Website Maker Tips Even If You Are A Beginner » Search Engine Optimization

Link Building: Find Out the Benefits of Link building to your Website

Joshua Elliot — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:40:23 +0000

Backlinks are simply hyperlinks published on various websites that lead back to your site. Having backlinks offer many advantages to your personal site. While there are many SEO experts that offer information on the best methods of gaining different kinds of links its helpful to understand what they are and how they are used.

By using backlinks you can increase the ranking for your site. A direct correlation can be found between the page rank of a site and amount of inbound links that point to that site. Users need to remember the different between a website and web page too. While a web page is just one page with only one URL that is used for linking, a website contains several pages that each need links to gain the same page rank. For instance the main URL of a site might be ranked in the top 10, but the inner pages might not be ranked at all.

These links will also help to increase the amount of traffic that a website has. The increased page rank created an increase in the organic traffic and often helps to provide a steady source of potential profits. Also, the higher a search engine ranks your site, the more traffic it will have.

Bots are used by computers to index and rank individual websites. One of the things they take into account is the trust other websites show towards yours. When a site is willing to link to yours without reciprocal link, it assumes you must have some information that others are willing to share. The more a bot sees this happen they higher page rank it will give.

These links also help to increase the amount of money that a site can generate. Using sites to generate income is helping the Internet to grow by millions of websites a week. The more links to your site the greater your chances of turning a profit are.

The Internet is connected by a spider web of hyperlinks and there is room to build your site into the booming traffic gem you desire. The more popular a site, the higher the page rank, the higher the page rank the more traffic. The increase in traffic means there are more customers looking to your products or services.

The most important thing to remember in any website is that content is king. As you add more content you need to remember to add more backlinks that will start the linking cycle all over again.

Link Building 101: Utilize Relevant and Descriptive Anchor text to increase Link Popularity

Joshua Elliot — Sun, 23 May 2010 16:09:37 +0000

To be able to have a consistent progress on your web ranking, you have to enhance your link popularity—meaning you have to generate lots of valuable links that will back link to your website. Utilizing anchor text to link to your site gives higher degree of enhancement to your site’s popularity compared to a typical link, but you must vary it to take advantage of its efficiency.

Now the questions are: What kind of links should you use? Where are you going to get your links? How frequently should you vary your anchor text?

The Internal links

Ascertain that every page in your website links to one page to another. Build a website layout and directory of your web pages. In the “description” of your link, you can utilize internal anchor text so that if Google visit your website the entire site will be easily seen using your website layout or map.

Getting a quality page rank through blogging isn’t that easy because they usually do not have backlinks. The best way to have good page rank is to make use of anchor text in similar posts which will also improve your link popularity.

For E.g.:

If your webpage is all about leather bags and wallet, your anchor text there have “leather bags and wallet” link in it. The anchor text should be descriptive and relevant to your site.

The External links

Anchor text in external sites improves page rank and link popularity. In giving a link offer the exact html code to be inserted on the webpage, it will help the site’s visitors to find the page easily.

How frequently should you vary your anchor text?

When you use the same anchor text, for example in 50 web pages, it may be mistakenly viewed as a spam. Therefore, you have to vary your anchor text/or the address of your web page so that it would be mixed up.

For E.g.:

As a replacement to using “leather bags and wallet” as your hyperlink, use “affordable leather bags, trendy wallets and bags, etc”. The phrase is not the same but the “leather bags and wallet” is still there. You will not link to the same “leather bags and wallet” page; rather you link it to interrelated page. And this will aid in building up the link popularity and structure to your site.

Where are you going to get your links?

Utilizing Yahoo Explorer check your backlink on top ten sites on your niche. Search for sites which will enable you to add your website links.
Make an article(s) on niche, and vary your anchor text at the end of your articles in resource box.
Submit website to specific and broad directories.
Put a hyperlink in your comment when you visit linked forums and blogs.
Obtain hyperlinks from public sites like Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, etc…

Utilize anchor text when you want to build your link, this will improve your link popularity as well as your page ranking, plus, you will build greater web traffic.

Alexa Ranking Important? Or SEO Important?

Joshua Elliot — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:00:02 +0000

I was reading ProBlogger’ latest post on “How to boost your Alexa Ranking” written by a guest Kelly Diels. She was sharing on how it got her blog went from 1,082,076 to 173,556 in Alexa ranking in 2 months and 1 day, which is quite great if that is your goal.

