Archive for the ‘Web Hosting’ Category
How to Increase Google Page Rank
Visit any internet marketing forum and you are bound to find at least a few discussions on Google page rank. But what exactly is Google Page Rank and what do you need to do to increase it?
First of all Page Rank is a value that Google assigns to a web page based on the importance of the page. It is determined by the number of incoming links to that web page and few other factors including the page rank of the page giving the link to you.
There has been discussion recently asked to the importance of page rank. However one thing to consider is this, if Google thinks page rank is important than page rank is important.
Remember Google gets over 65% of all the search traffic on the Internet every day. If you were to take 10 websites that were all optimized for the same keywords, typically you would find that the page with the highest page rank would rank higher in the search engine results than the other pages.
So what are the best ways to increase your Google Page Rank?
- One of the first things you should do is aim to increase the numnber of backlinks that you have pointing to your website. This fact alone can increase your link popularity and ultimately increase your page rank. Combined with that is the fact that the more back links you have pointing back your website for more potential traffic you will get from it.
- As well as increasing the quantity of links to your website you should also try to get your links on high quality web pages. This means getting your link on pages that are ranked as high or higher than yours. When you do this some of their page rank can be transferred to you which ultimately helps increase the page rank of your site.
There are lots of ways to increase your page rank, but the most common methods are posting in discussion forums that have a high page rank, article marketing, submitting your site to directories, commenting on blogs and distributing press releases.
You should also try to get some deep links in addition to the links to your home page. Deep linking means linking to internal pages on your website as opposed to always linking to your homepage.
There are many other methods that you can use to improve your page rank, but any time you spend on getting links is well spent!
It is worth noting that the page rank displayed on the Google toolbar is not up to date. Although Google is always internally updating the page rank of web pages, the toolbar page rank is only updated every few months.
You should also be aware that just because a web page has a low page rank it doesn’t mean that getting a link on that page isn’t worthwhile. The page rank could increase on the next toolbar update.
Finally, it is worth remembering that a good Google Page Rank on its own is not necessarily going to mean lots of traffic. You also want to ensure that you have chosen good keyword phrases and have optimized your website.
By Suzanne Morrison
10 Ways to Get Banned by the Search Engines
When you build your website, you, of course, want to get high rankings in the search engines. There are lots of ways to do this and lots of ways to NOT do this. Below are 10 things to avoid if you want to be in good standing with the search engines.
- Duplicate Content/Sites – Do not set up multiple sites or site pages using basically the same content with a few different keywords spread around. This does not fool the search engines.
- Cloaking – Cloaking is when a website or webpage is set up to show different content for a search engine spider than the human visitors. The cloaked page (for the spiders) is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to get higher rankings. What it can get you is banned!
- Linking to Bad Neighborhoods – Be careful who you link to because you can be found guilty by association. Do not link to adult sites, gambling sites or link farms. Also be careful not to link to sites that use any of the SEO methods mentioned here.
- Title Stacking – This is simply trying to give each page more than one title tag so you can use more keywords to get higher rankings. The search engines consider this a dirty little trick.
- Doorway Pages – Doorway or gateway pages are pages that are set-up for one keyword topic but then they take you to different content. These pages usually have little value in the way of content and have little to do with the rest of the site. They are used solely to try to get a higher rank in the search engines.
- Redirect Pages – Redirect pages are set up to rank high in the search engines but when you click on the page, it will take you to another page which is usually a sales page for a product or service. So, what you see isn’t what you get!
- Automated Submission Services – Do not use automated submission services. They are against Google’s TOS and can get you banned.
- Hidden Links – This is when a link is added to a page in such a small size that it cannot be seen by human visitors but can be picked up by the search engine spiders. This might work for a time but when the search engines discover it, you will be penalized!
- Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing or spamming is simply being too repetitive with your keywords as to the extent of your content not being sensible. For example if your keywords are cat food and your text reads something like this: When your cat gets hungry be sure to feed them this cat food because your cat will like this cat food. This cat food comes in an easy to open cat food can and contains fish, chicken and healthy ingredients that all cat food should have. So, when your cat is hungry for cat food, give them this cat food because this cat food is the best cat food for your cat!You can easily see why this kind of keyword stuffing should not be used.
