Top 10 Web Site Marketing Tips for SME

Many small business owners struggle with the seemingly overwhelming task of managing their web site. There always seems to be so much to do, yet no time to do it all (something we know all too well). This brief primer should help to highlight the key aspects of web site management that will help them gain the most from their web site with the time that they have available. 

The following ten tips are key to maintaining a successful web site. Follow these and your site will do better. Nothing will guarantee that a web site will be successful as there are simple too many different factors that impact web success - but as a general rule these ten tips will always lead to better performance.

1. Content
2. Freshness
3. No Tricks
4. Links
5. Structure
6. Accessibility
7. Quality Code
8. URLs
9. Style
10. Images


For more detail consult Building Web Site Success a detailed primer about these and other aspects of Internet marketing.

#1 Content
Content is key: Almost all the search engines scan a sites content now - almost ignoring things like meta tags. The more content you have on your site the more the search engines can scan - but there is more to it then that: people like content too. Many people measure a web site's success by the number of visitors it gets - so ask yourself - why would people come to your web site? do you offer them interesting and informative information that relates to your product or service? if not, why would they come?

Relevant content and lots of it is a key for a successful web site. There is always room for more content on a web site, and you can never have too much.

Take this article for example, while it's fairly useful information for many of our visitors, it's also additional content for our web site - and will serve to help our site do better. Writing articles about aspects of your industry is a great way to generate content.

Set asside an hour a day (or at least an hour a week) to devote to adding new content to your web site.

#2 Freshness
Keep it current: Having lots of content is great - but if it is all three years old it's not going to look like your site is much of a priority. The search engines actually track this. They monitor how frequently your site changes as they visit it for indexing. The more often it changes the better your rank in the freshness category.

What constitutes change? pretty much anything - which is why keeping a BLOG or adding frequent news articles to your web site usually produces such good results. It is also the reason why having something as simple as rotating content and the current date on every page has been shown to make a difference (although the search engines have been getting wise to this kind of tactic)

#3 No Tricks
Don't try to outsmart the Search Engines - Eventually you'll loose: Many design firms promise success through the use of tricks, backdoors, and special tactics designed to sneak a web site into a top position rapidly. Something, of course, that the search engines are constantly battling to defeat. Why play the game? as the search engines find the cheaters they will plug the holes and a rank (that usually costs a pretty penny to achieve) will immediately be lost.

Rather, follow the recommendations of the search engines - most set out rules for web masters that outline what they would like to see in a web site (incidentally these rules are the main source of research for this document) By following the rules the engines are actually battling all the cheating web sites and working to promote the sites that follow the rules - they are fighting FOR you!

#4 Links
Links both in and out must be relevant: There has been a lot of talk about link exchanges - people linking to others merely to gain a higher rank (hmmm this smacks of breaking tip #3) if you are going to link to someone and/or ask them to link to you - ask yourself: is it relevant?

Any old link is not going to help you much - search engines will look at who is linking to you - they are also starting to pay very close attention to how many links you have off your web site on a page. This is being done to try and drop sites with pages of links (do you have a links page on your web site?)
It is far better to have relevant links places throughout your web site - on only those pages that specifically the topic that relates to the page being linked to.
Unfortunately you can't exert too much control over the way that other sites link to yours but it is worth looking at how a site usually links to others before to specifically go requesting a link from them.

#5 Structure
Organize your web site and everyone will thank you: Both the search engines and your web visitors prefer a web site that is well structured. The search engines due to their very nature (being computer programs) must break down all web sites into elements based on the structure of the pages. People, so frequently rushing to find the specific information they are looking for, rarely read through web pages but rather scan headings and bullied lists to find the detailed sections of interest. In both cases a well structured site will be far better received then one that is a mish-mosh of information haphazardly thrown together.

This is simple to do - but all too often missed. Make headings, use the correct coding tags for them, organize sections of content into groups, and use bold and bullied lists to present key points.
Keep in mind when writing paragraphs of text that most humans will not read them unless they are specifically titled with a headline that matches what they are looking for.

