I was browsing a small business forum the other day and notices a post by a business owner. The business owner had hired a “SEO Expert” to increase their rankings in the Search Engines. After nearly a year, their website was no where near the top of any Search Engine.

He emailed his site to me to take a look at it for him. It only took a second looking at the source to realize this guy had hired the wrong person to do SEO on their website. A quick look at his site with my Firefox SEO extension showed no backlinks.

The on-page SEO (or lack of) was horrible plus his Copyrighting was not optimized either. It was no wonder this site didn’t rank. This site was in a small niche and it shouldn’t have been that hard to rank well, especially over a year’s time.

If you have questions about your SEO expert, here are 7 signs that you’ve hired the wrong SEO expert or company.

1. Your Real Estate Agent website ranks #1 for Viagra in your City.
2. There are no backlinks pointing to your website, but you find that your website has 367 outgoing links to Gambling and Porn sites.
3. When you pull up your SEO’s website, it says “This Account Has Been Suspended.”
4. Your think “BlackHat SEO” is the name of your SEO Company.
5. Your SEO expert’s idea of on-page optimization includes typing your keywords across the top of your index page, over and over and over.
6. More than 95% of people with Guestbooks on their websites know your URL.
7. Matt Cutt’s knows your URL by heart.

Okay, so that was a little tongue in cheek list, but there are a lot of people/companies out there who will take your money and do little to get your website ranked. There are also those who can actually damage your website. Buyer Beware when hiring an SEO Expert or SEO Company. Here’s a post about

7 Signs You Hired The Wrong SEO Company.

Every kid on the block seems to know web designing these days. Actually thinking along those lines it is not difficult at all to learn how to design a web page or for that matter even a site. What with FrontPage, Dreamweaver and the gang making the job even simpler.

But one has to realize there is more to web designing then knowing how to write a few HTML codes or use one of the many commercially available programs. While teaching you how to code or code correctly for that matter is not the objective of this article, I would be giving you some tips that distinguish the real web designer from the rest of the pack.

1. I will strictly ask you to not to use lots of flash contents if you want to be at the top of the search engine. Yes, I know it looks awesome but it does nothing more than hindering your all search engine optimization strategies. You don’t need to provide your visitors an eye candy, dude just provide them some helpful content.

2. Always remember to use navigation menu at the right side of each page of your site, why? because search engines count the first few phrases appearing on the page, this way you would provide the search engines the content first.

3. Make your pages cross browser compatible. Though this is very difficult even for the most experienced among us, TRY!

4. Time your page for its loading speeds. Remember, though a graphic image looks really good on your site, its hateful if your visitors have to wait hours for it to load. You may be using a high speed connection, the whole world doesn’t. Your page has to be quick to load.

5. Too many images have exactly the opposite effect then they are meant to have. So, do everything in proportion… including putting in graphics and animations.

6. Colour combinations matter. Your text has to be readable & as importantly if not more, worth reading.

7. Always work on a good navigation structure… Remember if a client cant find your contact info or order link, you’d miss on a sale.

8. Make your site search engine friendly. Its no use having the best site in the world which no one can find. And for every one’s sake don’t mess around with hidden layers to get a high listing on the engines. It is JUST NOT worth the risk!

9. If you have ad banners, place them with a little thought. Too many of those little pop ups are the most annoying thing on the web and more often then not deter visitors from sticking onto your site rather than earn you some extra cash.

10. Lastly… you never know everything. Over the years and after designing a dozen sites, I still learn something new from ever project that I undertake. Guys you can never be perfect when it comes to coding… And if you are… then there is always room to improve perfection.

10 SEO Tips And Tricks For A Budding Web Designer.

Writing and submitting articles to ezines and article directories can be one of the most effective forms of free promotion for your website.
Here are some reasons why you should be doing this to help grow your business:
1. Branding.
You can brand your website, business and yourself by submitting articles to ezines. You can include a “resources box” at the end of the article. That resource box can give your name, business name, your credentials, website address and a brief description of your website to prompt readers to visit.

