Theories in SEO Practice

We've all done it at some point in our professional lives. We search a keyword that describes our business only to scratch our head as to how our competitor's website shows up on the top of the list instead of ours. If you've gone one step further and read about Search Engine Optimization, then surely you have come across the conflicting information online.

One article tells you to do one thing while another tells you to do the opposite. Which one should you believe?

This gray area of what you should or should not do is much like the modern day "Bat Cave." If you are lucky enough to stumble upon it, chances are you don't quite know how you got there and if you had to go back one day you would probably just find yourself lost in the woods.

So what should you believe? The general rule is to combine what you read or heard with what you have experienced and somewhere in there lies the truth. To get you started, let's debunk some of the more commonly used myths floating around.




1) Use a Keyword Rich Domain Name:

It is widely believed that if you include your keywords in your domain name like www.professional-website-design-in-nj.com it will greatly increase your rankings. This is not true. It is best to choose a domain name that is short, easy to remember and if possible includes your company name.

2) Google Partnership:

If you are ever approached by a company claiming to have a partnership with Google, run in the opposite direction. There is no such thing as a "preferred" relationship with Google and in fact on Google's website it even states: Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google.

3) Meta Keyword Tag:

It used to be that the Meta Keyword Tag was given a lot of weight in the early days of Search Engine Optimization, but people abused it and now it does very little. You may still want to include your keywords here, but know that it will not do much and in fact most search engines won't even check it.

4) Bold or Italicized Text:

Adding emphasis to certain keywords like using bold or italics can make your text easier to scan for the reader if done properly, but has little to no affect on your search engine ranking.

5) Content Length:

There is no search engine rule stating that your content needs to be a specific number of words in order to get indexed. Any recommended length is more to assist the reader in understanding what you do than to aid the search engines.

6) Duplicate Content:

Posting specific content like an article or blog entry on your site and then on another site will not get you penalized. In the search results, Google will recognize that the content is the same and only choose one of the pages to display, but it will not hurt your overall search engine ranking.

7) Avoid Flash:

Any text that you place in Flash will not be readable by a search engine, but this doesn't mean you have to avoid flash altogether. You can still very successfully incorporate Flash into your site through rotating pictures or a header on the page. Just don't have an all Flash site or use a Flash intro if you are interested in increasing your search engine rankings.




8) Pay-Per-Click:

Some say that using Pay-Per-Click will help your organic listing while others say it will hurt. Both are false. The fact is that Google has gone to great lengths to separate the two departments of organic and paid listings to a point where the two departments don't communicate or even sit at the same table for lunch.

9) Update the Site Frequently:

Updating your site often is a good idea if you have something new to say. Just don't change around a few words to accommodate the search engines as that won't help your listing at all. Regularly adding legitimate content like articles, press releases and blog entries will help though.

10) Doorway Pages:

Many companies will sell this idea of increasing your ranking by creating hundreds of one page sites loaded with keywords that link to you from various domains. This is considered spamming the search engine and is not recommended. If you properly optimize your site and focus on the correct way to get listed, you will increase your ranking much quicker than these doorway pages ever could.

Of course there are many other myths out there confusing the general public about what works and what doesn't work. Some of them are spread by people who don't really know the truth and others are spread by SEO companies in an attempt to make search engine optimization confusing... mission accomplished! Regardless of where the myths come from, if you or the SEO Company you hire use common sense and do things the right way, you will have no trouble finding the proverbial Bat Cave?and when you get there please tell them that I want my utility belt back!


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About the Author: Marc D. Ensign is the CEO and Visionary of Sound-n-Vision, a New Jersey web design and Internet marketing company. Marc actively teaches workshops and seminars on web design and search engine optimization throughout the New York Metropolitan area.

Article Submission Tips

Building your list and adding prospects to your sales funnel with article submissions is the hottest sales lead generation trend on the Web today. However, the article submission process is one of the most boring and tedious tasks around. That's why many authors, experts and businesses choose to outsource their article marketing efforts.

How can you choose the best article submission company to handle this important process for you? Follow these tips to avoid being ripped off from unscrupulous merchants.