#6 Accessibility
A web site that speaks to all is better then a site that only speaks to some: Tips #6 and #7 are closely related: The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provides a list of guidelines for how to create web sites that are accessible to as many people (and systems) as possible. Think about your web site - can someone with a visual disability (perhaps even something as simple as colour-blindness) still get information about your product or service? If not, how do you feel knowing that you have just excluded a vast segment of the population from accessing your web site?

There are many simple ways that you can ensure your web site is accessible to people with special needs. A group of simple tests for the sites content and design that ensure your product or service is presented to the widest possible audience. The specifics are beyond the scope of this document - but be sure that you check with your designer to ensure that your site design and code is following accessibility guidelines.

#7 Quality CodeWell coded web sites perform better: Many small business owners don't have too much control over the code used to create their web site - but it is still important to know how important it may be. Standard compliant code that has been checked for errors is easier for the search engines to assimilate. It is more widely visible across varied platforms (computer types) and in different browsers.

Ensure your web designer is writing standard compliant code that is validated for errors. You can also check your own web site using free on-line tools from the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium - the standards body that administers Internet technologies)

#8 URLs
Prudent choice of URLs will impact your web site's performance: Professional web designers should already know this - but if you are using a content management system to build your web site, or portions of it, it is important to understand the significance of the URL used to access pages on your web site.

Search engines look at the address of every page on your web site and try to extract key-words from the content of the url. For example, you may have a page about "Widgets" on your web site called "somewhere.com" creating the page with a filename of wigits.html will give a better keyword rank then page6.html this is also true of sub-directories on the site somewhere.com/widgets/... being better then somewhere.com/files/...
This is a fairly subtle point but makes a significant difference for most search engines. It can also make it much easier for people that are typing in a URL to access a specific page of your web site. Notice the URL for this web page - it's called http://www.pawprint.net/internet-marketing/small-business-web-site.php for a reason!

#9 Style
Looks do matter - but perhaps not the way you think...: In the grand scheme of things the "looks" of a web site in the classic sense are not really that important - honestly! once people have looked at a web site for a few minutes they will quickly discard their first impression (based on looks) and move immediately to asking - is this site giving me the information I need - and can I find it quickly (going back to tips #1 - content and #5 - structure)

So what are we on about with style? simple - ensure the style of your site makes it easy to read. Avoid things like black backgrounds with white text (inverse text is harder to read) ALL CAPS (humans read by identifying word shapes - writing in all caps forces people to read every letter and quickly becomes annoying - plus on the net it is used as an typographic method of indicating you are screaming) You should also check your web site using a colour blind test to ensure that visitors with the various types of colour-blindness can still actually read your navigation.

#10 Images
Selling a product - better make sure it looks good: If you are selling something that has a visual representation - then professional looking photography is key. Even a multi-million dollar resort will not look good if the photographs are amateurish. If you care about what you have to sell, then it's worth investing in some professional photographs to show people what you have. Remember, on-line people can't get a hold of your product - so you need to give them some really good photographs so that they can feel confident that it meets their needs.

Thanks for visiting; don't forget to comment!

On-Page Optimization Factors

On-Page factors are related directly to the content and structure of the website. This normally consists of pages written in the HyperText Markup Language but also applies to other document formats that are indexed by search engines, for example Microsoft Word or PDF formats. On-page optimization involves modifying keyword frequency in the URL, Title, Headings, Hypertext Links and Body text. It may also involve reducing redundant HTML codes (aka cruft) produced by Web page authoring tools and restructuring the site to produce better linked and focussed page content.

Many search engines now discount the weight given to on-page factors because they give too much scope for abuse by SEO experts. In theory the visible parts of a web-page are less prone to manipulation as they have to make sense to readers. However doorway pages with redirections and clever use of style sheets enable different content to be served to search engines and end users.

Each page should target between two and four keywords directly related to the contents. If you feel the need for more keywords then consider splitting your content into separate pages. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) should contain keywords, separated by hyphens without being too long, around 128 characters is probably a sensible upper limit for the entire URL. The Title tag should contain the keywords with no stop words but arranged to make sense.

