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dimanche 27 mai 2007

SEO Introduction

If your looking to increase your websites presense on the internet we will provide you with a detailed insight into the world of Search Engine Optimization, so let us begin with this broken down introduction to SEO. In the current age having your site online is only one step towards making your mark on the internet, it's incredibly easy to get online but once you get online you will probably encounter a common dilemma, where are the visitors? Undoubtedly you have joined the many millions of websites that fall into the abyss of the search engine's, if you are fortunate to get listed by them at all. You may not think search engine positioning affects you but if you own or operate a website, it does. If you any ambitions for your website then you have to cater for this increasingly important webmaster role.
Search engine optimization is more than making your site rank well in the major search engines, it's about integrating it seamlessly into your page design without your visitors even being aware exists. SEO is an on going task that all webmasters need to undertake in order to keep reasonable positioning within search engines and recieve the subsequent traffic it brings. A common mistake many people make is to optimize their site once and believe that they can hold a rank, this might be true for some obscure key words but there is so much information flowing around the internet that there will always be someone willing to take your site on for rankings.

It is important to remember the complex algorithms search engines use to determine your position calculate thousands of different factors, you cannot rely on one to keep ahead of the game. SEO Assistance will bring you an indepth view into the world of search engine positioning, we have broken it down into easily digestible sections so you can move your site up inch by inch. One downside to keeping your website in the public eye is that it requires a constant effort but if you are planning to sell a product or keep your website active, it is definitely worth it.

Sitemaps - Uncover the Only Quick and Easy Site Submission Strategy

What is the easiest and quickest way to get your site spidered and listed by Google and Yahoo?

This is an enternal question, one that many frustrated SEO specialists and online business owners are still trying to figure out. The trick to answering this question is to find out exactly what Google and Yahoo want you to do to get listed; not what you THINK they want you to do. That being said, the tried and true methods to get your pages indexed and listed by Google and Yahoo have been the following:

1. Blogging and Pinging

2. Submit your website through the standard submission form provided by Yahoo and Google

3. Pay a search engine submission service to do it for you

4. Figure out how to create a Sitemap for each of the engines to get the spiders to come to your site (you still have to manually submit)

These are all decent methods. However, the problems with 3 of these methods are many, and here are just a few:

1. Blog and Ping and submission forms are all slow ways to get listed. Who has that kind of time?

2. Search Engine Submission services can be expensive

3. Using an automated search engine submission service can get you banned, if the search engines think that you are "spamming"

Of all the methods listed above, both Google and Yahoo prefer that you create a sitemap and then submit your site to them. You create a database file that contains information about ALL of your web pages. You then load that file onto your website and then let Google know where that file is. Google is extremely specific about how the database should be submitted, which is in XML format.

By submitting your website in this way, you are cutting down on their overhead by a huge amount. You see, when you submit the old-fashioned way, using the standard submission form we talked about earlier, Google and Yahoo have to convert your information to the database XML format themselves. As you can imagine, this takes time, especially with the zillions of webpages that are submitted daily. So, those sites that are submitted in the manner and format that Google and Yahoo are already using will get their pages spidered faster...do you see the logic here? Using this process, you are enabling them to visit many MORE of your web pages quickly and easy. This is exactly what Google and Yahoo want you to do.

By submitting your sitemap in the preferred format, you will accomplish the following:

1. Save enormous amounts of your valuable time and money.

2. You don't risk getting banned

3. You will get Google and Yahoo to spider the pages of your site faster.

So, if you want to get your site spidered, and therefore listed, faster, you must create and submit the sitemap. In theory, the search engines can list your pages whenever they want. In reality, until you get them to spider your webpages, you will never get them listed!

Sitemaps 101 - Back To SEO School

Sitemaps are without doubt one of the most often ignored and undervalued aspects of search engine optimization. You've probably spent a huge amount of time working on pages of original content, keyword density and getting incoming links but never once spared a thought for a sitemap for your new creation.