2. Expert Status
If you write informative and helpful articles, youll become known as an expert in the field. This will give you and your business extra credibility which will help position you against your competition.
3. Exposure
Your article might also be placed on the ezine publishers home page. If they publish each issue on their home page this will give you some extra exposure and added credibility.
4. Permanent Links
You might get extra exposure if the ezine publisher archives their ezine on their site. People often want to read the back issues before they make the decision to subscribe. And your article will be there for them to see. This will aslo give you a valuable permanent back link to your site, which is great for Page Rank.
5. Free Advertsing
You will get free advertising. This frees up money to spend your profits on other forms of advertising or building your business. You could then buy advertisements in other ezines that havent published your articles.
6. Lead to Other Income
You might get extra income from people wanting to hire you to write other articles, ebooks, or even asking you to speak at seminars. What a great way to multiply your income and credibility.
7. Going Viral
If you allow ezine publishers to publish your articles in their free ebooks, your advertising could multiply all over the internet. These ebooks tend to be given away over and over again, each time increasing your reach.
8. Increase Your Reach
When you submit your article to an ezine publisher that has a free content/article directory on their web site, you can get your article published all over the web. They allow their visitors to republish your article on their website or in their ezine.
9. Trust
Youll gain peoples trust. If they read your article and like it, theyll be far more likely to buy your product or service. This will give obvious benefits to your profits.
10. Establish Relationships
Heres how you can really boost your chances of getting your article to run in an ezine. Agree to run one of their articles in your ezine if, in exchange, they run yours in their ezine. Its a win/win situation, that could lead to even more profitable joint venture deals in the future.
As you can see, there are many reasons why you should be practicing article marketing to build your online business profile.
You dont have to be a prize-winning-quality writer. Just make sure the articles are informative and that the information you impart is valid and accurate.
Now you just have to get on and do it. The best way to learn is to “just do it”!

By Michael Beauchamp
Michael Beauchamp, is the owner of http://www.e-bizresources.com He has also just launched http://www.free-ad-directory.info where youll find many free online advertising resources, or you can submit your own quality free advertising site.

10 Good Reasons For Submitting Articles To Ezines – Article Marketing Reviewed – Exploring Article Writing and Promotion.

The purpose of article internet marketing is to connect people with the information they are searching for on the internet, and at the same time create a desire in them to go to your website for more information, or to look at the products you offer there.

As the main reason people surf the internet is to find quality information and solutions to problems they may have, the role of a search engine is to connect people with the information that they are looking for.

The way this happens is through keywords. The words that a person types into the search bar of Google or any other search engine are called keywords. The search engines use those keywords to connect people with the information they are seeking.

An important key in article internet marketing is to write the article around the main keywords of the website page that you want to promote. By developing the skill of writing articles that contain the right elements that search engines need to send people to your article, you will become successful at article internet marketing.

A major role of Portal Feeder 2.0 is to to create quality websites full of unique content and to teach portal feeder members how to optimize those sites to attract the search engines. As search engines are looking for fresh and unique content,an important part of the Portal Feeder training is to teach Portal Feeder members how to create quality articles.

Writing quality articles is foundational to success in online marketing. The Portal Feeder training teaches what are the critical elements of a quality piece of content. The title and the content need to be written in such a way that the reader’s attention is held when they start to read. The article needs to have not only the keywords related to the topic, but also other words that also indicate to the search engines what the article is about. This strategy is called Latent Semantic Indexing.

Another strategy taught in Portal Feeder is that articles should not have a closing paragraph. The resource box plays the role of the closing paragraph. The resource box should spark the curiosity of the reader to click the link and see the benifit of what you are offering on your website.

As an owner of an article directory, I have discovered that many article authors do not write quality articles that benefit the readers and attract search engines to index the article. Many people make obvious mistakes which indicate that they do not fully understand the power of article marketing. If you want to make money marketing online, it is important for you to know and follow sound strategies in your article marketing.

Portal Feeder-Article Marketing on Steroids – Article Marketing Reviewed – Exploring Article Writing and Promotion.

Alt text is the line of text you see pop up (in Internet Explorer, see note below) when you place your cursor over an image. It also displays a text representation of the image when the user has images turned off in their browser (this is the intended behavior). It is highly recommended that you utilize this area as it is required under accessibility laws and, is indexed by the search engines.