&ltTITLE&gt On Page Optimization &lt/TITLE&gt

This should be the first tag in the Head section of the page. There is evidence that search engines give more weight to factors higher up the page. The content should be properly structured with the use of Heading (H1, H2, H3 etc) tags containing relevant keywords. Search-engines will only index a limited amount of text in HTML tags and using too many keywords will dilute the focus. Don't spam any of these tags, this won't be effective and could result in a penalty.

Many website designers spend a lot of time creating Keyword and Description meta tags. Although these may be read by search engines, for example the description tag is used by Yahoo! to provide a short description of the site in the Search Engine Results Pages, they are not used for ranking pages.

&lt META NAME="description" content="Optimizing On-Page Factors for Search Engine" &gt

Personally I don't bother with them as they bulk out pages for little real benefit. Both Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search will use the text they find on the page as a description so make sure your first header and sentence describe the contents. However some search engine watchers say that the new Microsoft search engine, currently in beta tests, puts some weight on meta-tags. There is also evidence to suggest that search engines give more prominence earlier in the page and some engines will only index a limited amount of body text so making the first paragraph punchy is a good idea.

Image alternate-text tags (ALT tags) are only indexed where the image is part of a hyperlink. However ALT tags are useful for non-graphical browsing and should be employed correctly.

&lt IMG ALT="Description of Image" SRC="image.jpg" &gt

Comments are not indexed. Use bold/strong/italic attributes where appropriate.

Write natural copy aimed at the end user and not search engines. Don't worry too much about keyword density for the contents but take the opportunity to include keywords combined in different phrases and orders and create anchor text to related internal pages. Keep the number of links to fewer than 50, and probably less and don't repeat identical outbound-links. Theme related pages should be at the same level in the site hierarchy and be linked through the site's menu structure and site map. At least one page at the same level should link back to the home page so that search engines that have traversed a deep-link can index the rest of the website.

SEO Strategies that helps you to build your site SEO friendly

Areas of All Internet Marketers, SEO Strategy is the most important to your online marketing efforts. Millions of web pages exist on the web. You create a website for your business and then work hard in promotion of the website but get lost among those pages. There should be a definite SEO strategy for promoting a website comes in mind. SEO Strategy should be well documented with a focussed approach and requires planning patience and long term approach.

Our SEO strategy for a website begins from the selection of a domain name of your company, designing, development, keyword research, optimization, search engine compaigns, directory submissions, reciprocal and one way link building, and social media optimization methods.

Basic elements of SEO Strategy are:-

• Book a relevant domain name for your website
• Define a suitable navigation structure
• Keyword analysis to search the best keywords that matches with the theme of your website
• Optimization of your website with the use of right keywords
• Develop a content stragegy – Its rightly said that content is the king. You can develop content by writing articles
• Submission of web site in search engines
• Directory submissions
• Linking Strategy - Reciprocal and one way link building campaigns
• Develop social media optmisation stragegy - News releases, Forum postings and Article writing and submission
• Use of natual and white hat SEO strategies to promote your website

SEO Strategies also supports to plan all types of work to for the websites; it is to recommend the optimizer to make their sites according to this Strategies as following given:

Understanding SEO 
-> Search Engine Basics 
-> Creating an SEO Plan 

SEO Strategies 
-> Building Your Site for SEO
-> Keywords and Your Web Site 
-> Pay-per-Click and SEO 
-> Maximizing Pay-per-Click Strategies 
-> Increasing Keyword Success 
-> Understanding and Using Behavioral Targeting.. 
-> Managing Keyword and PPC Campaigns 
-> Keyword Tools and Services 
-> Tagging Your Web Site 
-> The Content Piece of the Puzzle 
-> Understanding the Role of Links and Linking.. 