The post was giving tips in Alexa ranking, and I find it very good to read and informative. But one though got to me while I was reading it. Is Alexa ranking or important than SEO?

This is quite hard to tell which is more important……

Why I said what I said

I find that Alexa and SEO have something related to each other, that is why so many so the Internet marketers uses both of them to brand or boost about themselves. This is okay, I sometimes do that too. But the real question comes if your high ranking Alexa number brings you a lot of traffic to your website?

From what I see in the blog post, Alexa ranking is mostly about creating new unique content, getting authoritative links back to your website, and to create content often. This is very close to SEO ideas, and basically are basic SEO too.

In order to have the both Alexa and SEO ranking, I would suggest to do a very good on page optimization on every page on your website when you have new content. Here keyword research is key to building SEO content. It is important to find out the related keywords that

Then use the tips given by Kelly, to write unique content, guest post and link back to your website or blog, and lastly to write more content often.

For me SEO is still important, follow by Alexa ranking. What about you? Which is more important to you? I like to hear from you.

Netbooks Are Making SEO Ranking More Competitive

Joshua Elliot — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:35:31 +0000

Netbooks are the newest mini laptops that are on the trend now, and most of them are owed by females, and males are not the majority of the netbook owners. It was only recently that I used my friend’s netbook to search something on Google, that I realised the search result rankings is going to be harder if the computers are going to be smaller.

The netbook is surprising cheaper than the average 14inch laptops, smaller, although the operating system is not faster than their bigger cousins, what they lack in speed, they make up in their portability and affordability. Back to what I want to voice out is that we as Internet marketers will face a more competition for search engine rankings, here is the reason why:

As the netbooks are usually 10 inch in size, that makes the screen smaller and thus when doing a search online, less search results will appear on the netbook screen. Below is the picture from my friend’s netbook:

As you can see that the search results are showing 2 natural results, whereas the paid search (Adwords PPC) has occupied 3 top positions on the result. Below is the search result of a 14 inch laptop, where I am using the same keyword search of ‘forex training’ and we can see that there are 3 PPC ads on top follow by 3 natural searches:

It has been known that when searchers are searching on the results, they will tend to focus on the top few results instead of the bottom few, refer to the picture below

Why would searchers not look further down for more results? Here are some of my thoughts why:

1) They are too lazy: yes they simply are too lazy to scroll down to check for more.

2) They have found what they are looking for, so they simply ignore the other search results.

Back to the topic on why netbooks are making SEO ranking more competitive. Due to the small screen and my two thoughts why the searchers did not look further, it becomes clear that search engine ranking is getting more and more competitive.

The women are buying the netbooks, due to its small size and weight less. So for the women niches are the ones that will make the SEO ranking the most competitive as women are buyers, who is unlike men. We know that most women are buyers, thus the women niches will be getting competitive than ever.

Well the good news is that there will still be people wants to own a laptop that has bigger screen than a netbook (for mostly men and lesser women). The main thing is to focus more on your website keyword research, related content, placing keywords on your web page for on page optimization and generating relevant links back to website. Will help to rank your web page in higher search result rankings.

By the way, if you have something to add on, do feel free to comment below. And if you find that this post is useful to you, do buzz this post up using the Yahoo Buzz button above.

SEO In Your Website URL

Joshua Elliot — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:43:54 +0000

Have you seen websites that have a website URL that you do not know what the page will be about? Yes of course you do, and many more will be created because they (webmasters or web designers) do not know the importance of SEO. In order for your website to have the best web page being optimized for SEO, your URL should also be able SEO for the best result.

What is a URL?

URL is also called Uniform Resource Locator or previously known as Uniform Resource Identifier. You can read more about what is URL here.

Why would I recommend to use the URL in a SEO approach? There are 2 reasons why:

Reason 1 – The search engines like Google likes it when you can help them to find out what is the keyword you are targeting. Like on-page optimization for your web page, telling the search engines that the web page is relevant to what the online searchers are looking for in the same way, the URL that has the keyword for the web page will help you in the SEO for your web page.

Reason 2 – It will be easy for your online searchers to find out what your web page is about by looking at the URL. Take for example “www.YourDomainName.com/seo-webpage/”, you will see that the web page is talking about SEO webpage from the URL.

