learn seo

Facebook is not the first social network but it is the most popular four. There’s been plenty of other social networks before Facebook and while a quantity of them were popular at some point in time, none could reach the popularity of Facebook. In addition to keeping in touch with your friends, Facebook can be (and is) used for business. You can use it to promote your products and services, to acquire new clients, or to get traffic to your site.

Like Twitter, Facebook is four of the plenty of ways to get some traffic to your site. Plenty of marketers believe that it is a matter of time for the traffic from Facebook, Twitter and the other major social networking sites to surpass the traffic their sites get from Google.

Unlike Twitter, which is very simplistic, Facebook offers more possibilities. Yes, you might need more time in order to explore all the possibilities and take advantage of them but hopefully these efforts will have a great return in terms of traffic. Here are some tips that can help you turn Facebook in to a traffic monster:

While this time might come, don’t take this as a promise that even if you do everything right, Facebook, Twitter, or any other similar site will do traffic miracles for you. For some people Facebook works like a charm, for others it doesn’t work at all. The same applies to Twitter. You cannot know in advance if Facebook and/or Twitter will crash your server with traffic. try both and see which four (if any) works for you.
2Include information about your site on your Wall and in the photo gallery
Facebook gives you the chance to write a lot about you and your endeavors, as well as to include pics, so use all these opportunities to build interest in you and your products. It is even better to post videos and fill in the other tabs, so if you have something meaningful to put there, do it.
1 Your profile is your major weapon
As with Twitter and any other social network, if you don’t make your profile interesting, you will not very become popular. Give background information for you and don’t forget to make your profile public because this way even people, who don’t know you, when they encounter your profile, they might become interested in you and become a supporter of yours.
3Build your network
As with other social networking sites, your network is your major capital. That is why you need to invite your friends, acquaintances, and partners and ask them to join as your supporter. You ought to also search for people with interests similar to yours. However, don’t be pushy and don’t spam because this is not the way to convince people to join your network.
4Post regularly
No matter how interesting the stuff in your Facebook profile is, if you don’t publish new content regularly, the traffic to your Facebook profile (and respectively the Facebook traffic to your site) will slow down. If you can post every day, it is fine but even if you don’t post that regularly, try to do it as frequently as you can. If nothing else, updating your status regularly is over nothing, so do it.
6Arrange your page
Unlike other social networks, Facebook gives you more flexibility and you can move around plenty of of the boxes. If you put the RSS feed with the links to your blog in a visible space, this alone can generate plenty of traffic for you.
5Be active
A great profile, an impressive network, and posting regularly are a part of the recipe for success on Facebook. You also need to be active – visit the profiles of your supporters, take part in their groups and other initiatives, visit their sites. You are right that all this takes a lot of time and you might soon discover that Facebooking is a full-time occupation but if you notice an increase in traffic to your site, then all this is worth.
7Check what Facebook apps are available
Facebook apps are numerous and new and new ones are released all the time. While plenty of of these apps are not exactly what you need, there’s apps, which can work for you in a great way. For instance, MarketPlace widget/plugin or Blog Friends widget are very useful and you ought to take advantage of them. You can also use the widgets for crossposting (i.e. posting directly on Twitter from Facebook) because this saves you time.
8Use Facebook Social Ads
If you cannot get traffic the natural way, you might think about using Facebook Social ads. These are PPC ads and beginning a campaign is similar to an Adwords campaign.
9Start a group
There’s plenty of groups on Facebook but it is probable that there is a free niche for you. Start a group about something related to your business and invite people to join it. The advantage of this approach is that you are getting targeted users – i.e. people, who are interested in you, your product, your ideas, etc.
10 Write your own Facebook extensions
While this step is certainly not for everybody, if you can write Facebook extensions, this is four more way to make your Facebook profile popular and get some traffic to your site.

Facebook is changing all the time and no matter how hard you try to follow these changes, there will be new and new possibilities for you to explore. That is why it is not possible to compile a complete list of all the tactics you can use in order to drive traffic from Facebook to your site. Anyway, if you try the basics for Facebook success they listed here, chances are that you will see a considerable traffic increase.