- Invisible Text – This is when you hide text by using the same color text and background. The invisible text is meant for the search engines only and not for visitors. This is done so you can stuff a lot more keywords on your page without wrecking your content. The search engines will discover this and they will penalize you!
Be careful not to use these Black Hat SEO methods because it could cause you a lot of trouble with the search engines. Be careful as well, who you hire to work on your site because some of these things can be done without your knowledge and cause your site to get banned or penalized.
A few things you should do to get higher rankings are:
- Research keywords and use relevant keywords on your web pages and in your page title.
- Add new content to your site regularly
- Link with relevant, quality sites
- Use a site map
- Don’t use a lot of javascript or flash. The search engines do not read these.
Following all of the above can keep you from getting banned and improve your rankings!
By Terri Seymour
Free Traffic for Your Website or Blog
The homework is done, your blog or website is live. You’ve chosen a hot niche/topic, ordered an awesome banner/header and chosen a theme if required…you’ve worked hard.
You add valuable content, affiliate links to high converting products, your own product links…but there is a problem. You have no traffic. Without traffic, there is no one to appreciate your hard work and awesome content.
Without traffic, you are a nobody in the cyber world. Traffic is what gets the search engine Gods to notice you. There is no one to click your affiliate links without traffic.
But, it can get expensive driving traffic to your site if you use some of the paid methods such as PPC.
There are however some very valid traffic producing methods that you can employ for free.
Let’s examine a few:
1) Forum Marketing: The worst think you can do is show up on forums and start dropping one liners with your “signature” and a link back to you blog. This is considered spam and the only thing it will do for you is to get you banned. But, forums are an excellent place to get noticed with when you add great valuable content.
Obviously you want to choose forums that focus on your particular topic or niche. Forums are a condensed concentration of the people that are interested in your niche…all located in one spot. Make sure with each post, you leave your signature with a link to your product, website and or blog.
If you establish yourself as a valued contributor then you will eventually be perceived as an expert and people will navigate to your blog or website to find out more.
2) Article marketing: There is a hungry audience waiting for excellent articles to use on their own websites or blog and article directories is where they go looking. With articles, you don’t want to fill the article with your links but use the author resource/bio box provided to leave your signature and links.
You can employ the use of article directories to get your article listed in hundreds of article directories. Additionally, many directories also submit to newsletter publishers.
It’s always a good idea to track your articles by using Google Alerts. If someone is routinely publishing your material, you may want to contact them and offer to submit your articles directly to them whenever you write a new one.
3) Sign up on sites like MyBlogLog and use their widget on your site. You can befriend other bloggers and build your own community of followers with MyBlogLog…a social community that you can tap into and get a consistent flow of traffic.
4) If you have an opt in form on your site, make sure to send an email out every time you create a new post. These people have already shown an interest by signing up to your blog…keep them informed and coming back.
5) Let’s not forget the basics…blog posting. You need to stay on top of your website or blog and keep it fresh with new content including using your keywords for SEO purposes. Ideally, your keywords should be in the title, the first paragraph and the last paragraph. But, only if it makes sense to do so.
6) Yahoo answers is an excellent way to get traffic and show off your expert knowledge. Look for questions in your area of expertise and provide valuable answers. It’s important that you add your link for reference.
7) Getting free traffic can be as easy as guest blogging on some high-ranking blogs but only if you can write intelligent, interesting, value filled posts that will benefit them. Your link will then be added to your post and can bring lots of free traffic your way.
Twitter: Let’s not forget Twitter. Twitter is here to stay and has become an invaluable source of free traffic, so if you haven’t already, it’s time you took a hard look at it. In fact, every time you submit an article to Ezine the reader can tweet the title and link to it.
Once again, don’t go on Twitter and start spamming with links, links, links. That is what you will become known for. Instead, build up a stream of targeted followers by providing interesting tweets.
9) Build a Squidoo Lense: Squidoo pages are the perfect avenue to get 1-way links to your blog. You can get direct traffic to your Squidoo lense if you use your long-tail keywords. Google loves Squidoo pages and using this method will often get you ranked in the top ten.