Note: Internet Explorer (IE) will display alt text when you hover your cursor over an element that utilizes the alt attribute. This is incorrect behavior as the alt text is designed to be displayed when the user has their images turned off while browsing. Other browsers such as Opera and Mozilla will not display the alt text on hover.

The alt attribute should not to be stuffed with keywords or phrases. The alt text should mirror the content of the image. If it is a graphic header, then your alt attribute should mirror the text in the graphic header.

Alternative text values should not exceed 80 characters in length. If more than 70-80 characters are required one should use the longdesc attribute as an alternative to alt text.

Make sure your Alt Attribute is relevant to the content for that image.

Building the Perfect Page – The Basics – Part I.

For those search engines that are META enabled, the META keywords tag used to be one of the most important areas after the page title and page description. It has been abused by both marketers and consumers alike that there is very little weight given to the META keywords tag.

Don’t fret over your META keywords tag. Utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your title element, META description tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Try to limit it to 15 to 20 words if possible.

Make sure your META Keywords Tag is relevant to the content on your page.

Okay, let’s try tackling a few questions from the Grab bag thread. Just a hint for next time: if your question takes three paragraphs to ask, your odds of getting an answer go down.

Q: “Is Bigdaddy fully deployed?”
A: Yes, I believe every data center now has the Bigdaddy upgrade in software infrastructure, as of this weekend.

Q: “What’s the story on the Mozilla Googlebot? Is that what Bigdaddy sends out?”
A: Yes, I believe so. You will probably see less crawling by the older Googlebot, which has a User-Agent of “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)”. I believe crawling from the Bigdaddy infrastructure has a new User-Agent, which is “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

Q: “Do you take Emmy with you to San Francisco?”
A: Nope, Emmy is a true indoors cat; she doesn’t like to travel.

Q: “Any new word on sites that were showing more supplemental results?”
A: An additional crawling change to show more sites from those sites was checked in late last week, but it may still take a little bit of time (another few days) for that to show up in the index. I’ll keep an eye on sites that people have given as examples to see how those sites are showing up.

Q: “Is the RK parameter turned off, or should we expect to see it again?”
A: I wouldn’t expect to see the RK parameter have a non-zero value again.

Q: “What’s an RK parameter?”
A: It’s a parameter that you could see in a Google toolbar query. Some people outside of Google had speculated that it was live PageRank, that PageRank differed between Bigdaddy and the older infrastructure, etc.

Q: “Now that Bigdaddy is out, will there be a new export of PageRank anytime soon?” and “Will the deployment of BigDaddy stabilise the rolling PR issues we are experiencing at present?”
A: I’ll ask around about that. If there aren’t any logistical obstacles, I’ll ask if we could make a new set of PageRanks visible within the next couple weeks. I’d expect that as Bigdaddy stabilizes everywhere, the variation in toolbar PR for individual urls is more like to settle down too.

Q: “This datacentre http://64.233.185.104/ works differently to all of the others. Noticed just a few hours ago. . . . . Where does that DC fit into the scheme of things? Is it mainly made from newly spidered data?”
A: Sharp eyes, g1smd. That wouldn’t surprise me. As Bigdaddy cools down, that frees us up to do new/other things.

Q: “Not so much a question… GET A PSP!”
A: I got one today, TallTroll. I picked up Me and My Katamari (MAMK) and a PSP that turned out to have firmware v1.52 on it. So I could upgrade to 2.0, then downgrade to 1.5 so I could run homebrew programs. But I think MAMK requires firmware 2.5 or 2.6 to play, which means a one-way upgrade or maybe using RunUMD or a similar program. Suffice it to say I’m having fun just geeking around.

Q: “Can you give us a general way of getting a good idea in front of Google?”
A: If it’s bizdev, there’s a bizdev dept. at Google you could contact. If it’s not a business/patent/proprietary idea, I’d mention it here or blog about it somewhere. Writing a snail mail letter could work well too.

