The most effective SEO technique is to index the pages of new website. There are lot of important issues, one should take care. We are providing a simple guide steps to help you in this regard.

1. Just design you website structure, create your content pages (don’t worry if they are not completed yet) and publish them swiftly. Because, the process of indexing, new websites takes about two months. So, this technique helps you saving time.

2. Since, you have already designed your web site structure and contents (may be incomplete or with minimal info) as I said earlier. Now, create a sitemap for the site and submit this to Google Sitemap Service. Yahoo has lately created a similar service to Google Sitemap and so also submits your website to it. There are lots of online free site map generation services available. Here are few of them, you may use.

* Create your Google Sitemap Online By: XML Sitemaps

* ROR Sitemap Generator By: ROR Web

* Site Map Builder By: sitemapbuilder

3. Third step is to submit your website to some Open Directory Project; DMOZ is good and is used as basis by many search engines like Google, MSN and Alexa. This process again takes several months. So, the first step plays a good here too.

4. There are three major search engines namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. Submit all your pages for inclusion in these three major search engines and keep submitting your site pages to other search engines on a regular basis. Do it manually or you may use some search engine submission software or service which may help you by automatic submission.

5. There are lot of SEO Friendly Directories on the web. Some are paid services and some allows free submissions of URL. Submit your website to these SEO Friendly Directories. All major search engines crawls these Directories frequently. This will help you both a catalyst for the indexing of the web pages and also move a step forward in Page rank Building.

6. You may start Building links using Reciprocal Link exchange programs. The text links should not only point to your website homepage but also to other pages down in the website page structure.

7. Posting on Google Groups advertising for your website is something very helpful in building good Page Rank. The posts should include at least two links to your website.

8. Participate in topic discussion on other sites is also a great technique to make your existence strong and do include your site URL in the reference section.

Way back before when SEO software were just starting, they were merely concerned to have as many back links as they can. It was more of quantity over quality. However, the days have changed and now, quality is better than quantity. Because of that, there are certain back links that you should avoid and some are those you shouldn’t. What are the good and the bad when it comes to SEO?

The Bad and the Ones to Avoid:

· Reciprocal Back Links: Having reciprocal back links will probably lead you to only two things: the good and the bad. The good side is that you can seriously make it both beneficial to you and the link you are exchanging with if you have similar websites. The bad news is if it is an unrelated site, it will and can possibly stain your reputation. These types of links are very overrated, overused and simply creates spam.

· Site Wide Back Links: Site wide links are those links you can find at any corner of the site. From the header to the footer to left and right. Surely, it may create traffic but then it will really not help in your rankings or ratings. Having a link all over the place means that your text link is probably irrelevant compared with the other links.

 The Good and the Ones to Look out for:

· Social Networking and Book marking: It may seem ridiculous for you and for some but social back links are really one of those that create great traffic. It is actually maybe one of the reasons why your sites are flooded.

· Article-related Back Links: Another natural source of traffic and ranking top when it comes to search ratings would be a nicely written article. If your links are endowed in the middle or whatever part of an article that is excellently written, your links will also be considered as very important and practical.

· Blog Site Back Links: Blog sites are now everywhere. It is a way to read about information in a funny, interesting and definitely not boring way compared to say the news sites. Since it is so popular, having a blog site link in your site will also create traffic.

best seo software

evo 2

The good and the bad back links mentioned above will help you in strategizing which is the best SEO software to choose. In other words you must know what linking structure the software will perform for you. To get tips for choosing a good SEO software at a discount visit us.

Over the last few weeks been working on building up a steady number of back links.

I’ve been aiming to get around 10-15 backlinks per week, which I think I am just about managing.

I don’t find it easy getting back links, but the hard work will hopefully pay dividends and improve my google ranking.

Maybe it’s already working, as I’ve noticed my site ranking has improved on Google, for my primary terms ‘oak cupboard’ and ‘oak cupboards’ my site is now at position 3

The recent sale of Zappos (an online shoe retailer) for $1.2 Billion to Amazon made the headlines. The company is well known for its extensive use of social media including Twitter, so I thought it was worth taking a closer look to see what are some of their strategies and tactics with their use of Social Media, especially Twitter .

Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and it’s nearly 400 employees on Twitter help keep the company’s profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales.  Now it shouldn’t be surprising that a CEO who sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for $270 Million should grasp the importance of “driving web traffic” through well-placed “self-linking” in public conversations. A web page like twitter.zappos.com is worthy of study as the “secret sauce”:

Perhaps one of the most superb business uses of Twitter is exemplified by Zappos, the Amazonian style e-commerce company stocking over 3 million shoes, handbags, clothing item and accessories from over 1100 brands. The 24-year old CEO Tony Hsieh, not only twitters himself (with some 1,571,987 followers),

Note: He has also encouraged its Zappos’ employees to twitter, as can be seen on their twitter.zappos.com web page.