What is a sitemap?
Put simply it's a page or pages that contain a list of and link to all the other documents on your site. This is useful on two levels:

1. Your visitor can quickly reference all the documents on your site to find exactly what they're looking for.

2. Search engine spiders can also quickly find and index every single page of your site in the least amount of time. The SEO benefits of using a sitemap far considerable and should not be ignored.

This is a win-win situation for you, your website visitors and the search engines. Put simply you're nuts if you've not included a sitemap as part of your overall website promotion strategy.

The good news is that it's never too late to start. You can create a sitemap page today but there are some rules to creating an effective sitemap that you need to follow:

Your sitemap must only be linked to from your homepage and no other page. Why? You want the search engine spiders to find this link directly from your homepage and follow it from there. Your sitemap MUST NOT be linked to from every other page of your site. Also from a Google Pagerank point of view only linking to your sitemap from your homepage can also "funnel" PR quickly to pages all over your site.

If you have a large website of 50 pages or more limit the number of pages listed on your sitemap to a maximum of 30. This is to prevent your sitemap from being misinterpreted as a link farm by the search engines. It also makes the sitemap a lot easier for real human visitors to read through. Limiting the number of pages listed on each sitemap to 30 might mean splitting your sitemap over 5, 10 or 20 pages. This has to be done and the long term benefits are worth it. Bear in mind that if you do create a 20 page sitemap you've just created an extra 20 pages of content for your website!

Make absolutely sure that each of your sitemap pages links to the next. If you have 10 sitemap pages in total then each of those needs to link to every other sitemap page. Otherwise both visitors and search engine spiders will find a broken link, lose interest and go away.

Test your sitemap thoroughly. Make sure all the links works. Make sure it's easy to read and navigate through. Your sitemap is there to assist your visitor and not confuse them.


How should you structure your sitemap? The following tips must be adhered to in order for your site to gain the maximum possible benefit from having a sitemap.

1. The title of each sitemap link should be keyword rich and link directly back to the original page.

2. Include 10 - 20 words of text from the original page of content underneath the relevant sitemap link. This creates more content for search engine spiders and human visitors can see exactly what each page is about in advance of clicking.
uman visitor benefit is that they can see what the pages is about in advance.

3. Ensure that the look and feel of your sitemap page is consistent with the rest of your site. Use the same basic HTML template you used for every other page of your site.

So now you understand the importance of building a sitemap for your website. There is work involved but the long term benefits for your websites far outweigh any effort you have to make right now.

SEO Success: Step Three is Creating Long-Term Popularity

Finally, after the hard-core efforts that are directly related to generating traffic to your website, you next step is to develop a strategy that creates follow-on, long-term traffic. Several methods exist for this Tier III strategy:

- Taking the large list of ancillary keywords that relate directly or indirectly to your website, begin purchasing keyword related domain names that will be used to create traffic driving websites that point to your money site.

- Setup satellite pages using the keyword domain names with the idea of capturing traffic geared toward those specific keywords, developing niche market traffic. As you develop niche markets for those new customers, you are going to be able to capitalize on those customers for the other products and/or services that your company offers when these sites link back to your money site as a result of informing and attracting these new customers through the niche sites.

- Create links, backlinks and cross-links between the satellite pages and your money site, improving your link popularity for all websites, especially your money site.

- Display articles or e-books related to your industry and place these articles on your websites being aware of the best location based on keyword dominance.

- For long-term, viral marketing results, create articles or e-books that you will either sell on your website or offer to public domain websites where your link information must be retained for use by anyone else on the internet; these articles will create links that go back to your money site or your niche sites.

- Follow the same steps in Tier I and II for all the niche sites as you did for your original money site; that is, design a SEO-optimized website and follow Tier II strategy to create the necessary link popularity to drive traffic to these sites.

Monitoring
In order to determine if the SEO efforts are successful, you must monitor results of for number and quality of backlinks, PR and web trend statistics. There are many sources for generating this data as well as programs that will assist in these analyses. Whatever method you choose, whether it is using specific programs or setting up a spreadsheet for entry of data, be consistent in tracking the data. There will be fluctuations from day-to-day that you should expect. You are looking for general, overall upward trends, not short-term blips. Upward progress followed by maintenance of a strong position with slow, steady growth would indicate a successful SEO campaign.