Q: “Did you check out the guys all painted in silver doing the robot on milk crates in San Fran?”
A: Nope, that’s down by Fisherman’s Wharf. We’re hanging near Union Square.

Q: “Why do you focus your attention so much on SEOs and not at webmasters who make actual quality websites?”
A: I think that’s an issue I have personally, because I spend so much of my time looking at spam. Lots of other people focus on helping general webmasters, like the Sitemaps team, for example. I have started to do “SEO Advice” posts instead of just “SEO Mistakes” posts, but you’re right: I personally could use a reminder to keep focusing on the sites that make quality content and how to pull those sites up, not just how to counter sites that cheat. Thanks for bringing that up.

Q: “My sitemap has about 1350 urls in it. . . . . its been around for 2+ years, but I cannot seem to get all the pages indexed. Am I missing something here?”
A: One of the classic crawling strategies that Google has used is the amount of PageRank on your pages. So just because your site has been around for a couple years (or that you submit a sitemap), that doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically crawl every page on your site. In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply. You might also want to look at the remaining unindexed urls; do they have a ton of parameters (we typically prefer urls with 1-2 parameters)? Is there a robots.txt? Is it possible to reach the unindexed urls easily by following static text links (no Flash, JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, frames, etc. in the way)? That’s what I would recommend looking at.

Q: “When I change a robots.txt to exclude more existing files from being crawled, how long does it take for them to be removed from the index? Perhaps the answer is a function of how often the site is crawled and it’s PR?”
A: It is a function of how often the site is crawled. I believe in the past that every several hundred page fetches or several days, the bot would re-check the robots.txt. Note that for supplemental results, you need recrawling to happen by the supplemental Googlebot in order for the robots.txt file to take affect on those pages. If you’re really sure you never want those pages to be seen, you can use our url removal tool to remove urls for six months at a time. But I’d be very careful with the url removal tool unless you’re an expert. If you make a mistake and (for example) remove your entire site, that’s your responsibility. Google can sometimes clear out self-removals, but we don’t guarantee it.

Q: “I would love to be able to search for html code and see how that ranks.”
A: I would like that too. Indexing non-visible things like punctuation, JavaScript, and HTML would be great, but it would also bulk up the size of the index. Any time you’re considering a new feature (e.g. our numrange search), you have to trade off how much the index would get bigger versus the utility of the feature. My guess is that we wouldn’t offer this any time soon.

Q: “Seriously, How do you plan on picking which of these questions to answer?”
A: I’m tackling the ones that looked interesting, short, and general enough that more than one person would be interested.

Q: “I am seeing a lot of sites with “%09? (tab) and “%20? (space) in front of the URL in Googles index.”
A: I’ll ask someone about that.

Q: (paraphrasing) The sitemaps validation fetch seems to happen with a User-Agent of “-”? My auto-reject rules reject that user agent.
A: I’ll ask someone about that. You could whitelist the IP range that Googlebot comes from in the mean time.

Q: “If one were to offer to sell space on their site (or consider purchasing it on another), would it be a good idea to offer to add a NOFOLLOW tag so to generate the traffic from the advertisement, but not have the appearence of artificial PR manipulation through purchasing of links?”
A: Yes, if you sell links, you should mark them with the nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google.

Q: “On sites directed to international audiences with the same (high quality) content in several languages is it better to do several TLDs like mydomain.com, mydomain.de, mydomain.fr, mydomain.eu and so on or do subdomains like en.mydomain.eu, de.mydomain.eu, fr.mydomain.eu or something else like mydomain.com/en, mydomain.com/de, mydomain.com/fr?”
A: Good question. If you’ve only got a small number of pages, I might start out with subdomains, e.g. de.mydomain.eu or de.mydomain.com. Once you develop a substantial presence or number of pages in each language, that’s where it often makes sense to start developing separate domains.

Q: “Any results on why IDN Domains don’t show pagerank?”
A: I’ve seen a couple that do, but I’ll check into why most don’t. My guess is that there’s a normalization issue somewhere in the toolbar PageRank pathway.