Twitter

• Zappos has a dedicated page for Twitter on its site that’s linked to from every other page on the site with the words What are Zappos employees doing right now? There you’ll find all of the Twittering Zappos employees’ most recent messages. Employees tweet about what they are doing at work and about interesting resources on and off the Zappos site.
• Words throughout the page link back to search results pages in the Zappos catalog. (also called well-placed “self-linking” in public conversations). Could this really drive sales?
• There’s also an employee leaderboard that shows who’s on Twitter and how many followers they have. Tony the CEO has five times as many followers as anyone else, perhaps because there’s a link on every page encouraging people to follow him and perhaps because CEOs are always the most interesting people at any company (sarcasm). Notably, Tony has taken the time to follow even more people than are following him – he’s got 2800+ followers and 3200+ friends.
• Tony’s also penned a prominently placed introduction to using Twitter. Check out the intro paragraph: “Remember back when sending SMS text messages on your cell phone was a new thing, and it seemed kind of strange to use your cell phone to do that? And today, you probably wonder how you ever lived without text messaging.Well, Twitter is the same way. It’s going to seem a little weird at first, but I promise you if you can talk your friends into joining it and you all use it for 2 weeks, it will change your life. You will wonder how you ever lived without it.”
• Transparent Brand Tracking, additionally, there’s a page that aggregates all the public mentions of Zappos from Twitter users at large. This is a great example of openness and transparency – something the company would probably be less inclined to do had they not already developed a wildly loyal customer base thanks to their famous customer service.Who wouldn’t like to have messages like this on their website, though, without exercising any control over what appears there?

• Celebrating your super fans Zappos has set up special Twitter tracking pages for some of its favorite outside fans. Check out this page for the super charming WineLibrary.TV founder Gary Vaynerchuk, and this page for author and social media consultant Tara Hunt. That’s a great little way to say thanks to Twitter savvy brand super fans.

8 Key Outcomes This Twitter Activity Enables:

• It drives inbound links,
• Its employees create a good deal of internal web links
• Raises Google Page Rank.
• Enables a customer service forum,
• Accelerates public relations,
• Promotes branding
• Provides a search engine attraction platform, creating magnets for search engine activity

So how are you using Twitter to increase sales?

The Link Federation launches today!

A free scheme for those who wish to improve the

 position of their website or blog through high quality back links. How does it work?

You enter the link (URL) to your site on a categorised list with other links that share similar relevant content. Unlike many schemes, only sites with relevant content will be permitted in each category and this will be checked regularly. 

Simply copy and paste the entire list for your category to your site (e.g. to your ‘Links’ page)  as will all the other contributors. Around once a month the list will be updated so this process is repeated to keep the links current. 

You can check that you are being listed on all the other  sites in your category with a number of tools that are freely  available on the internet, in seconds. If you aren’t listed on any, just tell us and we’ll ensure the offending site either lists you or is deleted.

Links are important but they must be relevant or search engines will ignore them so by using categories you can ensure you are gaining high quality back links to your site – one of the three most critical factors in achieving top page ranks. Quality is more important than quantity.

This scheme is completely free of charge but to keep it manageable and exclude spammers, membership will be restricted and offered by invitation or application only.   Turn around of applications will typically be less than 24 hours.

As this is brand new and entirely voluntary, we anticipate lots of suggestions in our discussion boards to improve the scheme and these will be very welcome. We also expect to attract other initiatives to help you promote your site.

To apply check out www.linkfederation.org  

Pete

I often say “You’re either doing the right thing, or your not.” As a progressive and agnostic, I’ve often been accused of being an ethical relativist. Well, I’m not. I think torture is always wrong, that’s why I advocate the investigation of Bush administration officials who ordered or condoned it.

As people who are very active in the world of food, specifically organic gardening and grass-fed beef, we’re always doing our best to buy and promote food that is sustainable and healthy. This ethic, which is certainly absolute, is born from our environmentalism, which guides our choices regarding our behavior toward the planet. We can’t afford to be 100% sustainable yet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand we should be.

So when, recently, my innkeeper friend Cherie wanted to do a web site to encourage people to volunteer while on vacation in Hawaii, I jumped at the chance. It didn’t pay much, but I spent a lot of time on it because I knew it could be successful and make a difference.

I just didn’t realize how right I was!

This site went public around the fourth of July this year. That’s, what? Five months. In five months, the Hawaii volunteer site has earned a Google PageRank of 4. My main site, Supak.com, which has existed since 1996 and has many more backlinks, is a 4. Such is the power of link bait. And why are volunteer opportunities for vacationers in Hawaii such powerful link bait? Because it is an example of people doing the right thing. People (well, most of them) like to do the right thing, and when they see it being done, they will link to it, or bookmark it, or Digg it, or share it on Facebook (note the sharing stick at the bottom of this post).

In this case, they’re doing the right thing in Hawaii, and they’re earning a discount on their stay at Cherie’s historic upcountry Maui bed and and breakfast. Plus, they’re earning a donation (taken from the price of their stay) to the organization for which they volunteer. Win-win-win.

A close look at the analytics and the webmaster tools shows me exactly what’s going on here. The linking that’s going on is not as extensive as I’d like (that I see in webmaster tools), but the links we have gotten are good ones. Most of them are the usual links I provide to my clients, from my usual set of web properties that are capable of passing some decent link juice. So, I’d expect a PR3 out of it. But a 4?

Looking through the traffic from referrals in the analytics, I’m seeing a decent amount of traffic coming from links that don’t show up in the webmaster tools links (interesting, that). There’s a link from the front page of a German travel forum site that’s a PR 4. There’s a good link from Women’s Entertainment Television, on a blog page with a PR4.