Optimizing Search Strategies 
-> Adding Your Site to Directories 
-> Pay-for-Inclusion Services 
-> Robots, Spiders, and Crawlers 
-> The Truth About SEO Spam
-> Adding Social-Media Optimization 
-> Automated Optimization 

by Ram Babu (SEO Professional)
rambabu234sonu@aol.co.uk
Thanking You!

55 Quick SEO Tips, Every SEO should know

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.
Source; Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an SEO trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over 10 years experience in search engine optimization, web development and marketing.

By Richard V. Burckhardt! Source: SearchEngineJournal.com

15 Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS

Google Adsense publishers often commit common mistakes that could ban their Adsense account. Google Adsense is a popular web advertising program which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.

On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.

1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links. Update: Google has allowed you to run contextual advertising like Yahoo ads, Chitika etc provided the ads do not resemble Adsense ads.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches – Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing – Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported – Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

Update:
16. Maximum 2 referral button per product per page – With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only 2 referral buttons for adsense referral, adwords referral, Google pack and Firefox with google toolbar referral. Update: This feature is closing Aug 2008.

17. Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads. – Several services like Chitika eminimalls allow you to place alternate urls, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating an simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate url feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate urls.

18. Do not confuse with adjacent images – It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors.

Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful at Google.com/Adsense go in the help area!
Source: QuickOnlineTips.com

New SEO best practices 2011

Search Engine Optimization is an art which continues to evolve and improve and if you want to be serious about keeping your site top notch you must ensure that you keep up to date with the most recent SEO practices. The following is a list of modern practices compiled by SEOmoz.

-> Title Tag Format
Recommended Practice:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

When you are trying to rank highly for a particular keyword / phrase, it is best to include it in the beginning of the title

-> The Usefulness of H1 Tags
H1s are important for users but not necessarily for search engines anymore.

They are very important for establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined semantics, but they seem to be less important for search engine optimization.

-> The Usefulness of Nofollow
We recommend using rel= for thwarting would be spammers of user generated content. You can also use it as an incentive for creating active users.

-> The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag
The canonical tag is still young and is only useful as a hint to the search engines to prevent duplicate content. It is not the silver bullet that webmasters are looking for.

-> The Use of Alt text with Images
We recommend including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. We also suggest adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings. This is an essential thing which you should be doing anyway.

-> The Use of the Meta Keywords tag
If it is not a problem to let your competitors know your keywords and you are trying to rank highly in, the Meta Keywords tag can be useful. Note: This is different from what we have recommend in the past.

-> The Use of Parameter Driven URLs (I.E. www.example.com/index.php?option=com_conent§iondid=0)
We don’t recommend using them. Mask parameters by creating Search Engine Friendly URLS

-> The Usefulness of Footer Links
Use footer links sparingly. We recommend no more than 25 relevant internal navigational links.
We have seen many examples of Google penalties tied directly to abusive footer links (that "magically" lifted upon removal of the keyword anchor text stuffed footers). Manipulative links in footers are easily detected algorithmically, and appear to have automated penalties applied to them by Google.

-> The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites
Do not use Javascript or Flash for any navigation important to search engines. Use pure CSS menus!

-> The Use of 301 Redirects
Use 301 redirects as the best way to redirect webpages but warn that they do have disadvantages.

-> Blocking pages from Search Engines
The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is generally a better option than robots.txt. Robots.txt files are useful but should be used sparingly and only if a meta robots tag is not an option.

-> Google Search Wiki's Affect on Rankings
We don’t recommend spending any time or resources on search wiki.

-> The Affect of Negative Links from “Bad Link Neighborhoods”
Link neighborhoods are a real thing but the affect of links from bad neighborhoods on good neighborhoods is minimal if the links are not reciprocal.

-> The Importance of Traffic on Rankings
The metric of visitors to a given site is not used to help determine rankings.

All above are new SEO techniques which are very useful for search marketing work .. it is to give you some great ideas to your mind with latest SEO strategies ..