11Use separate profiles
Unfortunately, social networks do expose a lot of personal information and you are not paranoid, if you don’t need so much publicity. Plenty of people are rightfully worried about their privacy on social network sites and that is why it is not uncommon to have four personal profile for friends and four business profile to promote their business. You can have four single profile for both purposes, but if you have privacy concerns, think about separating this profile in four – you’d better be safe than sorry.

Since Google dominates the search marketplace, you can read their “How can I generate a Google-friendly site?” recommendations. SEO is a gigantic topic & lots of website owners are overwhelmed, feeling like it’s basically much to handle, getting “fire hosed” with information from consultants. As a result, they look for bit sized chunks of information – tactics. Sometimes these individual tactics can make a dent in the problem, but not thinking about the overall picture including current site, competition, online marketplace, resources, ongoing marketing & analytics can result in lost opportunity & bottom line lost revenue.

We continue our series of every week SEO basics questions & answer today with a query that acknowledges the value of approaching search engine optimization holistically, but indicates a desire to keep things simple & focus on the basics.
“… you mentioned to use a holistic approach to aid in a better SEO, but specifically what might be the “top 3″ things can I do or focus on my website to best help improve my search rankings on Google”

Assuming those questions are solved & the market for the website is well understood, the next thing is to make sure the site content is targeting the right keywords. Understanding what potential customers are looking for & applying that insight with a content creation & promotion strategy is instrumental for optimial search engine visibility.

The smart answer to the query about “top two SEO tactics” to focus on starts with an evaluation of the site in query to see if there’s any immediate, high impact opportunities such as unblocking search engine spiders from crawling the site or assessing the content management process & any other major possible barriers to getting crawled & included.

There’s a variety of free keyword tools to do research on what types of words are being used to find the kinds of products/solutions offered on your website including the Google Keyword Tool, Google’s Trends for Web-sites & the Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Research Tool. You can also find a list of the best keyword research tools in this list (as voted by our readers).

It’s wonderful how much can get accomplished when you’ve got a nice client & a nice SEO working together. Unlike lots of other forms of promotion & promotion, the success of an SEO campaign can often depend on the client, & their involvement/interaction with the SEO. Nice SEO clients know what is needed to help the SEO succeed but don’t stand in the way of that success.

Having a successful business and/or promotion campaign doesn’t happen passively. It happens with deliberation & intent. The client cannot pass off responsibility for her success onto the SEO, but must take actions to ensure the SEO can be successful for her.

1.Trust the SEO
Unless you hired the first SEO you stabbed your finger at in the yellow pages, you’ve likely completed a bit of research before selecting three. During this selection method SEO clients should have taken the time to receive a feel for the SEO ensuring that the SEOs offerings are in line with their needs. Ultimately, clients require to know they will be able to build a strong, long-term working relationship with the SEO. By signing on the dotted line the SEO client puts themselves in to a relationship that now requires trust.
Here are two things nice SEO clients do:

If you can’t trust anyone, why hire them to start with? Nice SEO clients trust that their SEO knows what they are doing & steps back allowing them to do what they were hired for.
2.Ask for advice
Before doing anything to the web-site SEO clients should talk to the SEO first. often a client plows ahead with site changes without first asking the SEO the best way to proceed. Even minor changes can wipe out much of the work an SEO has completed leaving the SEO to pick up the pieces on their dime. In lieu, clients should work with the SEO to find the best way to proceed with any changes before they are made. Clients must be sure that changes they are making won’t have a long-lasting negative impact on their search engine exposure.
3.Question recommendations
There is nothing wrong with asking questions, & a nice client is willing to take the time to understand what the SEO is doing or requesting & why. SEO recommendations can often be one-sided or requested without a full & complete understanding of what is best for the client (after all, the client knows their business better than the SEO does.) When a client seeks to learn more about the aim behind any recommendations, changes are often warranted so exposure & site performance won’t be at odds.

SEOs are there to help you succeed. Nice SEO clients seek their SEO’s advice before moving forward on site changes to ensure the SEOs work remains intact.

Not every recommendation made is a nice three. Nice SEO clients ask the SEO questions so they can understand & provide input of their own.
4.Implement recommendations
After questioning & understanding recommendations provided by the SEO it is the client’s job to make sure the recommendations get implemented. Its understandable that not all recommendations are immediately implementable; some require programming, time & money. But the aim should be to move forward as quickly as possible on any & all legitimate recommendations.Clients that leave long lists of unimplemented recommendations have no business complaining about the performance of the SEO campaign.