And that link, it turns out, is from a highly ranked blogger. I go on and on about how important blogs are, and here’s a case where some decent links, as I’ve described above, work to give a page a PR4 in less than six months. Have Fun • Do Good is “A blog for people who want to make the world a better place AND have fun!” Apparently, there are a lot of people who want to do the right thing and read that blog for inspiration. More importantly for our purposes, there are a ton of people who link to that blog, because it’s a PR6. Even though the post with the link to our volunteer site has fallen off the front page, and it just links to the WETV post (same blogger) the link juice from those archives is still enough to put us over the top into PR4 territory. Who knows who found us through that post, has linked to us, and will be sending us juice next…

So, for doing good, we’ve been rewarded by those who do good. And we’re just getting started. Many of the organizations to whom we linked will be linking back (lesson: be generous with your links), and we’ll be adding more on a regular basis. And, since it’s such a cool idea for doing good (and there’s financial incentive involved), I figure there will be many more people like Britt Bravo of Have Fun Do Good who will be linking to us as well.

 We often get comments from member on how we are doing so well, as their site never really delivered for them. A typical case in point was the owner of a company I spoke to at the recent TCT exhibition in Coventry.

He informed me that he tried the internet but had such a specialist product it was a waste of time putting on. He was so adamant there was no point in arguing with him at the show.

He was making the classic mistake that 1000’s of other company make including myself. I am still amazed how many company websites I visit have the wrong telephone number, address, and missing pages or old news, what is even more disappointing is that over 70% of buyers will not deal with companies who do not have a website, can you imagine what impression these buyers are left with when they land on such a site!

Also you need to stop treating the internet like a telephone book, yes if you type in your name with a bit of luck it will find you, or having your site layout like a company profile. You really need to ensure that you not have a site/software that you cannot easily create & add your own content on.

Having done that, there is loads of really good free information on the internet on SEO (search engine optimization) and free software to help improve your site, but you need to spend some time getting your head around it, before you employ some one to do it for you.

Otherwise when people like me visit it I will be thinking: “it really is a good looking website” but about as much use as a chocolate teapot!

My site is designed for a busy engineer to find what he looking in hurry, and failing that ring me, is your telephone number easy to see on every product page, or tucked away at the back of your site?

You have to take control of your site otherwise it’s like employing a new salesman that you lock into an office with a telephone that only allows incoming calls, and then wondering why he not selling anything.

I have, like others employed poor sales staff, but I have at least given them a chance of delivering the goods, and the same goes for marketing on the internet.

Regards Alan

Around 90% of  SEO is done by conducting an efficient campaign to build your backlinks. The best way to improve your rank in google or other search engines is to have as many quality links as possible from other sites related to your business. The higher the pagerank of the referral is, the better the link. Getting quality links with pagerank starting with 5-6 is very difficult because such pages are hard to find (I mean find and get your link approved). Some websites will sell links on their high rank pages, but I never pay money for creating backlinks.

Usually, if the website is new or no one did SEO for it, I start by subscribing it to as many free directories as possible, if I can find niche directories even better. This is easy, you just type in google “web directories” or”add url/suggest url/add business…” and you will see a lot of them. For narrowing your search add the word “free”. Submitting to directories is simple, you have to follow some simple steps and then send the information to the site administrator. Some web directories approve a listing fast, some take months. To increase the chances of getting approved you have to be sure you enter your site in the right category.

Then you can go to step to 2 and start getting links from blogs and forums. You can get backlinks from blogs by commenting on the articles. Once again, the best way is to select blogs related to your activity, if not at least the article should be related. Don’t spam, and by that I mean don’t juts post your message there, you need to get involved and comment on topic. If you don’t do that, the link will be removed by the admin.

Usually blogs have 4 boxes for comments: name, email, website and the comment itself. Where they ask for the name you should put the keyword you are targeting, it will act like anchor text; then normally complete the other boxes. There are blogs which require you to be logged in to post a comment. In this case you cannot use the same technique because these blogs don’t have the same boxes to complete,the box where you can complete the url is missing. So the best way is to create an account, log in and comment on topic. Then leave the the url as signature.

Backlinks in forums I don’t really recommend because forum admins are very careful about putting links on their sites and a lot of times you work for nothing since they remove the link. But if you want to use them you have to find related forums and the ones which eventually don’t ban you will provide a long term link to your site. Forums are very SEO friendly if the members are active, this provides fresh content all the time and google likes that. But we will talk about content in future posts.

To create a backlink on a forum you can edit your signature with the desired anchor text and hyperlink to your website or you can start a new thread/reply in an existing thread and hyperlink the targeted keywords in your post. To be more friendly to the forum admins you can make some complementary comments, also an introductory post will not hurt; just say hello and a few things about you in your first post. Some forums will not allow you to have links in your post, even in your signature, until you make at least a few comments so you have to be active and contributing in the forum. You can post news, ask related questions, answer questions if you know how or give your feedback about the topic to be sure that you are not consider a spammer who is there just to get a link.

You don’t have to be alarmed if the blog or forum pages where you place your link have a lower pagerank or are unranked, because like I said before pages with high pagerank are hard to find. Just keep finding sites that are related to your business or activity and keep building your links. In time the results will speak for themselves, I am sure if done right you will have success. I had.

Looking to submit your website to the search engines.

Try here free url submission

Okay so you want to create a website but where do you start?

The first thing you’re going to need is a Domain Name, something like www.mycooldomainname.com

The domain name is the address of your website and it will be used for directing traffic (people) to your site.

Normally the domain name is formed in three parts, but you only choose two of the three parts.

part1.part2.part3 = www.domainname.com

But before you go rushing to buy www.iwanttobethenextgoogle.com you need to think about it for a minute. What is the website going to be used for,  is it you / your company / your passion / your mum ?