Ram Babu SEO Professional
Thanks

10 Tips to Avoid Google get your website Banned

Let's first define what is "ban"? There are two things usually called ban out there:

* When your site has dropped from Google index and does not show anymore for its target keywords.
* When your IP has been blocked and you cannot use Google search for some time.

Both issues are rather unwanted. The first one is applied to your site when it doesn't suit Google webmaster guidelines. The second one is applied to your IP address when you perform agressive amount of queries to Google at a time. Fortunately, you can easily avoid both types of Google ban following the below rules. Let's first deal with website ban:

1. Make your site available. Always use reliable hosting service with good uptime (no less than 99.5%) and fast response time. If Googlebot comes to your site and cannot access it, your site may drop.

2. Provide unique and relevant content. Fill your website with fresh unique content that is relevant to your website theme and is interesting to your visitors. Write your content for humans, not for search engine bots. If you post a duplicate content on your site, Google may exclude it from its index.

3. Don't use spam methods to promote your website. Never use doorways, hidden text, auto-generated keyword-filled pages, cloaking or any other spam techniques. Remember, we all use Google for search. Don't dump a trash at Google's index.

4. Carefully build links. Not every inbound link is good. Take care of websites linking to you. Don't participate in link farms. Try to get links from relevant or close theme websites. Do not ever spam forums, guest books or comments with your links! Outbound links are important too. Pay a close attention on what sites do you link from your website. Do not link to sites that use spam techniques, because this may result in your site ban.

5. Make your site crawlable. Provide a way for Googlebot to index the whole your site. Create sitemap, if you use JavaScript or Flash links - duplicate them with plain text ones. Make sure your server correctly handles errors, like 403, 404, redirects and so on. Check for broken links and HTML errors with some HTML validator tool.

6. Avoid using domains with bad history. Do not use previously black listed domains for your site.

How to avoid IP ban?

7. Do not use unauthorized software to check web ranking. Google restricts usage of software that send automated search queries to Google. Actually, to be 100% sure your IP won't be banned - do not check your web rankings at all.

8. Use Google API. If you really need to check the rank of your site in Google, try to use software and tools that can work via Google Web API. Google API is the only legitimate way to perform automated queries to Google.

9. Limit the amount of searches. If the accuracy of Google API search results is not enough for your purposes and using the natural search is crucial for you, try to limit the amount searches with some reasonable number. If you check web rankings, don't check first 1000 results, reduce the search to first 30-50 results. This will give you an adequate picture of your current standings and won't stress Google much as well.

10. Use Google for its main purpose. Use Google for search only and you never get your IP banned.

Source Google.

10 SEO elements every websites should have

As I’m on holiday this week, tripping around Europe, I’ve little time to be writing blog articles. But fear not! Jerry Low has kindly stepped in to supply his top 10 SEO elements that all websites should have. Enjoy!

Seriously, you don’t need an expert to optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), after all, is not rocket science. It is something you can learn and do it yourself – all it takes is some serious readings and hard work.

However, there is something we need to know before we start any real SEO work – the direction of our entire SEO campaign – What we are trying to achieve? What are our targeted keywords? Who are our competitors? That led us to the most important preparation work before any SEO campaign get started - keyword research.

Keyword research is crucial as it acts like a compass for your website or blog. A proper keyword research reveals the supply and demand trends in your industries thus giving general idea on which keyword you should focus on.

In brief, here is how you can do a keyword research:

* Get a list of related keywords using Google Keyword Tool
* Search each keyword to check how many websites turned out on the search engine result page (SERP) – this fits in as the number of supplies.
* Websites topping the SERP are your major competitors, study them well.
* To learn what are the demands, check number of searches for each keyword using keyword tools.
* Tool suggestion for keyword research: Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery – these two are my favourites.

Well, now you have a rough idea on your competition. The smart approach is to be a big fish in a small/average pond – for starters, you should focus your work on keywords with moderate demands and low competition.

Besides supply and demand, keyword research also offers valuable information for your web designs. Take example that you are selling shoes online, I am sure you’ll have questions like: What are the popular brands searched online? How shoes should be categorized – based on brand, occasion, or sizes?