10) Video: Create and distribute a video that includes a link back to your blog or website. Videos have taken over the Internet as most people would rather watch a video than read a screen. People love them.
This by no means a comprehensive list as there are many more ways to drive free traffic. But, these are some of the most important ones and will get you started.
Don’t be discouraged easily. It takes time for people to discover your new blog or website. You must be patient and consistently work towards your goal and if you do, I promise that you will reap the benefits.
Combine persistent and consistent action with patience and before you know it you will have your own thriving list of subscribers hungry to learn from you.
By Kathy Dobson
How to Increase Your Traffic and Conversions in Three Simple Steps
“We need more traffic.” For most websites this is a truism. We all want more traffic. We all would benefit from it. This is the reason that strategies such as SEO are so popular – they aim to build strong streams of relevant traffic to your website. All well and good – this is a bit of a no-brainer.
But this is where many webmasters leave it. They understand that only a percentage of their traffic will convert so they set out to find ways to get more traffic. The thinking is, “if you’re converting a 2% slice of the traffic pie, build a bigger pie.”
The question that is considered far less often: “can we convert more of the traffic we’re already getting?”
There are two ways to get more business out of your website:
- Increase your traffic
- Convert more of it
When you’re operating on limited resources (and, really, who isn’t in this economy?) the question of where to invest them is always a daunting one. Play your cards right and you’ll reap the rewards. Invest unwisely and you may find yourself up that old proverbial creek.
So how do you choose which lever to pull? Conversions or traffic?
Fortunately, there is a way to increase both 1) your organic search traffic and 2) your conversions all in one stroke.
Sound too good to be true? Stay with me…
What you’ll need:
- Access to your web analytics (such as Google Analytics)
- Conversion tracking setup (such as Goals in Google Analytics)
- A rank checking solution (I like SEOBook’s Rank Checker [http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/]) that allows you to export bulk results to a spreadsheet or CSV file.
- Excel (or a similar spreadsheet system)
I’m going to assume, for this walkthrough, that everyone is using Google Analytics, has goal tracking set up properly, is using SEOBook’s Rank Checker and MS Excel.
We’re going to walk through this step-by-step. Now would be a good time to refill your coffee cup, close your email, close the door to your office and power through – this should only take 15-20 minutes.
Step 1: Harvest Keyword Data From Your Analytics
I’m going to assume you’re using Google Analytics since most people are.
- Log in and click through to the “Traffic Sources” section, then “Search Engines” – then click on Google in the list that shows up.
- If you’re running an AdWords campaign you’ll want to select “non-paid” to filter out the paid keyword referrals
- Set your date range for 3-4 months (30 days doesn’t generally provide enough data) – you should now be looking at organic (non-paid) keyword referrals through Google for the last 3-4 months.
- Click on the “Goal Conversion” tab (next to “Site Usage”)
- Click on “Goal Conversion Rate” to sort by the highest-converting keywords
- Using the “Show rows:” drop-down menu at the bottom of the screen, select “100?
- Choose “Export” at the top of the screen, and select the “CSV” option
- Open the CSV file in Excel (or a similar program) – remove the extraneous stuff so you’re just looking at the keywords, number of visits and the goal conversion rate
Step 2: Check Your Rankings
Next we want to figure out where your website is ranking for each of these keywords. For this exercise we only want to check Google rankings, so you’ll save yourself some time if you right click on the Rank Checker icon and set it to only check Google (not Yahoo! and MSN).
- Using SEOBook’s Rank Checker, select the “Add Multiple Keywords” option
- Enter your domain
- Copy/paste the 100 keywords we exported from Google
- Analytics into Rank Checker
- Run the ranking check
- Export your results to a CSV file
- Copy only the “Google.com position” and “Google.com URL” columns and past them into your spreadsheet from Google Analytics – you need to insert columns here, don’t paste over other information
Step 3: Sort, Identify Keyword Opportunities and Optimize!
Relax – you’ve already done the legwork. Now comes the fun part.