It’s likley that the domain name will be in use for a long time to come and so you should consider some things before deciding on the name.

1) Make the name easy to remember, generally short names are better.

2) Ensure the name cannot be spelt, or worded in different ways. For example www.were.com could also be where.com or wear.com, also stay away from numbers combinations like the 411.com could also be fouroneone.com. Think about the people coming to your site, you don’t want to have to explain that 411 is the numbers 411.

3) If your domain name is not something fixed like your company name, you should consider including keywords in it. For example if you own a pet shop based in essex you may want to choose www.petshopessex.com

4) Sometimes unique domain names can be used to your advantage, names like google, twittter, facebook, myspace. But remember that these names only become popular with branding, advertising and the public awareness.

5) You can’t use special characters in your domain name like#@¬$, but you can use hyphens – which act like a word spacer. Search engines can read sperate words even if they are not seperated by hyphens www.thenextbigthing.com is okay and so is www.the-next-big-thing.com

6) Once you have found a domain name you will need check that someone else has not already registered it. To  see if the name you have chossen is available type it in here:

Domain Name Checker

Now that you have selected a name you need to choose the TLD (top level domain) for it, the is the part 3 of the website address, the .com bit. I would always recommend registering a .com in conjuction with another name that maybe more appropriate if you were regisitering a name for a charity it would be a good idea to register www.yourcharity.com & www.yourcharity.org and if you can afford it I would register all available TLD’s as this will help protect you brand in the future.

Note that the TLD’s have some restrictions on who can register what and what for, they can be only registered for a minimum fixed term of 1 year and some TLD’s such at .co.uk can only be registered for a minimum of two years.

I hope this article helps with deciding on your domain name, I’d really appericate your comments or suggestions for improvement

I’ve quickly created this post to list the some of the tools I use when doing market research, promotion e.t.c.

Google Adwords: Keyword Tool – Check popular keywords and get suggestions on alternative keywords.

SubmitterBot – Submit your website to huge bunch of web directories.

Google Insights for Search – Check keywords searches based on location and other variables.

ValueMyWeb – Get a rough idea on your websites value based on popularity.

KeywordSpy – Check your competitors PPC keywords.

Google Search Based Keyword Tool – Check keywords search volumes, based on real searches.

Google Trends – See what people are searching for, now and in the past.

WordTracker – A good alternative to googles keyword tool.

NicheBot – Another good keyword tool.

Alexa – Provides a good insight into a website traffic rank, but also has some other useful features.

If you found these tool useful please share this post.

Regards

Lee

Back links are to the success of a website is essential. Search engines like Google and Yahoo to determine the popularity of a site to the number of backlinks are (also known as inbound links) to a site from other sites. Building a solid base of backlinks to your website is definitely the best thing you can do to build page rank of your website, but the quality is as important as quantity. Links to sites with high Page Rank are the best, while the backlinks for sites or spam bad reputation, you can really hurt.

Here are some simple tips to build more backlinks to the site.

1. Submit articles to article directories. Article marketing is an easy way to create high quality backlinks to. By submitting an article to a directory service like Share this article is allowed to send links to your site in the article and resource box. This creates back links page. If another website collects your website for your publication, you will need additional backlinks to this site.

2. Write a press release and through a cable service. A delivery service such as PRWeb to distribute your press release (with links included) to the message within the respective search engine, which can be picked up by other Web sites, blogs and online newspapers.

3. Answer the questions in a Q & A community. Sites like Yahoo Answers and Wiki! The answers allow people to answer questions and provide links to “resources” on the Internet. For questions about your products or services and then to answer the question, and a link to your page. Ensure a cost effective solution to not forbidden.

Webit Question – I need to answer this very important question. So which is the better, a website or a blog? Not always the simple answer.

Some websites do amazing and make lots of money but most do not. In the past the big companies would spend a small fortune to be on top. Websites and blogs were pretty much separate entities but now recent changes in search engine marketing has changed all that and has forced us all to adapt or die on the vine.

The rules to SEO change very fast. In the last few months the playing field has been drastically leveled. The search engines to let the real content shine are filtering out Lot’s of garbage. The little guy finally has a major chance and big dollar SEO can no longer buy out the search positions.

You might have heard people complaining about Google over this issue. Many websites came to a screeching halt. Google has very intelligent algorithms now that knows when you’re trying to overdo the SEO with no real value otherwise.

Google loves real content. Period. Content that helps and/or improves people and the planet we live on. If your part of that, then Google still supports you.

If on the other hand your a money site with a thousand keywords and back links, selling money and or affiliate products, with no apparent content value, well…just don’t expect much support from the big guy on that one anymore, no matter how much you spend.

Soooooo my answer is. BLOG.

Blog’s are much better than websites. At least as far as the search engines are concerned but don’t throw away your websites any time soon. We are just going to alter the way we do things a bit and how we publish to them, that’s all.

So here’s the adaptation:
Websites and blogs are both very important and have their place but we will treat them slightly different these days.
1. You want a highly targeted domain name for your blog. Something easy to remember and a name that says it all about your niche or topic. Outrageous also works.
2. You use your research from Wordtracker to create the names of your websites. The twist? Use the long tail keywords you got from Wordtracker as extensions from your main Blog’s Domain Name rather than buying separate names for all of your websites, as I have always done in the past.