All these can be answered as you run down the keyword research work. You’ll see searches come in based on brands, like ‘DC shoes’, ‘jordan shoes’, ‘nike shoes’; in the same time, searchers are also looking for shoes for different activities or occasions, like ‘ballet shoes’, ‘safety shoes’, ‘bowling shoes’, ‘prom shoes’, and so on.

By the end of your research work, you should be able to generate a list of target keywords. And now it’s the time to focus your SEO work on them. To get started, here are the 10 key elements that will improve your blog or website’s SEO quality immediately. 10 key elements that improve your website SEO quality immediately:

1. Index-able and Keyword-rich URL
The power of a keyword rich URL is often overlooked by bloggers and webmasters. In case you have yet to registered your domain name, try include your primary keywords in your domain; while for those who are already running a website, a keyword rich URL (example: abc.com/keyword) still helps a lot. One might complains that domain name with keywords faces branding problems and hard to be remembered; but that’s the dilemma every webmaster/blogger has to face.

Also, a good SEO practice is to avoid complicated dynamic URL that is hard to be indexed. Try limit your URL to 2 – 3 variables, excessive usage of ?, $, &, +, % characters as well as cgi-bin redirect will only do you harm.

2. A reliable web hosting
Website with poor uptime will never rank high on search engines. Let’s imagine that you are the search engine, how would ranking a down website on top of your search result page looks like? Awfully bad, don’t you think? Hence, hosting your website on a reliable web hosts - dedicated or shared, is very crucial.

To pick up the right web host, you can always hang around reputable hosting forums like WebHostingTalk.com or you can read my personal hosting reviews here.

3. Keyword-rich title and heading tags
A keyword-rich page title is as crucial as a keyword-rich URL for a few reasons.

One, a keyword-rich title tells the search engine bots what the page is about thus grouping your webpage into the right category; second, most search engines will bold your keywords in title whenever that particular keyword is searched. Common sense, the bolding effect will definitely draw extra attention from the searchers and thus, brings more clicks into your website/blog.

Heading tags (example

) is hard to be missed in old times. Not now anymore. As more and more websites are built solely on blogging software like Typepad and WordPress, heading tags are often put in the wrong use.

Take Wordpress (WP) templates for example, WP themes designers often use heading tags for sidebar titles without relevant keywords (example: Achieve, Categories) which bring no SEO value at all. To make sure your blog is well SEO-ed, one top thing to do is to remove or modify these headings into keyword-rich headings.

4. Alt tag on images
In term of SEO, putting descriptive alt attributes with your image places additional relevant text to your source code. Search engines like this and the more relevant text you have the better chances you get to rank higher.

As an additional benefit, a descriptive image alt tag helps users to understand your image when it fails to load.

5. Proper structured internal linking
Search engines pay a lot of attention to links – both internal and external. As internal links are those that can be controlled by you, make sure your website internal linking is proper structured and filled with relevant descriptive keywords. A plain anchor text like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ are not clever; ‘click here for more Jordan shoes’ and ‘read more about ballet shoes’ are.

For website owners, make sure there are plenty enough of internal links pointing to your primary pages; for bloggers, mentioned and linked to your previous blogpost whenever it’s appropriate, this give extra link juice to your previous blogpost (hence better rankings) plus it enables your readers to catch up what they missed.

6. Inbound links
Link development is an inevitable process if you want your website to rank high. The keypoint, however, is not to obtain links blindly from spammy websites and directories. Always emphasize quality on top of quantity when you’re building links.

There are wide options for your link building campaign: from submitting your sites to reputable directories to asking for a link exchange; from buying text link ads to writing guest blog post in your industries – some of these methods can be risky (of search engine’s filter and bans) and some are not. What you need to do is to pick a series of method you feel comfortable with and pour some sweat in the link building campaign.

7. XML sitemap
XML sitemaps is used for search engine bots indexing. It runs as a list of all pages and posts along with related information like priority of each page and the date of creation. These elements help search engine bots to crawl your websites/blogs as well as learning the importance level of each page.