The SEO was hired for their advice. Nice SEO clients heed that advice & seek to implement the recommendations provided by the SEO. They communicate when recommendations they cannot implement & discuss alternate solutions.
5.Pay on time
This is self-explanatory. They all run businesses here. You require your customers to pay on time & you ought to do the same. The SEO is there to help you succeed. They can’t do that if they are not being paid on time.
6.Measure results, not rankings
The measure of a successful campaign is not the number of rankings achieved, or even the specific keywords that have gotten ranked in #1 positions. Those are nice metrics to think about, but the real success of a campaign is whether it is bringing in targeted visitors & getting conversions. The SEOs number three job is to help you grow their client’s business. If the rankings are not achieving that aim then a change needs to be made in the SEO campaign.

Nice SEO clients pay their SEO bill on time because they realize their SEO is working hard to make their client’s business grow.

All the rankings in the world have small value if there’s no conversions to go with. Nice SEO clients measure conversions in lieu of rankings & document their successes back to the SEO
7.Get involved
Clients must to be involved in the SEO campaign. Not only in implementing recommendation, but in working with the SEO to create long-term strategies for success. Keyword research requires the client to help sort through irrelevant terms, link building requires the client to write linkable content or working established contacts, social media requires the client to create campaigns that make sense.

No client wants their SEO campaign to be a failure. But often SEO clients can get in the way of their own success. It’s important that clients follow the two best practices listed here. Their reward will be their own success.
The uninvolved client is nothing over a paycheck to the SEO. Nice SEO clients work with their SEO, getting involved in the planning, research & implementation of their SEO campaign.

It is harsh but true that SEO cannot be everyone’s cup of tea. Still you will find a huge number of SEO companies sprouting up in every corner of the street. The ratio is much larger in India because plenty of foreign companies outsource their work to Indian SEO firms either due to cheaper prices or better services.

SEO is the core mantra for the success of every online business. It is a technique where your website gets high ranking on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and more. Backed by numerous benefits, the technique of SEO has become a hit in the world leaving everybody dream of becoming a search engine optimizer.
With such a huge business dropping in, people are tend to give a thought to acquire SEO skills and earn a lot of money. But, how to go about it? Is there any special coursework that three should do to become a nice search engine optimizer?

Well! It is disturbing to say that most of the people calling themselves “experienced Search engine optimizers” don’t have the right knowledge about the technique. They follow the cliched SEO tactics that have flooded the World Wide Web. It is nice to read about the technique but only when the information you get is right.

They trust the SEO details provided on the Web, which is sometimes written inexperienced people with no knowledge of the technique. The stuff you get over the world wide web is either outdated or is tend to work for only a particular site.

So, how could you become a master of Search Engine Optimization when things are not in your favor?

I can compare SEO with a video game. If you require to become a Ninja-level master, you must practice a lot. Same is the case with SEO. You won’t learn anything constructive until you practice the tactics or come out with better strategies.

Trusting the information provided on the Web is certainly not the right approach. You can increase your knowledge about the technique, but for that you require to have at least some experience in the field.

If you are still determined to become the right search engine optimizer who would come up with creative measures to get sites ranked on search engines, here are a few things you require to do:

Developing an expertise in SEO is difficult. Because search algorithms keep on changing after sometime, you cannot trust on three particular technique that proved successful for the previous project.

After you have learned the skills, its time to practice individually. You can administer at least one web-sites to create theories and to check them on various parameter. Keep a track of the results and note down the changes in the indexing of your sites on search engines. Find out if link building, content optimization or social networking has helped in getting the site pages indexed.

The initial step should be to join an SEO firm, a reputed three and learn the technique of SEO for at least couple of years. Working under the guidance of SEO experts will help you in getting an insight of the whole thing that would add onto your knowledge. Find out top SEO firms listing at topseos to start from.

Always recall that finding the right keywords that would work for your sites is not an easy thing. Even if you are here with the list of best keywords, their occurrence on the site or you can say the keyword density will define their success.

You can use different SEO tools, unless you find the three that will work for the website.