Q: “Would it be possible to add a date range to queries? I might get 91,000,000 results, but the first 200 are 2-3 years old. I would like to limit results to items no more than 6-12 months old.”
A: Check out our advanced search page for this option. Tara Calashain also did some really interesting digging into this too, e.g. this info she uncovered. Google Hacks is a pretty solid book if you’d like to read more fun Google hacks.

Q: “What about the problem of directories and shopping comparison spam overriding real pages?”
A: Fair feedback. I heard that recently from a Googler, too. Sometimes we think of spam as strictly things like hidden text, cloaking, etc. But users think of spam as noise: things that they don’t want. If they’re trying to get information, fix a problem, read reviews, etc., then sites that like aren’t as helpful.

Q: “Are you planning to visit/speak in the UK at all in the near future?”
A: Sadly not. I’m hitting the Boston Pubcon and SES San Jose, but I can only do 4-5 conferences a year.

Q: “The one thing that seems to be getting to people generally, is what are the post Big Daddy intentions? Fixes, spam issues, regeneration of ‘pure’ indices, supp. issues, PR and BL update, etc.”
A: I can’t give a timeline (e.g. “scaling up communication in April, more work on canonicalization in May”) because priorities can change, esp. depending on machine issues, deployments of new binaries, webspam developments, etc. Short-term, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some refreshing in supplemental results relatively soon, and potentially different PageRanks visible in the next couple weeks.

Q: “Even Matt is afraid to use a redirect from www.mattcutts.com/ to www.mattcutts.com/blog/ because Google might penalize his website and put it into supplemental hell.”
A: Heh. No, that’s not it. I’m deliberately leaving them separate as a test case to see how we do now and down the road.

Q: “Just like you told me a couple of months ago, the Supplemental Googlebot (SG) got around to my site and things got sorted out. Thanks. . . . . If you are in San Fran and want to check out the Monterey Aquarium, could you please write a short review? I’ve been thinking of visiting and wondering if it is worth the trip.”
A: I would definitely recommend the Monterey Bay Aquarium, especially if you can find a coupon or other good deal. I highly recommend the otters, the kelp forest, and the jellyfish area.

Q & A thread: March 27, 2006.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a way to get a top position in the search engines and a natural and free of cost way to get maximum traffic to your website.

Here are a few tried and tested ways to achieve the topmost position in a search engines:

1. On Page Optimization:
• After making a thorough research on the keywords, use the keywords in the metatags, titles and contents of your webpages.
• Try using about 2 keywords in the contents of a single webpage.

2. Off Page Optimization:
• You need to have a high page rank to be placed at a top position in a search engine. Linking to a website having a high page rank will serve this purpose.
• To convince a website of high page rank is the job that requires all your efforts as websites with a high page rank do not always link to websites having lower page rank than theirs.
• So you need to convince them to that extent to trade links or else you can always opt for the easy way to get a high page rank by paying the websites of higher page rank to link to your website. Of course paying to link with high page rank websites is possible only with websites who offer such a feature.
• Another simpler option is buying expired domains that already have a high page rank.

3. Beat your competitor in search engine ranking:
Don’t try to beat the search engine. Try to beat your competitor website and try to do at least one thing better than them and continue this till you see some visible changes in the search engine ranks.

4. Popular search terms are better than keywords:
Using the most popular and highly sorted out search term is better than using popular keywords.

5. More the number of pages of your website, the better is your page rank.
• Less number of pages with a high density of keywords won’t attract the search engines as much as more number of pages in a website with limited keywords.
• Eg: Wikipedia has millions of pages and so for almost any search term you find it in the top 10 search results. This wasn’t achieved in a day, the pages were added little by little and finally their count grew to millions.
• Rather than cramping everything in a single webpage, distribute it among different webpages.
• A single webpage could have 400-800 words per page.

6. To increase your webpages, you could start writing articles on a regular basis.
For this you can write it yourself or heir a Ghostwriter who may charge you around $5 per article or borrow it from an article website and publish it on your website keeping the author’s resource box intact.

7. Your website should have a newsletter feature.
• Subscribers of your newsletter will judge you by the quality of the content that you send them.
• So sit down to write some quality content for your newsletter.
• Even if you have 5-10 people who have signed up for your newsletter, you can get 80% of the sales from them.