While XML sitemap is not a must for a website to rank high, it is however good practice for web and blog owners to have it on site.

8. WWW/non-WWW Canonical Issue
Originally, all websites built can be viewed in two versions: the WWW and the non-WWW version. In normal cases, the search engines should be able to recognize the issue and rank the websites accordingly but occasionally it fails. This led to serious problem where websites are penalized (especially on Google) due to content duplication. Even if there’s no penalty imposed, the web page indexed twice will have hard time to rank high as the back links are (PR/anchor text) shared over two web pages.

The solution of this problem is simple. One, you can login to Google Webmaster Tools and tell them which version (WWW or non-WWW) of the website is preferred. Alternatively, a simple 301 redirect code in your .htaccess file is sufficient to solve the problem.

Example code:

To have your website in WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com $
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To have your website in non-WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^ example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http:// example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

9. Robots.txt
Robots.txt simply tells search engine bots what to crawl and what not to. It might not help that much in website rankings but it prevents irrelevant objects to be related to your website – which is good for your website to look focus (in search engine eyes) and professional.

10. Content is king
Users do not search for fun, they search for information and solution to a problem. If your website or blog does not offer what the users really want, they will move away. As what had been widely covered by Nathan’s post about increasing and maitaining blog traffics, you should know attracting traffics via SEO is just the beginning; the key point of having a successful website is always having an informative website that solves human’s needs.

About the author
Jerry Low is the guy behind Web Hosting Secret Revealed. He offers unbiased hosting reviews to help make your decision easier. In case you are looking for a web host, why not start reading his recommendations – Hostgator now?
Source by Jerry Low

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Most important factors are:
1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Overall Popularity of Site – “Trust” & “Authority”
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Age of Site
5. Internal Link Structure
6. Keyword Use in Page Content
7. Outbound Links to Quality/Relevant Sites
8. Age of Page
9. Keyword Use in Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3)
10. Age of Link

Master OFFpage SEO Presentation 2009 1233862507910620 3

SEO tips from experts

One good thing about SMO techniques are 'backlinks,' which is a major ranking factor for top searchengines . The backlinks gotten from a site with high PR is more valued by searchengines in deciding the rank of the website. Creating an account with following socialbookmarking sites can get us free placement
in high PR sites.
a. Digg
b. Technorati
c. Del.icio.us
d. NowPublic
e. StumbleUpon
f. BlinkList
g. Spurl
h. Furl
i. Slashdot
j. Simpy
To raise the rank in major search engines for top keywords Social Media Searches are highly effective. The top keywords should be included as anchor text in social media engines. Inclusion of keywords in the anchor text will improve the website ranking in search engines. Podcasting sites and Vlogs are important techniques involved in Social Media optimisation.

Latest SEO techniques include Onpage optimisation techniques and Offpage
optimisation techniques. A synopsis of Onpage optimisation techniques is listed below:-
1. Title
2.Meta keyword ( Include it, Just keep 10 keywords, Something is better than nothing:-))
3.Meta description (Sprinkle your key words in description, meta description should be
precise and clear, this will be stated beneath your title in SERP,
Users will decide whether to enter to site or not by reading this description, so craft this
carefully)
4.Place your keywords in Header tags(H1,H2, H3,H4)
5.Put keywords in the initial sentence
6)Place your keywords in the file name
7)Include Keywords in the file name of images
8)Add keywords to Alt tags of images
9)Add keywords to tilte attributes
10)Keywords in the anchor text to internal pages
11)Link keywords in the artciles to another article of the same website using Anchor text.
12)Keywords in the internal link can go the home page.
13)Offload your javascript
14)Include the keywords in the javascript file in HTML comment tags
15)Code to text ratio(minimise the code and maximise the content)
16)Reduce the loading time of your webpage
17)Keep the keyword density between 3 and 7 percentage
18)Check your website for W3C compliancy
19)Don't copy content from other website, u might be caught and... banned

thanks for visiting!