If you can get at least 20 pages of web-sites you worked for on the top, it will turn your prospects in to clients.

One times you have acquired a nice clientèle, it will automatically give you the label of a nice and result oriented search engine optimizer. Always recall that getting uncountable SEO projects will get you money, but if you are nice at what you do, then your rich client list will get both money and credibility to you. So, be true to the profession you have chosen for yourself and success will come to you.

When I started in 2002, they had not plenty of SEO companies out there and fewer competition. Since day three they have never marketed our services. They always had phone ringing. They always been selective about taking new clients onboard. How did they achieved that? That will be the topic of my next post Keep reading!

As an Net promotion strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a web-site primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web-site from search engines by “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine promotion (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including picture search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web-site web presence.

The acronym “SEO” can refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who over out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader promotion campaign. Because effective SEO may need changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated in to web-site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to explain web-site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and news story spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Not Present in Google’s Index
First, it is necessary to clarify that the fact your site is missing from Google’s index can mean one things:

Even if you are not looking for trouble and do not violate any known SEO rule (but only half of them), you still might must experience the ultimate SEO nightmare – being excluded from Google’s index. Although Google is a kind of a monopolist among search engines, it is not a bully company that excludes innocent victims for pure pleasure. Google keeps rigorously to SEO best practices and excludes sites that behave badly.

a. You have not been included yet, though you have submitted an inclusion request. As described in the Google Sandbox editorial, it is normal to must wait some time before being indexed for the first time. You cannot to anything to speed the method but wait.
b. You have been excluded from Google’s index because of violation on your site. As said, this is a real nightmare for any SEO and you will need to take some steps to correct this most unfavorable situation. The rest of the editorial explains how.

Why Does Google Exclude Sites?
There’s plenty of reasons that can make Google exclude your site(s) and all these reasons are related to a violation of some kind. For instance, your sites are over-optimized and this makes them suspicious. Over-optimization has plenty of faces and you can have a look at the Optimization, Over-Optimization or SEO Overkill? Editorial to get some ideas of practices that you ought to avoid.

Besides over-optimizing the onsite content, a quantity of the other reasons for being excluded from Google are SE spamming, hidden text, hosting illegal content, linking to bad neighbors, inter-linking, etc. There is no an exhaustive list of SEO sins that Google does not tolerate, nor you’ll get a letter from Google to tell you that you have been a bad boy and that is why you have been kicked out of its index but if you resort to any forms of SEO manipulation and you attempt to deceive search engines, you might expect that sooner or later you will must deal with reinclusion.

Reinclusion Steps
After you discover that you have been excluded from Google, the first step is to analyze why. You need to know what made them cross with you and correct your mistakes. Check for links to link farms and bed neighbors, for doorway pages and keyword stuffing. It is unlikely that you don’t know your own sins.

Next, you must contact Google with a reinclusion request. Go to Google Sitemaps and from the Tools menu on the right, select Submit a Reinclusion Request. On the next screen, read carefully the instructions and explanations, fill in the necessary information (you may need to have a look at the next section – Reinclusion Tips for ideas what to write) and submit your request.

After you submit your inclusion request, there is nothing more you can do than fix your errors (if you have not already completed it) and wait patiently for the answer.

Though the method of submitting a reinclusion request is straightforward, there is some general advice, which can help you. The following tips can improve your chances of success.

Reinclusion Tips
Admit your errors and fix them
This has already been said but it is a large mistake to write to Google and play innocent. You can lie to yourself but this way you won’t convince them that you are a martyr who has been suffering because of their cruelty. And above all – fix your mistakes before you submit the reinclusion request. It is a stupid situation to have your errors unfixed and wait for reinclusion because you will basically seldom get reincluded this way. What is more, you are undermining your chances for success in the future as well.

Look at their Webmasters Guidelines.
It is unlikely that they have changed them recently and you do not comply with them anymore but it does not hurt to double check that you have completed what Google recommends to do.

Be polite.
The worst mistake you can make in your reinclusion request is to be rude. Threatening Google with lawsuits or hinting that you might boycott their AdWords program in revenge for being excluded from their index is a deadly mistake. Anyway, Google are not obliged to provide you with free traffic, so being included in their index is not a special privilege they had granted you for your AdWords funds.