Sort your spreadsheet by rank and then by conversion rate.
What you’re looking for are keywords that:
- You’re not ranking #1 for
- Have a high conversion rate
For example, here’s our reasonable expectation: if you rank #12 (on page two) for a keyword that is referring 25 visitors per month with a conversion rate of 20% (5 visitors convert each month), increasing your ranking even modestly will increase your targeted traffic and conversions at once.
For these keywords there are two basic options to improve your position:
- You can re-target the ranking page to rank better for this keyword
- You can create a new page (where appropriate) targeting this keyword
Caution: you need to make some decisions at this point. You can’t optimize for any and every keyword that sees a decent conversion rate – trying to do that tends to turn your pages into a messy soup of keywords that users hate. Instead, identify the best keywords to rank for (based on conversion rate, not just traffic) and aim for the most valuable choices.
Even a modest improvement in ranking for a keyword with a high conversion rate will both increase your traffic and improve the overall conversion rate of your site.
It’s not just about increasing traffic. It’s about identifying the right traffic sources and turning up the volume.
By Mike Tekula in Featured
Free Traffic and the 4 Vital Elements of a Successful Website
Let’s face it, anyone can build a website, there are countless companies out there offering a vast array of web building solutions, some good, some great, and some quite frankly are a complete waste of time! But throwing together a website is really only part of the story, only part of the process. There are literally, hundreds of thousands of web pages, that will never be viewed and therefore stand no chance of commercial success. Some of those sites are relatively good; unfortunately their owners have misunderstood the process and have the cart before the horse… In the online world nobody just happens by your website, credit card in hand! If you’ve yet to build your website, or about to create a new site, stop! consider first exactly what you wish to achieve with that site, before you start. “Creating a website should follow a process proven to deliver a commercial end result… or run the risk of ending up, just another pretty picture in cyberspace!” Fortunately there is a process, and I highly recommend you take a look at it… perhaps you already know it…
- Content
- Traffic
- Pre-sell
- Monetize
A time tested, 4 step process, proven to produce websites that deliver… commercially! Ok so, let’s now look briefly at each step and why they work in this particular order.
1. Número Uno, as always. Content.
Very, very important. Building information-rich sites is crucial. You must have high quality, unique, relevant content on your site, A; because you want to attract visitors in the first place and B; to generate long term, search engine based free traffic. Online, people are looking for solutions, for information that leads to solutions. They use the search engines to hunt for the most relevant facts to reach this end goal solution. your job is therefore easy… give it to them… but don’t just plonk down any old garbage and hope for the best… take your time, put in the effort, provide good quality information that will over-deliver and keep your visitor interested, satisfy her need and you will be rewarded. Over time, gradually add new fresh, useful content and you will be creating web pages valued by humans and search engines alike. On the internet, high value content is king!
2. Traffic… Ahh! The Holy Grail
Much has been written on the subject, and many are making a good living providing (?) this elusive element. Truth is, (excluding social media) there are but two ways to get it, you either pay for it, or you optimize for it. If you take the time to understand the basics, you can easily do both. Paid search, (PPC) such as Google Adwords has its place, and can provide an immediate stream of targeted visitors to your website; however it is a study of its own and can, if not understood, be very costly very quickly! If you want to go that route learn with small amounts (of money!) and don’t be tempted to throw good after bad…owch! been there! Safer and arguably better, is optimization (SEO) for the organic results, as reached via a Google or other search engine search. This is simply intelligent website construction, a process anyone can do. The important point is, the optimization should be built in during the creative process, at the time you’re constructing the site; you are literally building your website to principles that make it search engine friendly, thus leading to high natural positions in organic search results, leading to of course, significant free traffic flow to your site…
3. Don’t sell… Pre-sell
You have created a website with value rich content, and fully optimized its pages for indexing by Google (and other search engines)….Folks are arriving at your site as directed by their search results. You are keen to have them buy your goods or services, ready with your pitch… but wait! There’s another vital step in the process of converting your visitors into customers, and you’ve done half the work already… Pre-selling is a warming up process, whereby you develop trust and confidence in your offer… its already well known that people are more willing to buy from those they like, trust or respect. By over-delivering relevant high value information, without appearing to be forcing a sale you will almost by default, create an atmosphere that inevitably leads to sales. Simple! As far as your visitor is concerned, her needs are being met, his wishes are being fulfilled, you are providing the very information that is the solution to that which they are searching for in the first place. Pre-selling creates an open-to-buy mindset that smoothly introduces your visitors to your monetization offer.