Here Are My Top 10 Questions to Ask Any Article Marketing & Submission Service Provider So You Can Reach Your Goals:

   1. Are the sites on your company's article submission list well known across the Web, or are they dummy sites that you set up? Some unscrupulous article submission service providers promise to post your article to hundreds or thousands of sites for a very low fee - like $15! What they don't tell you is that these sites are ones they have created for the sole purpose of posting your articles. No one visits these sites. Search engines don't index these sites. So no one will ever see these articles. Ask for a list of sites they submit to. If they don't seem credible, run fast!
   2. Does Google index the sites you submit to? If Google doesn't, then you are wasting your time. Ask them for a list of success stories. By going to Google and typing the headline in quotes, you can check whether or not Google indexes the articles they submit.
   3. Does Alexa index the sites your company submits articles to? Alexa.com is a website that tracks the traffic of all websites. Go there and type your website URL and you'll see where your site ranks among the millions of websites. It's easy and fun to do. Try it! Now, ask the marketing company to provide the names of 10 sites they will submit your article to. See where they rank on Alexa. Do they even rank on Alexa? If not, watch out!
   4. Is this a targeted campaign, or a scattershot approach? Ask the company how well targeted the article submission process is going to be. Can they target specific audiences, like health, or marketing or C-level executives? If they can't, then you are wasting your money reaching audiences that aren't interested in your message.
   5. Does your article submission company submit articles by hand or by software? Most reputable websites that accept articles will not accept articles delivered by software. They want unique content and they know articles submitted by software will be sent to every site imaginable.
   6. Does your article submission company edit your article? I've written six books on marketing and the Internet that have been translated into six different languages, and I write and submit articles on a weekly basis. Yet, I still hire proofreaders to review my articles. Sure, you think you are a great writer, but there's not a person alive who won't benefit from a copy editor giving the article a second look.
   7. Will your article submission service use sound search engine optimization strategies to make my articles search engine friendly? If your hire a good article marketing company, they will not only edit your articles but they will make your articles search engine friendly as well. This way, your articles can be found on Google.
   8. Will your company handle the day-to-day correspondence with site and ezine editors? You can spend hours answering questions from website and ezine editors. The best firms handle the routine correspondence for you. They bring you in only when you need to answer an important question. You should avoid firms that don't respond to editors because your articles will never be published by highly targeted websites. They can say they submitted the article, but you won't have any pickup.
   9. Does your company submit articles in a way that Google respects, or do you blast articles out there? Google hates when people try to manipulate their rankings and will ding your article campaign if you send out too many articles too quickly. Make sure your article marketing company understands this. Otherwise, Google could blackball your article marketing efforts.
  10. What do you charge for article submission? It has been my experience that the article submission process, if performed correctly, can take up to 10 hours or more to submit your article to 100 sites. That doesn't count the proofing, editing, optimizing, consulting and following up. All this work takes time and effort. If the price seems too low, remember the old saying, “You get what you pay for."

You want an article submission service that cares about your success. Many fly-by-night artists just want to take your money and run. Make sure the service you select takes the time to get to know you, your marketing goals and your audience. Follow these tips to ensure you get what you pay for! If not, you could be headed for disaster.

Importance of Keywords Density

Content

It's all about the text.

Remember that optimization is all about the text. Search engines are text
driven but there are still some basic HTML tags to keep in mind (i.e., h1, h2,
meta tags, title tag). SEO helps improve search engine results but does not
guarantee top ratings.

Patience and realistic goals will keep the frustrations low. Search engines
have to crawl a site to determine what a site is about. This takes time, usually
about a month, before crawls and indexing are completed by the various search
engine spiders.

Take time to think (a lot) about the purpose of the website. Write down a lot
of stuff in a word processing program even if it sounds silly at first. Then
edit what you wrote. Edit some more, get some feedback and then start working on
the keywords and keyphrases that identify the unique quality of your
website.

Keywords and Keyphrases

Keywords used to be easy. Those days are gone. Keywords are highly
competitive. Using two-word or three-word, maybe even four-word, phrases makes
optimization less frustrating. A keyword phrase (keyphrase) helps identify the
uniqueness of a website.

The keyword "game" will generate about 1 billion(!) results. The keyphrase
"card game" will generate about 50 million results. That is a difference of
approximately 950 million. The keyphrase "magic card game" will generate about
four-million results. Time will need to be spent finding unique keyphrases but
the benefits of narrowing the results, with multi-word phrases, provides a
better chance of being noticed.

Computation of Keywords Density

Keyword Density

The density formula is D = WC/KC (D = density; WC = word count; KC = keyword count)

For major keywords target 3-7% density
For minor keywords target 1-2% density

Keyword density measures how relevant keywords are in a page. The formula density = word count divided by keyword count will provide a general idea of the density percentage. For major keywords try to keep the density between three and seven percent. For minor keywords keep density between one and two percent. Try to optimize between five to ten keywords per web page.

Avoid the unethical practice of keyword stuffing. You will be penalized and possibly banned from the search engines which is worse than doing no optimization at all. Keyword stuffing uses various techniques but it is basically stuffing a page and/or meta tag with several occurrences of a keyword or keyphrase.