This 3-Tiered approach to SEO Strategy is very effective when implemented with the patience it takes for long-term results. Short-term "fixes" and "tricks" may have an effect in the short-run, but as the search engines change and adapt their algorithms -- as they doing almost monthly -- what worked today for quick results may actually get you banned tomorrow. This strategy is based on search engine directives: Well-designed websites, free of bad code, offering information, services or products of interest to the internet community will create their own base of popularity -- for which you will be rewarded by strong, growing traffic. When you are in it for the long haul, your strategy must utilize long-term efforts.

SEO Success: Step One is Good Web Design

Creating a well-designed website is the first step in your internet marketing strategy. Once the website has been created and optimized, there are further techniques to employ that will drive traffic to your website for successful, long-term results. You wouldn't consider opening a retail store in a major shopping mall without signage and you shouldn't consider having a nice looking website designed without expanding your web presence in order to be found on the internet. But unless the website is designed correctly to begin with, follow-on SEO efforts will have limited results at best. The following strategy overview is designed to bring about productive SEO results:

- Create an attractive website that is complementary to your company image and provides your targeted audience with information about you, your company and your products and/or services.

- Design a website that has a call-to-action in the form of a purchase or providing you a contact, subscription or other commitment from your visitor.

- Create a successful marketing arm for your overall business promotion and marketing campaign to promote your business, products and/or services with the many follow-on strategies that drive traffic to your website.

- Become competitive in your industry and marketplace by meeting or exceeding the industry marketing standards and attracting a qualified audience for your products and/or services based on a strong reputation.

- Generate and maintain or grow internet traffic to your website resulting in a conversion of traffic into sales of your products and/or services by evolving as your market demands.

This search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is composed of several processes in three stages: 1) Good web design, 2) Attracting attention from search engines and directories, and 3) Creating long-term popularity on the internet. However, it all starts with good web design. Website design is the foundation and beginning of a successful internet marketing strategy. It is true that there are websites on the internet that are unattractive but somehow seem to work. If there are aspects of these websites that work, imagine how well they could do if they simply followed basic design implementation tactics that resulted in a good image as well as simply pushed information out to the viewer.

These basics are essential for Tier 1 success:

- Good web design will complement and enhance the company image and offline marketing campaign products creating a corporate branding if done well.

- Easy, logical navigation that leads the viewer deeper and deeper into the web of information provided by the website will keep the visitor on your site longer and give you more time to sell your products or services.

- Attractive but quick-loading graphics that are pleasing to the eye and meaningful to the website will guide the viewer along the route you decide is important for explaining what you offer.

- Keyword usage that is search engine-friendly depends on how the keywords are utilized, the placement of the keywords, the frequency of the most important keywords and their relevance to the website.

- Website coding that is lean, clean and without errors will keep the search engines happy and your viewer seeing exactly what you intended to offer.

- Relevance of content to the theme of the site is essential. Be concise, to the point and focus on your goals. If you have multiple themes and offerings, consider multiple websites to address the different markets, then tie each website back to the others by linking.

- Changing content that changes frequently and stays fresh keeps your viewer returning and prevents the search engines from treating your website as if it were stale news. A stale site will be ranked lower by the search engines.

Content is king -- it's all about content, content, content. But how that content is presented is what makes the difference.

SEO - Natural Linking Strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between a small, barely profitable or visible website and a traffic magnet website. There are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to influence the search engines. Some search engines react to certain strategies better than others. Some even have conflicting strategies that they react to. To document all of these things would require a significant number of pages and research that goes beyond the scope of this article.

However, there are a number of things that can be documented that will work for most if not all search engines. And let's face it; there are really only 3 that make a difference between a successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy. They are the big three: Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines in any given month are responsible for over 90% of all internet searches.