8. On subscribing for your newsletter, provide the subscribers with some bonuses to entice them to visit your website again and again.

9. Give away reports on topics related to your website contents to your newsletter subscribers using autoresponders.

10. Submit your articles to E-zines, article directories etc., as these websites have huge traffic and your article thus can experience great exposure and the links back to your website can get huge website traffic too. These links placed here, are of great value to your website and thus placing your article in such websites gets traffic and backlink benefits.

11. Other than submitting articles in E-zines and article directories also try submitting your article to various websites that have contests similar to your article.
This article should have links back to your website, so that the traffic experienced by their website could be redirected to yours too in exchange of the articles. The articles written for your website, as well as submitted to different websites should follow certain strategies like:
• Find search terms that are searched at least 100 times per day but not more than 1 million times per day.
• Use these keywords throughout your article with a density of 3-7% per article. You could also use these keywords in the title of your article.
• Spend some time thinking of an attractive title for your article.
• Your article should have a good opening paragraph, so that people would go through your entire article with interest.

12. Make use of article announcement list which is quite similar to article directory where most of the visitors are generally webmasters in search of a quality article to be published on their website.

13. Submit your website in popular directories for increased traffic and backlinks. Submit your website only when it is fully functional to avoid rejection by the directories.

14. Join webmaster’s forum and try becoming a problem solver over there.
• Advice the forum members to find a solution to their problems.
• Ask for their opinions and comments for any of your works.
• If you have a blog of your own, then tell them about it and you could also mention about various posts that would help them find a solution to their problems and from the blog direct them to your website.
• If you direct them directly to your website they will feel as if you are there just to get traffic for your website ad not really there to advice them for solutions.

15. Beware of certain websites that provides codes, which you may be asked to place on your website to get 1000 of links to your website in minutes, but after this you website will certainly get removed from the search engines results. So beware and avoid risks.

16. Classifieds submission to get traffic for your website was once considered a very profitable deal but now due to its overcrowding, it is not so popular to attract traffic, although you do have chances of getting traffic from classified websites too. As its submission is for free might as well give it a try. Always use keywords to write your classified ads.

17. If you are a part of an affiliate network where the websites would like to refer their visitors to each other’s websites, then share posts, articles, newsletters with your website links placed on it, with such websites. You affiliates could use them for their own newsletters and finally, you are trying to help them send visitors to your website.

18. Set up your own blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com to display your website’s articles. Here your content gets maximum reviews and could thus help you improve your website content, making use of these reviews.

19. Once you blog becomes quite popular, submit your blog’s RSS to RSS directory to get more traffic.
• For Bloggers.com, it is “Yourdomain.blogspot.com/atom.xml”
• For wordpress.com, it is “yourdomain.com/feed/”

20. Write press releases.
• Press releases are the notifications that you send to media about noticeable and newsworthy information to get media attention and advertising for free.
• As press releases you can send your website poll information, latest survey information with special reports and mention that this was solely carried out by your website.
• Before writing your press release, go through some of the sample press releases already available on the website, so that you come to know about the format in which a press release has to be presented.
• Avoid presenting it as some advertising copy.

21. Newspaper press releases: When you write a press release, you can also mail the press release to the editor of a newspaper column where you want your press release to appear. The same could be done to printed magazines too.

22. The content of a single webpage should not exceed more than 400-800 words as search engines would not like to go through each and every word of your webpage. Distribute your contents over different webpages if the content is too long to be displayed in a single webpage, this will allow you to target more keywords.

23. If you want your visitors to click a particular link in your website, you could use the terms like “Not many people know about this link.”

for more information, visit my blog

http://fullguide.blogspot.com
http://booster.110mb.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Amr_Nasser

23 SEO Tips and Tricks.

Title Element

The page title element (some refer to it as the title tag which is incorrect) is one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.

Page title elements are normally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, no fluff, straight and to the point. This is what shows up in most search engine results as a link back to your page.

Make sure your Page Title Element (title tag) is relevant to the content on the page.

Building the Perfect Page – The Basics – Part I.