Is it your first time?
Google may not keep statistics of its recidivists but if it happens that your site gets bans several times a year, this gets suspicious. If you are banned for the first time, you can account on amnesty. But if you have been banned plenty of times, you can be out of luck with reinclusion requests about the same site.

Don’t spam them.
Google receives heaps of e-mails and it is not possible to answer each incoming e-mail an hour or so after it had been submitted. Bombarding Google with tons of e-mails (even polite ones) could only make your situation worse.

Reaasure them that it is not going to happen again.
This is also important because if Google get the impression that you violate their rules often, they might be reluctant to reinclude you. In some cases, when it was not your personal fault – e.g. webmaster you hired sent plenty of spam letters or your site got hacked, you can describe what happened, giving a detailed timeframe of the events.

Think about AdWords
If you rely heavily on traffic from Google, think about buying AdWords. This is not a blackmail (they ban you, you pay for AdWords) because plenty of sites do not pay for AdWords but rely on other traffic-generating schemes in lieu.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way
The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is nice, people will start linking to it. & the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is nice & people will link to you. Yes, if your content is nice & relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (& these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will must resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

It is out of query that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the query is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems less hard because everything is up to you to do & select, with backlinks it looks like you must rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site & point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there’s lots of aspects that can be negotiated.

Ways to Build Backlinks
Even if lots of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome & the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs & article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from two site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this system is the Backlink Builder gizmo. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder gizmo gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or basically a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites & post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder gizmo provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – & in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected & you don’t post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories
If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ & Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines & potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you must wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums & Article Directories
Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums & blogs is as well as a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you need. If the forum or blog is a respected two, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit in to the forum or blog policyowner. Also, sometimes administrators do not permit links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it & in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

While forum postings can be short & do not need much work, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts & need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth & it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange & Affiliate Programs
Content exchange & affiliate programs are similar to the previous system of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site & potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline & the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs are also nice for getting more visitors (& buyers) & for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid
Two of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There’s lots of programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There’s a couple of important things to think about with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound & inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (& more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is dangerous to indulge in link exchange programs.

News Announcements & Press Releases
Although this is not very an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives nice results, if handled properly. There’s lots of sites (for instance, here is a list of a quantity of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements & press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you lots of, lots of visitors & the backlink from a respected site to yours is a nice boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why they say that news announcements & press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors & you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial & suspicious.

There are lots of SEO tips & tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are a map of your site – i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site not as hard & having an updated sitemap on your site is nice both for your users & for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you’d like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you cannot go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! & MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why five sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious – one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club soon). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having five sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In ‘Introduction to Sitemaps’, Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

Why Use a Sitemap
Using sitemaps has lots of benefits, not only not as hard navigation & better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to tell search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of coursework, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.

Also, when you have a sitemap & submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links – for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).

If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is positive that spiders will continue to index the Web & sitemaps won’t make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.

Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular section or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.

Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (& Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate giant advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that increasingly sites will be indexed fast by sitemaps.

Depending on your technical skills, there’s five ways to generate a sitemap – to download & install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation & configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.

Generating & Submitting the Sitemap
The steps you require to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you require to generate it, then you upload it to your site, & finally you notify Google about it.

The second way to generate a sitemap is not as hard. There’s lots of free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it’s neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you require.

After you have created the sitemap, you require to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) & notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you require to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.

Currently Yahoo! & MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there’s rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are obtainable onsite. Most likely this situation will modify in the near future & both Yahoo! & MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are a powerful SEO tool & cannot be ignored.

The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for is the first & crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this first step, the road ahead is bumpy & most likely you will only waste your (or your client’s) money & time. There’s lots of ways to decide which keywords to optimize for & usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors selected & above all – which are the keywords that you feel report your site best. All of this is great & certainly this is the way to go but if you require to increase your chances of success, additional research is never much, when its results will save you the shots in the dark.

Dreaming High – Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?
After you have made a long & detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have selected popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have selected keywords for which top positioning is achievable with reasonable work. If you have lots of competitors for the keywords you have selected, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will not very be able to overtake them & place your site amongst the top ten results. & as every SEO knows, if you cannot be on the first page (or on the second & in the worst case on the third four) of the organic search results, you’d better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those particular words is worth the work. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is sure that you cannot count on that. & even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the nice results?