Another tip that can help you further increase your SEO in your web page using the URL is to create a folder named under the keyword you are targeting. For example if you are in the golf niche, there are other sub niche keywords of golf like “golf ball” or “golf club”. So in the end your URL will look like “www.YourDomainName.com/golfclub/howtoswingbetter/”, don’t you think that using this type of URL will further help the search engines and your online searchers know that whether the web page is what they are looking for.

Using Capital Letters For URL?

Most of the SEO website do not use capital letters in the first alphabet as it will be quite annoying to the human eyes, although it helps the readers to read better. Another way to further help your readers and search engines, is to add in a space. Instead of a space you add in a ‘horizontal bar’ to add as spacing between words, and the end result will look like this “www.YourDomainName.com/how-to-swing-better“. Don’t you think it looks better and more readable for you and your readers too?

So remember to do your keyword research first before you plan what your web page URL should be, make it easy for the search engines and readers, if you help them they will help you back, especially the search engines.

That will be all for the day, if you have additional details to add, please feel free to comment below. I will be awaiting for your participation.

Basic On-Page Optimization For Your Web Page

Joshua Elliot — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:54:10 +0000

A few rule of trump in doing Search Engine Optimization is to make sure your web page is optimized to your targeted keyword, which will help translate to the search engine, what type of audience you want to bring to your web page. Here are some basic on-page rule to look into:

Title Of Web Page

Like what it tells you, title of web page is very important as this is the summary of what your target audience will be finding. In this case, Google is very particular in the title of the web page, as searchers find it most related to what they are looking for. I have heard that the first few words in the title are the most important, and it is true for me as I place the most important keywords in the front of the title. The title is shown at the top left when you open the web page. It also appear as the title when someone searches for related search term. See picture below

Description Tag of Web Page

This is what I think is the second most important in on-page optimization, it is used to describe what your content is all about. This is an area where you need to summarize what your web page is all about. The primary keyword and related keywords must be position here to maximize the relevancy of what the searchers are looking for. This is shown just below the title when there is a search results. Do note that the description tag has the most 160 characters including space to be shown in the search results. See picture above.

Keyword Tag of Web Page

Although this is not as important back when the early Internt started, due to keyword stuffing by the webmasters to rank well in the search engines. You can still use the keyword tag to optimized your keyword for other smaller search engines which are not so sophicated like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Whatever it is, using the keyword tag to position your important keywords are still workable in on-page optimization.

Alternate Tag of Web Page

When you have picture in the web page, it will not have tell the web spiders what this picture is about and when something crops up that the picture is not able to show to the readers, this is what the alternate tag does. It shows the readers and search spiders what the picture is about. Key in relevant keywords to what your web page is all about.

Headline of Web Page

Headline is like grabbing your attention to continue reading the rest of the content. There are basically headline 1 to 6, where headline is the most important among the 6, but is suppose to use once in a web page, headline 2 the most three times in the web page, and the rest of the headlines you can use more than five times. Of course, you can use a lot of times for headline 3 and above, but in order to be rank naturally is to know when its too much.

Bold Wordings of Web Page

A lot of people do not know that by showing the blod wordings in your content to your readers, it also tells the web spiders that this is also an important keyword. Google understands that and it uses it as one of the ways for good ranking.

Content of the Web Page

Here you must remember to write the content for your readers not for search engines spiders. In order to rank well for your content, first write for human readers, then amend the content with the related keywords for your web page. KEI (Keyword Effective Index) is a calculation of your keyword appearing in your content.

If you have done the above to all your web pages, you will find that you will rank well even if you did not do any off-page optimization. What other on-page can you add in that I did not add in? Please fill in on the comment below.

Predicting Keyword Trend Of Your Niche

Joshua Elliot — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:01:50 +0000

Have you realized that the keywords of your niche might change, or maybe a new term has been added? They do! You can see the season of the niche like Christmas or Valentine’s day where a lot of your loved ones will rush to buy gifts for you or their loved ones.

Unlike the recent case of Michael Jackson who passed away, where a lot fans rushed to buy all his past albums, MTVs, anything that is related to Michael Jackson. A lot of marketers profit from this sudden increase trend of buying Michael Jackson’s product, there is nothing wrong in doing this. What I am trying to say is that, this kind of keyword like “buy Michael Jackson DVD” will not be able to able to sustain long as this is a sudden trend, and it will go away fast too.

