http//www.guidebeam.com/ http//www.guidebeam.com/ is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeams estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.