So, what is this article about? It's about what you can do as a website owner that will influence the search engines using commonly accepted practices of linking to other websites (outbound) and getting website links (inbound) back to you. There are basically 4 strategies that a website owner usually will employ to increase their website value in the eyes of the search engine. They are reciprocal linking, one-way linking, multi-site linking and directory linking. A website owner should not think that using just a single strategy is the right answer - sure it will help your SEO but it won't be the Best answer. The Best answer is to employ all 4 techniques and to do it naturally.

Each of the four linking strategies has specific descriptions that can be summed up as:
1. Reciprocal Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links back to Site A
2. One-Way Linking = Site B links to Site A
3. Multi-Site Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site D, and Site D links back to Site A. Could be 3..N number of sites involved.
4. Directory Linking = Site Directory A links to Site A

That seems simple enough but it takes time and effort to perform all 4 strategies and most website owners aren't willing to spend the time or don't have the time to spend on it. As a website owner, SEO needs to be one of the highest priority tasks that you need to address, just after Order Processing and Fulfillment and Customer Service. Without free traffic from the search engines, other traffic generation strategies that usually require payment must be engaged.

Now doing the 4 strategies above is great, but it gets even harder because you have to do it in a way that doesn't trigger the search engines to enforce a penalty upon your website. No one except the search engine engineers know all of the exact penalties but we have some good theories for some of them.

The first is the rate at which links are created. There is a certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to the age of the website according to the engine. For example, a young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying links.

The second is that having a link to every site that links to you will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach your sites full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies will appear more natural to the engines.

The third is having all inbound links to your site on "linking" pages will make those links less valuable than having a natural link on a contextually relative page for a percentage of the inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage, the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it requires more time and effort for both website owners.

The fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking sites. If all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased your links and that is not natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and it is. However, you should not expect the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 - 10).

The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links varied. It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have the same text on the link description. The natural tendency would be to have a certain percent be the sites name, but after that it should be a wide variety of description. Your link text description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your website.

Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your inbound links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all point back to the home page of your website. It's most natural for a good high quality link to appear in the text of a page and have it point internally within your site.

So, when you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of these things in mind and don't be impatient. Impatience could incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in the "sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being manipulated. Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered.

SEO Made Easy - Winning Tactics For Internet Business Success

Search engines are very difficult to completely understand. There are no complete explanations of how their ranking algorithms work. But the very fact that the average person does not intuitively know how to crack the search engine algorithms leads to all sorts of the same questions, usually variations of: "How do I get my website to the top of the search engine results pile?"

Search engine optimization is not magic or something equally difficult to understand. Instead, it is a step-by-step process and you should look at it that way. It can be summarized in the following points:

* An understanding of how search engines think.
* Knowing what search engines want
* Learning proven optimization techniques
* Applying your knowledge time and time again (experience - commonly known as trial and error!).

Of course, SEO is not completely explained by these four sentences. An automated software solution can give you the knowledge and tools to learn and implement SEO on your website with exceptional results. Success on the internet all boils down knowing how to implement Search Engine Optimization better than your competitors and getting it right the first time. If you do this, you will give your internet business that competitive edge.

However, if you have implemented SEO strategies correctly, and if you are still not seeing your website rank anywhere near where it should be on a particular keyword, then you may have one of the following problems:

* Your website may have been sandboxed (specific only to Google).
* Your website might be penalized or even removed from the index by a search engine for going against a stated guideline.
* A search engine might think that you are spamming them.

In the first case, you will have to "wait it out" with Google, while consolidating on your positions in the other search engines by continuously building links and adding content. You will not encounter the second case if you use and implement a very good automated SEO tool and understand exactly what the search engines will and won't permit.

However, like I said in the beginning, search engines are notoriously difficult to understand - their algorithms change by the second - and sometimes it is possible to all the right things and still not be ranked correctly. Search engines don't always get this part right. Called over-optimization by the major search engines, there is actually a lot of debate over this issue.

I know that optimizing your website and getting it listed is one of the hardest things to do. Believe me, I've been there. But now that you're armed with the information to get started, why not look for that automated SEO tool that will make your life easier and start you on the road to getting your site listed and ranked!