What we want to know is that “Are we able to predict the keyword trend of our niche?” The good news is that you can predict the keywords that will appear in the near future, so that it will give you ample time to set up a website with the right targeted keywords and links from relevant sites.

How do we predict the keywords of our niche?

Using simple tools like Google Trends, Google Alerts and Google Keyword Tool to position yourself for the changing of trend in your niche.

You can read more on 4 reasons to use Google Keyword Tool.

As you can see the picture above, that I am using the keyword trend of “Internet marketing”, the trend is decreasing these few years. The graph is quite simple to understand. What the Google Trends also have are the top 10 countries who are searching for the keyword “Internet marketing”, and it also provides the recent news on from Google News as well. You can read more on how to use Google Trends here.

The Google Alerts will help you in finding the news, blogs, or even social networking sites to find out what are the latest news in the development of a particular product. This is one of the best product that I find in Google, as it has help me to understand more, and not waste too much of my time searching for information on the net.

By keying in the primary keyword of your niche into Google Alerts, you can find out what is happening around the world, what is the latest update. You can even key in your name, company name, or product name, to see if there are anyone writing about you or even complaining about you. You can set the alert as immediate, daily or weekly update to your email.

There are other tools that will also help you in predicting the keyword of your niche, but today I will only share with you on Keyword Research Pro. Like what the name of the tool, it basically helps you in keyword research. What it also does is that it helps you find out what are the popular terms or products people are searching online currently.

It has save me a lot of time in doing keyword research and finding out what are the current hot trends online. Though Keyword Research Pro is not free, but it has help me in understanding more of keywords research and find out which keywords to target for my niche.

If you are interested know more about Keyword Research Pro: Find Out More, click the link.

Why Keyword Research Is Still The Main Gateway To Internet Success

Joshua Elliot — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:12:44 +0000

Taken from www.searchengineoptimizationcompany.ca

Since the dawn of the Internet, search engines have been doing what they have been doing, providing search results for Internet users. These search results will be highly dependent on the keywords the Internet users are typing. This is why it’s so important to understand how the global Internet users think and search for related topics or subjects.

Keyword Research Fact

1. More than 90% of the Internet users started on the search of their particular topics on the search engines with keywords in their mind. This is a fact and it cannot be change, unless there is a better way for them to search for their topics, search engines are here to stay.

2. Human beings are being conditioned to use search engines for the past decade, so this habit is very hard to change and is not a bad thing too.

3. The top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN (now called Bing), provide very good and related search results to the Internet users. And they are at the same thing doing their best to understand and help the Internet users with more options, like providing them free applications, Google Analytics, Flickr and Money Central.

Using only the 1st fact, you will know that money can be made if you understand keyword research. A couple of posts ago, I shared with you on a free keyword tool by Google. You can use it to determine whether you can go into the particular niche, by find out the search volume of the month.

Another thing to add is that, if there is a search volume of at least 500 searches a day, there is a good niche to go into (this is if you are targeting global market). If you are only targeting local market, like the city of Miami, the search volume must be at least 50 a day for that city. This is just a rough guide for all niches, I have a niche that earns me a few hundreds bucks monthly and the average search volume is like 10 daily, there is no hard and fast rule here, it also depends on some luck too.

Let’s get back to the topic…..

After finding out what is your niche daily search volume, you are to drill down to finding out the long tail keywords of the niche, for example you are in the golf clubs niche, you should include right hand golf sticks, left hand golf sticks and the brands of the golf sticks too, write content or reviews on the golf sticks etc… You will be able to find out that the longer the keywords the better the conversation rate is (provided you have great content and good offers).

Some questions for you as a Internet users on search engines:

Do you usually start with a general search term that is maybe one or two words long?
Do you add in related words to the general term, that will help you in getting the results?
Do you find that the longer related keywords are what you are actually looking for most of the time (provided you use the correct search term)?

If the above 3 questions are yeses, then you already know how Internet users (you and me included) search in the search engines.

There are tools that can help us in doing keyword research, and recently I purchased a tool called Keyword Research Pro, it has helped me a lot in terms of time, affect and money too. As keyword research can be a tiring thing to do, you might want to check it out as this will help you in the long term for your website or blog.

Read About Keyword Research Pro Review.