4. Monetize
Ok thanks for sticking with me, here’s the home run… This is where you make your offer enticing by introducing and highlighting the many benefits of your product or service, and detailing exactly how it offers the solution to their predicament. You have paved the way with informative relevant content and can now look to close with persuasive sales copy, (See below). Your call to action should be strong and concise, tell your prospect exactly what they need to do to order. If you have a good product, and you should, let them know exactly how they will benefit by ordering from you… Today! So there it is…in brief… A formula simple, yet highly effective. Generate targeted free traffic via your highly optimized website, provide information packed content that offers solutions, warm up or pre-sell your visitors by over-delivering on the quality of that content, then and only then, monetize by introducing persuasive, benefit focused sales copy to convert pre-sold visitors into enthusiastic customers… For full details on how to implement each of these steps (with no technical knowledge whatsoever!) grab yourself a free 48 page e-copy of The Simple Art of e-Persuasion at the info link below…or visit my site…
By Brye Bishop in Featured
How To Gain Traffic Using Search Engines and Keywords
For those of us who are running an online business certainly know that it’s not easy to gain traffic to our websites. It requires plenty of tedious work, consistent action, and a desire to make our online business succeed.
There are many ways to get traffic to your website. Some people suggest using a plethora of traffic generating methods. I suggest to find just one way, become very good at mastering this one method and use it over and over again. Learning all the different ways is fine, but keep in mind that the learning process itself will take time in which you could be implementing a traffic generating method that you already know.
In this case it only makes sense to find one method that you think you can master and just stick with it. That way you will optimize the amount of time you have to spend on your online business towards gaining that much needed traffic. Trust me, you will not make any money if you can’t get traffic to your website.
If you want your online business to succeed long term and would like traffic to come as cheap as possible, you’ll want to utilize the power of back links. Back links are simply links on others websites that point back to your website. The more back links you have, the higher your website and websites pages will rank in the search engines.
This is a very important concept to know for any internet marketer. Your goal should be to use a method where you are constantly picking up back links on a daily basis. When you combine those back links with keyword research and search engine optimization, over time you will begin to see your traffic drastically improve. Here’s an example of how I get traffic two ways using one method…article marketing.
The first thing I do is my keyword research. Ill write down a list of about 10 or so keywords that get a decent amount of traffic and very little to moderate competition. Once I have compiled the list, Ill write an article using one of the keywords and post it on my blog. Then I will write another article and submit it Ezine Articles using the same keywords as a hyper link in the authors resource box.
Over time I’ll see that page slowly move up the rankings for those keywords. The more back links I have pointing at that page, the higher and faster it will move up the rankings. I will rinse and repeat this process for all of the selected keywords until I have reached page one for each. It may take a month or more to do. Then I will select another 10 keywords and repeat the process all over again.
You can see how powerful this method is over time. After a year of this process you can be ranked on page one for over a hundred keywords all of which will bring targeted traffic to your website.
By Matt Helphrey in Website Traffic
SMX Sydney: Search Engine Friendly Web Design
Live blogging SEO session by Aidan Beanland from Yahoo7 at SMX Sydney2009.
Design and SEO are NOT mutually exclusive, Aidan says. Nobody likes ugly pages, but will people find your pretty ones? To ensure this, you should:
1) Specify SEO requirements before design plans. Use:
- unique page titles / URLs
- H1, H2 headings
- reasonable amount of body copy
- spiderable links
2) Treat Flash like images, wrap text around it or create a HTML only version*
3) Use image alt attributes and keywords in file paths*
4) Apply CSS image replacement to replicate text embedded in an image*
5) Use CSS layers to position text
* no cloaking or hidden text. That’s naughty.