Example:
Main Blog: http://webitgeek.com/
Extension Website: http://webitgeek.com/Software_Center/
(I realize this example is not a long tail search phrase, but it’s the best working example I had at hand)

This slight adaptation will save you a fortune in domain name cost. We use one main domain for everything and add highly targeted long tail keywords as extensions to the blog, thereby creating a website from a simple name extension. The long tails should all relate to the main blog’s niche in some way and be search engine friendly phrases.

If you have a different niche topic you would buy a different domain name and repeat the whole process again keeping as targeted to your main niche as possible with your website extensions.

Why do it this way?
* Consider it as work around to the old fashioned website that is having a hard time getting seen.
* Your blog provides the content rich media that drives the search engines, that drives the traffic, to your websites.
* Your main blog content can speak about your extensions (websites) to help promote and drive traffic.
* The extension phrases are highly targeted search phrases, stuff people are looking to learn more about or buy and will get far more traffic from the search engines when hooked up to your blog rather than as a conventional stand alone website.
* You never have to fight for a good name again. A name extension is always available for you to use at any time. No one can own the search phrase.
* It’s easier this way and you save tons of money and make more money at the same time.
* This is practically free organic SEO. The cost of a domain name and a hosting account and a few cheap software tools to put it all together and you can do well.

Source: www.articlealley.com

One little detail about link building: it’s important to get links out on as many servers as possible. Since I host a lot of sites on one server, linking between them doesn’t count as much as if they were hosted on a bunch of different servers. It’s a shame, really, but it’s one way the search engines weed out guys like me, who have big crops of web sites that all link together.

How much does this cost me? Well, it’s debatable. But I have done tests and links in from other IP addresses are worth at least a little more than links from the same machine. A lot of other factors are involved, but two links from the same machine’s sites that are both PR4’s is going to be worth more than two links form separate machines that are PR2’s. Generally.

It’s frustrating, but there is a gold mine of old IP’s available to any webmaster that’s been doing this a while. For example, today I was link building for Hawaii clients, and I remembered an old site, the old site of my Maui Bed and Breakfast client, that is actually hosted on Maui.net–an old and authoritative site. And there’s the old site for a Maui vacation rental site of a client who doesn’t use the site anymore, but there it sits on the Maui Gateway server, wasting away its PR2…

If you’re like me, and you host on a server other than your internet access company’s, you probably have tons of free disk space on your access host’s server that you’re not using, and that qualifies for a free link from your access server. In fact, I think I’m going to look into that. I had some old ones that went away, unfortunately, when I moved and switched ISPs, and that is one problem, unless you’re going to get the same ISP no matter where you move.

Of course, if you’re getting a good deal on hosting, you’re not going to want to host every new site you develop at a new IP address, but maybe occasionally you can get a new server. Or maybe your client’s who are developing a new site will keep the old one. Take advantage of those old homesteads, and link to and from them!

Hi again everyone, at last I can now give you what was to be the final list of the free programs I use to make my life easier on the Internet.

Sorry about the delay, but I’ve been on vacation, but more about that later.

To make amends for keeping you waiting, after giving you just 5 in the first post, followed by 12 free Google apps, I now give you another 10 programs you can use to help your web marketing, making it 26 so far, but check back soon and I’ll give you another 10.

Remember, none of these are affiliate links, and no sign-ups are required.

Quick media converter.

I have found this program invaluable to shrink the file size of videos I’ve been loading to YouTube. Voted as one of the 12 best free windows applications of 2008 and is also now among the best 2009 freeware applications selection on PCMag.

Audacity.

The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds.         I use this a lot in conjunction with Quick Media Converter before uploading my videos.

Website Grader.

I use this free SEO tool to measure the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

Open Office

Open Office is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers.

It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. I actually prefer to use this than use Word.

Comment Kahuna

A new FREE software delivering unlimited, high-quality, targeted backlinks to all your websites without using any risky tactics that can destroy your SEO. Grab this backlink and traffic booster software now & put it to work for you.     I use this a lot to boost my back links.

SEO For Firefox

Pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.

Search Engine Guide

There is a lot involved with search engine marketing. In fact, it can be a bit overwhelming, even for those with a great deal of experience. The good news is that by taking it one step at a time, it is not hard to learn. And once learned, search engine marketing can provide an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to your web site.

FreeMind

Has made it as the finalist for the 2009 Community Choice Award in the category “Most likely to change the way you do everything” FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) software written in Java.

The recent development has turned it into a high productivity tool. The operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.

CSS-Discuss

A mailing list devoted to talking about CSS and ways to use it in the real world; in other words, practical uses and applications.

HTML and CSS Tutorials.

The web designer’s resource for everything HTML and CSS, the most common technologies used in making web pages.

I mentioned I was on vacation. While I was away, I messed things up big time by not being used to a computer I borrowed. I’ve mentioned before what a fantastic hosting company I use, and just one email to them got things sorted out quickly, without any fuss at all, and at no charge, all included with their really low monthly hosting fees.

Thank you Paula and Dan, owners of d9 Hosting. Check them out, they have servers both in the UK and the USA.

Check out my vacation videos here, or subscribe to my RSS feed to be the first to know when I post the final 10.

So you are affected by the typical “online marketing bug” and want to make boatloads of money quick and fast from home? Well, it ain’t that easy! Let’s say that you build a website showcasing all the products and services you have got to offer. However, that lifeless webpage would not make you a dime by itself! In this article I will tell you why!