Simple SEO Technique that works

Everybody wants traffic generated to their website, but nobody wants
to pay their hard-earned money for it! Over the past seven years
I’ve been creating websites, I’ve found through trial and
error what makes or breaks a website for it’s visitors.

Just within the last few years however, I’ve been focused more on researching SEO
(Search Engine Optimization) and other techniques to gain website
visitors, and to make them stay. On top of the previous five years
experience, I’ve gained way too much knowledge to keep to myself!
So here are the basics, at least, of gaining and keeping website
traffic.

Find out your current page rank through Alexa.com. It’s not going to be pretty. You can use this tool however to track your progress over the next few months.

1) Optimize your website

If you’re interested in gaining website traffic at all, chances are you’ve heard this term before: SEO. SEO
stands for Search Engine Optimization, or optimizing your website to
rank highly in search engines. This is the absolute first step to
gaining website traffic, as it will help your potential visitors find
your website faster. Even for a complete startup website, that is not
linked with any others, you can gain targeted web traffic through just
search engines.

In order to optimize your website, include meta tags with
useful keywords and description, a site-map, write effective web
content, and have plenty of web content for the search engines to crawl.

There are plenty of meta tag generators if you do a quick search, or
you can research how to make your own. Same goes with the site-map.

Do you’re research and learn how to write quality website
content. Search engines crawl through your web pages, so if you use
your keywords within your content enough, visitors will find your
website faster. You can’t overdo this though, as your text may
start to sound unnatural. Practice and research is the key to writing
good content search engines will find.

2) Submit to search engines

After you’re site is well-enough optimized for search engines to
crawl, submit them to search engines. Submit to Yahoo and Google for sure, and then move onto others like MSN, Ask.com, etc.

Wait a few days and you’re website should be crawled. It
won’t show up on top quite yet, but search for it’s exact
name to see if it’s there at all. (eg. If you submit Webitect.net, search ‘Webitect’ or ‘Webitect.net’ directly to see if it shows up)

After you’re website is submitted and successfully showing up in search engines, check your Alexa rank again, and see how much your web site’s improved.

3) Submit to web directories

A basic rule of SEO
and gaining web traffic is to have websites link back to you. The more
that do, the higher your ranking on web searches. In addition, more
people click on your link if they see it listed somewhere. There are
two kinds of links to your website: back-links and
link-exchanges.Back-links are links that link to you, but you
don’t link back. Link-exchanges are when there is a mutual
agreement between the two web owners where they link to your website,
and you do the same for them. Both are valueable for search engine rank improvement, but back-links are much better.

So web directories are a way to get both of these kinds of links.
For the bigger directories, you may not have to give them a link back.
Don’t if you don’t have to. This will provide you with
aback-link from a well-known site, which will up your rank a lot.
Submit to as many directories that are relative to your website, but
most importantly, submit to DMOZ.org. This is the largest directory on the Internet today.

Wait a few days to be accepted into these web directories. Then, check to see if your Alexa rank has improved.

4) Find Link-Exchanges

So you’ve found the free back-links, now it’s time to move
onto link-exchanges. Most websites that are relevant to yours would be
happy to do a link exchange. Some however, may reject you because your
not high up in the search engines quite yet. Find websites that have
about the same or less visitors than you.

You can find other web owners in web forums, directories, etc. This
requires some direct contact, so be friendly! Be sure to find related
websites to your own.

5) Submit your content

Submit your content to websites like Digg.com, Helium, and AssociatedContent.
There are plenty of other websites that will let you post your content
as well. By doing this, you can provide a link back to your site for
each article you post on each website. If you post just 5 articles on 3
websites like this, that will give you 15 back-links. Furthermore, some
websites like this allow their visitors to put your content on their
website, with a link back to your website. Even more back-links.

6) Make your visitors link back to you

Create your own web directory, make a contest, or offer some other kind
of interactivity that will require your visitors to link back to you if
they participate. Moreback-links/link-exchanges and more traffic for
you.

Once more, check Alexa for your page
rank. I have yet to use all of these steps for my startup website, and
I’ve already increased my page rank by more than 10,000. These
tips should give you a healthy start as well. Use this as a base, and
then keep growing your web traffic by getting more links in to your
site, and adding more useful content that visitors will want to come
back to, and link to! Nobody should ever have to pay for website
traffic!

Some factors affecting page rank

Page rank is dependent upon a number of factors associated with the websites that are linking in: 

- Type of websites
- The number of different websites
- Their page rank
- Their IP Address
- Whether the sites that are linking in to yours are rated by Google as a subject authority
- The page titles of the the pages that are linking in
- The anchor text which is used in the links that are pointing to your page
- How many links does your site have pointing to the linking in pages?
- The type of links that are points to the linking in pages
- The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
- The number of links on the website page that is linking to yours