Would you drive a car built purely for aesthetics?
Next Aidan showed search engine unfriendly design examples, including:
http://www.playgroundweekender.com.au
These sites have no text at all on the page, only Flash content. Therefore these sites won’t rank well in Google.
SEO vs Technonlogy
1) AJAX and other client-side processes CAN affect SEO, so:
- weigh cost vs benefit
- check default page load state on AJAX pages
- use as enhancement, not for core content/links
- view pages with a text-only browser
2) Use technology to:
- rewrite URLs
- link to relatd pages
- enable “progressive enhancement”
SEO vs Accessibility
An accessible site is good for:
- disabled users
- low bandwith users
- mobile browsing
- old hardware/software
- legal compliance
- search engines!
W3C Web Accessibility Tips:
- images and animations
- multimedia
- hypertext links
- page organization
- graphs and charts
- scripts applets and plugins
- if using frames, use the no-frames element
- make table content sensible
These are all SEO tips too – it’s no coincidence.
SEO vs Cost effectiveness
- almost always delivers highest ROI of any online marketing channel
- first 80% of SEO benefits come from 20% effort
- medium upfront investment, low ongoing cost
- you’re already: writing content and adding images, getting links, doding pages, so do it right the first time
- consider the cost of : NOT optimizing (handing users to your competitors)
- equivalent PPC traffic
- Optimizing your site AFTER it’s launched
- offline advertising
Become a web analytics expert to prove your value
Final advice: “The most important single ingredient in the forumla of success is knowing how to get along with people” (Theodore Roosevelt). In other words, communication is key.
By Kalena Jordan
Top 3 Reasons Why Article Submission Services Drive More Traffic To Your Website
In today’s world of Internet marketing, it is necessary to have multiple means of getting traffic to your website. Not just any traffic, but targeted traffic, which will more likely result in the desired action you wish your readers to make. Article Internet marketing is a great way to get this targeted traffic to your website. There are many ways to market your articles however the most effective way is to maximize the use of your time when marketing these articles. If you market your articles efficiently, you can write more and get even more traffic to your website. Article submission services are one of the most efficient ways to get traffic to your website from your articles. Article submission services are services that automatically submit your articles to article directories and publishers for you. Some of them may have their own submission requirements to be able to submit to the maximum number of directories, so it is important to follow their submission guidelines. If you don’t follow the guidelines, you are only hurting yourself.
1) Instead of spending time submitting articles to directories, you are writing articles.
Let’s say there are over 500 article directories and publishers out there that you could be submitting your articles to. If you are submitting your articles to all these directories by hand and it takes you about 10 minutes to submit an article to a directory, then that is 5000 minutes, or about 3 ½ days. You can write a lot of articles in 3 /12 days! The amount of time you may spend submitting an article to an article submission service may be 30 minutes at most. 1 submission vs. over 500; how much is your time worth?
2) Additional exposure for your article.
Many times, article submission services have their own directories and lists that only members of their submission service have their articles on. These services also spend time getting traffic to their websites as well as provide ways that you can use to market your articles easily, such as RSS feeds, article directories and other tools. You get the benefit of the traffic that is on their article directory already because that traffic can stumble across your article.
3) Data you can use to more powerfully market your products/services through your articles.
Most of the good article submission services will keep statistics about who looks at your article, who downloads your article and who uses your article feed. This is valuable information that gives you insight into what kinds of articles your target market finds interesting and what kinds of titles draw them in. You can look over time which kinds of articles are out-performing the other articles and from there you can tailor the kind of articles you would write to produce even better results in terms of getting more traffic to your website. This is free marketing information that is very powerful feedback in being able to enhance your marketing message through your articles.
These are the top 3 methods of why article submission services will help you to drive more traffic to your website. However, there are other benefits as well of article submission services that will really enhance your results of driving hungry visitors to your website. When authors take all of these into account, then they will put themselves out in front of their competition on the Internet. A well-developed strategy is the key to success.
Want to send targeted traffic to your website but don’t know what service will help you? Get help with thisarticle submission service review at Discover how to make money with your articles and article internet marketing
By B Hopkins in Writing
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