It is a fact that people find products and services online with the aid of search engines. It is also well known that right now Google™ is the leader of all search engines. What this means is that, if you wish your products to be found, you need to get ranked highly in Google. And guess how would you do that? Unless you are ready to invest a truckload of money on pay-per-click advertising, your only other option is to build backlinks for your website!

If you want to make any decent amount of money online, that too with the least amount of investment possible, you need to have two things:

a) Good quality content on your website

b) Backlinks! A solid backlink structure is what would help your website gain good rankings in Google. When that happens, people would easily find your products and services and flock to shop on your website!

Now, let us say that you don’t know anything about backlink building; so, how would you get started? In this article I will take you by the hand and tell you exactly what you need to do – step by step!

Step 1: Find a niche you want to market in. In fact, there is no need to hunt for any particular “niche” market! There are several popular, money-making niches where millions of people are making money day and night. Such niches are weight loss, self help, dating, any hobby niche, etc., to name a few!

Step 2: Use your favorite keyword research tool to analyze your chosen niche market. Remember, this is a very crucial step! A lot of things, such as the domain name you would be buying, as well as the backlinks you would be building depend on this step!

Next, sort your keywords based on the number of times they are searched per month!

Step 3: Buy a  keyword-rich domain name. I did tell you to sort keywords based on their monthly search data in the previous step; well, you can buy a  domain name containing one of those top keywords/keyphrases! I usually buy domain names from Namecheap. But you can buy them from your favorite domain registrar if you wish!

Step 4: The next step is to buy web hosting and build your website. There is no need to spend a lot of money on hosting at this point since you are just starting out. Once you start making money, you can easily shift to better quality web hosts. Remember, all you are doing now is “testing the waters”.

Step 5. Assuming that you have populated your website with good quality content, it is now time to do what we have been discussing all along: build backlinks. As a matter of fact, there are two types of backlinks you can build: hard links such as http://domain.com and anchor text links such as:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>Your Keywords</a> (replace “Your Keywords” with your chosen keyword, and http://www.yourdomain.com with your website’s domain name)!

Anchor text links are what you would focus on since your website rankings largely depend on those links.

Remember not to give undue preference to any particular keyword just because it happens to be the most popular one! You should build backlinks for all the keywords and keyphrases searched for by internet users in your niche market. For me, any traffic is good traffic and any money is good money, and you would also notice that it is easier to get ranked for long tail keywords than the short tail ones!

To give you an idea, let us say that in order to be ranked number 1 for the keyword “make money”, you would need to build 100 backlinks for that particular keyword. But once you change your preference to say, “make money from home” or “make money from blogs”, you would not only need fewer backlinks to get ranked for such phrases but would also be able to get better targeted traffic from these keywords, as opposed to generic, two-word keyphrases!

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There are many misconception about swapping back-link with other sites, so let me explain:

There are two reasons to get links: the traffic they generate directly, and the incremental boost they give you in the search engine rankings. Now, the amount of boost each one gives you in the search engines is related to the “quality” of that link, and the “quality” is actually an external, machine-calculated estimate of …how much traffic that link ought to give you.

What sort of a link do you think would send you the most traffic? One on a website related to your area of business, or one on an irrelevant website?

A link hidden in the middle of a long list of other links, or a highlighted one in the middle of a paragraph someone’s reading, like this? A link from a long-established, well-known website, or one from a blog launched yesterday?

The answer as to which links will send you the most traffic are obvious …and they’re also what the search engines are looking for. Quality links, within the text, on well-regarded, relevant sites.

So to return to the original question, if I was offered a link from the home page of microsoft.com, would it somehow be valueless because I already have a link to Microsoft on this website? Of course not. It would be fantastic.

There is nothing wrong with “reciprocal” links if they’re useful to the visitor on both sites. Where you don’t want to waste time is on reciprocal links which would never generate traffic between the sites. And an exchanged link between you and a coffee producer in south america is never going to generate traffic, and it’s not going to help you in the search engines either.

My friend in Hawaii, Cherie Attix, runs the Hale Hookipa Inn Maui Bed and Breakfast. She also cares very deeply about her home, the Hawaiian Island of Maui, which she blogs about on her Maui blog. Recently, Cherie was recognized by O Magazine (part of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire) for her efforts in Voluntourism, or volunteer vacations in Hawaii.

Of course, this is an ethical, environmental, community-based project that I was more than happy to do for a reduced rate (provided I get to be a volunteer on vacation in Hawaii sponsor). I knew I would be encouraging people to give a little back to Hawaii when they visit, to help leave the place a little better than you found it.

When we lived on Maui for a year, I remember a trip to Haleakala National Park where a ranger stopped my wife and asked her not to take rocks from the crater as souvenirs. She held out her hands to reveal several Japanese brand cigarette butts (the most common kind to find up there), and he apologized and thanked her. It is in that spirit of stopping those butts from washing down the mountain into the ocean where turtles eat them and starve to death that we launched this site.

It’s chocked full of information (content is king) about volunteer projects on Maui. It’s organized so you can narrow right in on the organizations you’re most interested in.

From an SEO perspective, this site is gold. There’s all kinds of content, and plenty of room to expand. It’s Maui centric, for now, but could easily be adapted architecturally to include all the other islands: a potential mother load of long-tail key phrases (the percent of searches longer than 3 words is ever increasing as searches get smarter).