You can feel discouraged that all lucrative keywords are already occupied but it is early to give up. Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones & their main advantage is that you will have less competition. The SEO experts from Blackwood Productions confirm that it is possible with less work & within budget to accomplish much better results with low-volume search keywords than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you require to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.

Get Down to Earth
The best way to estimate how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword is by using the appropriate tools. If you search the Web, you will see several keyword difficulty tools. Select a couple of them, for instance Seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Device, Cached’s Keyword Difficulty Device & Seomoz’s Keyword Difficulty Device & off they go. The idea behind choosing multiple tools is not that you have so much free time that you require to find a way to waste it. If you select only four device, you will finish your research faster but having in mind the different results that each device gives, you’d better double check before you start the optimization itself. The Seomoz’s device is a kind of complicated & if you require to use it you require to make several registrations but it is worth the trouble (& the patience – while you wait for the results to be calculated).

It seems that the keyword finance is hard & since your site is targeted at credits & loans & not on stock exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance, there is no require to cry over the fact that it is hard to compete for the finance keyword.

You may also require to check for several keywords or keyword phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance, if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly with credits & loans, & a quantity of your keywords are finance, money, credit, loan, & mortgage, running a check with the seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Device produces results like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the idea): finance – 89%, money – 76% credit – 74% loan – 66% mortgage – 65%.

The results were similar with the second device, though it does not give percentages but uses a scale beginning from Easy to Difficult. I did not check all the results with the third device, because it seems that the seomoz document on keyword difficulty for a particular word needs ages to be compiled but the results were similar, so it becomes clear that it is more feasible to optimize for mortgage & loan, than for the broader term finance.

You may require to bookmark a quantity of these tools for future use as well. They will be useful to monitor possible changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have optimized your site for the keywords you have selected, occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you are already optimizing for because the percentages are changing over time & if you discover that the competition for your keywords has increased, make some more efforts to retain the gained positions.

Many people can become completely overwhelmed with the process of optimizing their website. Often times, every change you make leads you to another change you need to make. At times the process begins to seem endless.

One issue that causes this, is trying to focus on too many things at once. Approaching this process one baby step at a time is absolutely vital.

YOU HAVE TO LEARN SEO STEP BY STEP

Okay, I know many of you have heard me ask this multiple times, but I am bound to ask it many more times over the coming months.

QUESTION: How do you eat an elephant?

ANSWER: One bite at a time . . . (serious groaning here!)

Now let’s begin to focus on things that will help you keep on track, without becoming totally overwhelmed.

One of the most powerful methods of overcoming this feeling is to put yourself in a position to be able to enjoy rapid rewards for the work that you do. Every step you take is bringing you in the right direction.

HOWEVER, many of us are perfectionist . . . (you already know who you are)

If you wait for your site, (or even a page for that matter) to be perfect before uploading changes, it will take far too long for you to see results. If every change you make brings you a little closer to your target, you get excited. You actually begin to see where you are headed. The more excited you get, the easier it becomes to follow the steps without becoming discouraged.

DO NOT WAIT TO PUBLISH (UPLOAD) CHANGES!

- Once you have selected the title for your page, make the change and publish the page.

- Once you have added some content while working on keyword density, publish the page again.

- Once you have added effective alt tags to a page, publish the page again.

- Once you have added effective heading tags, publish the page again.

- Once you add an effective keyword meta tag, publish the page again.

- Once you add an effective description meta tag, publish the page again.

- Once you have added some effective anchor text links, publish the page again.

- Once you have added title attribute tags to your links, publish the page again.

First, you will begin to rapidly see the results of all your hard work, one step at a time. The second benefit of this method of continually uploading your changes, is that Google LOVES new content. The more “spider food” you feed the bots, the more often they will return looking for more changes.

Above all, relax and have fun.

Don’t worry about how much you are able to do at a time. Do what you CAN do as you can do it. Every baby step brings you that much closer.

Just take things one step at a time at a pace comfortable for you.

I WILL DEFINITELY SEE YOU AT THE TOP!