Volunteer on Vacation in Hawaii has all kinds of link bait potential… The original idea for the site was a page on the Maui B&B site about Voluntourism that was found, and linked to, by the good folks at O Magazine. Cherie’s been talking to all the organizations about whom we did a page, and we’re expecting all kinds of links back from a bunch of great-ranking .orgs! Maybe we’ll manage to get a .edu or a .gov!

Another aspect to the link bait is the do-the-right-thing mentality that powers a large part of the net. After all, this site is helping drive volunteers to projects that badly need them! It also drives money to them, and saves the volunteer a little too: Cherie is offering guests of her historic Hawaiian Bed and Breakfast a five percent discount on their stay, and is donating 5% of the cost of the stay to the organization for which the guest volunteers! This, of course, works as a marketing gem for Cherie, too!

So, that’s yet another link-bait aspect: save 5% on your stay and earn money for the organization of your choice! Volunteer! Talk about your Calls to Action! The ethical aspect of a site like this should not be underestimated. We’re hoping to drive a herd of volunteers into these programs, thereby making Hawaii a better place in terms of environment, culture, and community. We hope for the sake of all involved that this gets a lot of attention.

I just started an account at Free Traffic System. There you can add links to your websites and blogs. You can write articles, and submit them to the site. They take those articles, and post them to a bunch of blogs, with a back link to you.

If you also have a blog, you can add it to their directory, and get articles from other people. This serves two purposes. When your article is submitted to a blog, you get a backlink, resulting in free traffic, also, you get free content for your own blog from other people!

They also have an affiliate program. You get money for every paid member you refer, as well as their referals. For every FREE member you refer, you get a certain amount of back links posted with thier articles! It’s a win win!

I will keep you updated!

My Free Traffic Systems Affiliate Link Below;

http://www.freetrafficsystem.com/a.php?p=18505

What are backlinks?

Before we talk about Back Links, let’s quickly discuss Forward Links (or Hyperlinks). These are the links on your website that either:

• link to other pages (or documents eg. images, videos, audio files, PDFs etc are all considered ‘documents’) within your website (internal links)
• or link to pages (or documents) on other websites (external links).

In the HTML markup language these links look like this:

<a href=”/contact_us.html”>Contact Us</a>
this points, or links, to a page within your own website

<a href=”http://www.google.com”>Google Website</a>
this points to someone else’s website – google.com in this example

Back Links (or more commonly written as Backlinks) are the opposite of Forward Links.

Backlinks (or Incoming Back Links (IBL) or inbound links or off-site links) are links from other websites to one of your web pages. In the 2nd example above, you are providing google.com with a backlink (a link from your site to theirs).

Why backlink?

Search Engines count the number of backlinks your website has pointing to it as part of it’s own process (ranking) to determine how popular or important your website is. The more backlinks you have pointing to your website, the more “important” the search engines think your website is.

In the “old days” this simple strategy was very effective in getting your website ranked well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, search engines (especially Google) have become a lot smarter and wiser, and now the “quality” and “relevance” of the site backlinking to your site plays a significant part in the ranking process.  For example, if the website backlinking to you has a high ranking itself, then this link from them to you is seen as a “vote of confidence” by some search engines (eg. Google), and will help improve your overall ranking.

How do I create backlinks?

Common methods used for obtaining links to your site include (but are not limited to):

• Sending a press release to online PR sites.
• Sending an article (with a link to your site) to article submission sites.
• Submiting your site to relevant online directories.
• Joining forums that are relevant to the content of your site, put a link to your site in the signature area, and submit on-topic comments to the site.

Another method of increasing back links is by paying for them on other sites. Many search engines, in particular Google, strongly frown on this method of gaining links.

How do I know what backlinks are “out there” pointing back at me?

You can conduct “special” searches in most search engines that will list all the sites it has indexed that have a link back to your site. Most of the engines also provide the ability to filter out (remove from the results) any links that come from your own website.

Google Example

Google provides the link: prefix to a search query. Using this prefix will (supposedly) list all the web pages it has indexed that have a link to your website (including your own web pages pointing to other web pages in your site). Now, I say “supposedly” because Google doesn’t list no where near the number of backlinks pointing to your site. There are several reasons mentioned by “those in the know”, including Google not wanting people to (partly) reverse engineer it’s ranking algorithm (which is apparently largely tied to the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your site). Regardless of the reason, the link: prefix will basically get you no where.

Here’s a screen shot of a backlink query for my own website http://serptracker.markread.com.au (click on any of the following images for a larger view).

google backlinks to serp tracker

Hmmm … only 2 backlinks (and one of them is from my own website)!!  But I know there are a lot more! Not only did I create them, but Google has increased my ranking based on them (and certainly not just based on the 2 shown in the link: report!!)

The problem with Google’s link: prefix (as of the date of this posting) is that it doesn’t show you all of the backlinks Google has indexed that are pointing to your site (don’t ask me why). We need to coerce it a little. A better query is @serptracker.markread.com.au This produces the following results:

Improved backlink Google query

Ok, 148 results. That’s better! But some of them are my web pages pointing back at my site. Let’s remove them so we only see other websites backlinking to me.

We do this by excluding our website from the query, like this:

@serptracker.markread.com.au -site:serptracker.markread.com.au

Now we get a set of results like so:

Final Google Backlink Query

Of course, Google isn’t the only search engine in town that can show you a backlink report (although Google does currently have the lions share of the market – refer to the article comparing organic clicks vs ppc clicks for more interesting statistics). You should ideally obtain a backlink report from the top 3 search engines as a minimum (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and combine them all together (into a spreadsheet for example).

View all Google Search Operators

Yahoo Example

Yahoo backlink report example for SERPtracker

Here is a list of typical backlink search queries for several popular search engines. The domain name I’m searching for in these examples is serptracker.markread.com.au:

Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&filter=0

Yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt

Here’s a refinement. For more extensive results, try this search in the Yahoo search box:

linkdomain:serptracker.markread.com.au -site:serptracker.markread.com.au

The above search includes links to ALL pages on your site, not just the main page.

MSN
http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&FORM=MSNH&v=1&q=linkdomain:serptracker.markread.com.au

AllTheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf-8&q=link:serptracker.markread.com.au&_sb_lang=any

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/web/results?q=link%3Aserptracker.markread.com.au&kgs=0&kls=0&avkw=qtrp

There are also several free website services and tools that will produce a list of your backlinks from one or more search engines (some more accurately than others I might add). The commercial products generally offer the most comprehensive reports.

Here’s a few free sites I know of:

• http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
• http://www.backlinkfinder.com
• http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm

Getting quality backlinks will improve your website ranking in the search engines, but only if the backlinks remain in place. Articles, blogs, image banners and even whole domains do sometimes get deleted (by accident or otherwise). If you have a lot of these backlinks disappear you’ll notice your website will dip (sometimes dramatically) in the SERPs. So you’ll want to create quality backlinks to your site from time to time.

How can I measure my website ranking?

The manual method is by conducting a search of your website in the various search engines. The listing produced is called a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Typically a search engine query will produce many SERPs that you can look through to find the position (rank) of your website.

Google SERPs for SERP Tracker (3 Aug 2009)

The screenshot above shows a typical Google search. You enter the keyword to search on, click on the Search button, then pages and pages of listings are returned. You’ll then need to look through these pages one by one, counting as you go, until you find your website referenced. This can be a very slow and laborious process, especially if your website is near the end of the SERPs (Google will return up to 1000 listings).

If you do this process regularly (for your own business or for your boss as part of your job role), you may want to take a look at an automated tool designed to record the ranking of your website over a period of time, like SERPtracker. This SERP tracking tool has been purposely built with one objective in mind; to historically track the ranking of your website in the Google SERPs.

Other resources

I hope this post has clarified some of the confusion surrounding the backlink topic. It is not meant as a definitive essay on the subject. Other resources you might want to look at include:

• Wikipedia

Today our topic is the importance of back links in SEO services. The importance of back links is enormous. Google uses this as a parameter to evaluate or at least as an indicator as to the quality of your content. It gives so much attention to this inbound links or back links. This giving of importance can be measured by the very fact that in 2005 Google has filed a patent application based on search technology based on back linking. But the main and foremost important thing is getting quality back links and not a bunch of inbound links. Quality back links or inbound links are very crucial factor for higher search engine rankings and webmasters and online publishers employ various methods legitimate or illegitimate to get back links.

At first look at the factor why back links are important in search engine optimization. Actually these links are like a voting system and they make the search engine know how much people respect the opinion. Higher the popularity scale, higher the number of back links. They are like voting for you. If lots of people link to your web pages, using anchor text appropriate to your theme, this is taken as validation of your content. The logic is: why would people link to you unless you have something valuable to offer? Exactly for this reason it is considered as a measure of popularity.

Now come to the point that we have hinted at the beginning of this topic. That is web designers and web masters and online publishers take various types of methods both legitimate and illegitimate to get back links. It is indeed very sad that for getting a link you need to give money to another website. For instance, would it make sense if some poker website paid me to put their link on this web design and SEO blog (unless of course I specifically mention that it is an advertisement)? The buying and selling of links has become so rampant that Google is contemplating penalizing people indulging in these tactics?

Now automatically comes the topic how a good position or good way to be found to get quality back links. You should get back links in a normal, natural manner and back linking should be voluntary, not mercenary. For your own satisfaction and in order to keep your business safe and clear you can mention it on your website or blog that you are being paid to publish those links, and Google even goes to the extent of recommending the rel=no follow attribute for the websites you are linking to if you are publishing external links for extra bucks.

So far the best way of obtaining a higher quality back links is by means of generating valuable content regularly and timely and for a long time. You need to revise it and update it on a regular basis. Your content must be off higher quality and fit the purpose of your website. Webmasters and bloggers enjoying high traffic always like to refer to an external link rather than explaining a topic from scratch. Give people something to link to and see how your traffic surges up.

Just by adding your own press releases on to your website: I find it hard to believe as to why this is so often ignored or neglected by so many companies, even after they paid some pr guy to write it for them?

Some clients comment when I suggest it, saying “well, I don’t want duplicate content on my site.” or “I’ve been too busy to do it”  So if you don’t give a damn about promoting your site fine, otherwise get the f*ing releases up there and quit moaning  about duplicate content or not having the time!

Who the hell cares about duplicate content? Maybe it’s just me, but I thought the purpose of a press release was to bring exposure. It can’t do that if you sit on it. On top of putting the news out to your regular readers, customers, or visitors, it also allows you to archive your releases for search engine & journalists who visit the site wanting to learn more about your company/products or site history.

 If you don’t have a press room or at least a press release archive, ADD ONE!!!. And just publish the thing, and be done with it! Why companies refuse to grasp this concept is just beyond me. After all it’s not rocket science and it so easy…