4 Very Important SEO Tips I make sure to do for every single one of my pages.

1. <title>VERY IMPORTANT</title> … I can’t stress how important optimizing your title is. First off, it is what people will see in the search results for that page. So make sure you have what ever keywords you are optimizing for in your title! Don’t over due it though or you could be penalized. Make it stand out!

2. meta description: Again another important aspect. You want to have a very targetted description for what ever keywords you are building that page around. Don’t just fill the description by spamming the keywords either. Write something smart and witty that will get peoples attention. Make it stand out.

3. The actual content on the page should include the keywords your are optimizing for with a density of about 3%. What this means is this that say your building a page optimized for the keyword ‘fat loss’. Well, for every 100 words on the page, you will want to use the word ‘fat loss’. Don’t over due this either or you will be penalized.

4. Domain relevance. Name your pages with your keywords included, or put them in a folder with a relevant keyword.

Social networking sites are a sign of the times.  Common, everyday conversation includes the phrases, “Check out my new MySpace page,” and “Are you on Facebook?”  People of all ages use these pages to connect with old friends, meet someone new, and eliminate the distance between them and their loved ones.  Celebrities even use pages to become closer to their fans.  Where else can you reach hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a mouse?  Take the guesswork out of promoting your site by using these sites to your advantage.  While most social networks limit contact to registered users only, some offer message boards where the public can sound off about the issues that concern them most.

There are some things you can do to increase social network traffic to the site of your choice.  Follow along as you get a lesson in Social Network Advertising 101:

• Bold, emblazoned messages with controversial titles are sure to be a crowd pleaser. Be careful when choosing the subject because just about anything can be considered politically incorrect these days. Use all caps to spell out the most important idea that you are trying promote. Make sure to post it in a place with high visibility. Once one person reads your post, another will surely follow. Friends will forward your message to other friends who will forward your message to everyone in their network. Voila! You become an instant online celebrity!

• If you have a business of your own, offer a promotion of some sort and link it back to your page. Hold a monthly contest and take pictures of the cool thing that you are giving away. You will not believe the incredible power that giveaways have for increasing traffic to a site. The lure of getting something free or cheap appeals to everyone. Use that knowledge to your advantage and get people on your site. It may cost you a few dollars of your own money but it will definitely be worth it

• Link your site to keywords in your post. People cannot refrain from clicking on underlined phrases. Out of sheer curiosity, they will want to know why you highlighted certain words or sentences. With the click of a mouse, they will be sent directly to the source to ask you why themselves.

• Reply and reply often. Post replies to other people’s messages. Keep them short and light-hearted. Include a link to your own site. Encourage other people to learn more about you by visiting your page.

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Any small business owner understands that improving their search rankings is a crucial aspect of maximizing their web site’s success. Without improving your search engine optimization on web sites like Yahoo or Google, very few people will be directed to your web site via web searches, and thus you will be unlikely to attain new customers or patrons frequently. The trend for small businesses has been to outsource their search engine optimization content to freelance writers or firms that improve companies’ search rankings. However, this can often be very costly, especially for small businesses that are just getting off the ground. Many small online retailers don’t believe that they could construct their own search engine optimization content, as they fear that they don’t have the grammatical skills or knowledge of search rankings required to construct worthwhile content.

Really, there are only a few crucial points that non-professional writers need to grasp when constructing their search engine optimization content. While of course new writers should take some time to brush up on their punctuation and grammar, writing content to improve search rankings can be very easily learned. Here are some important points to remember when writing your search engine optimization content.

Choose Valuable Key Words - Many small business owners will simply utilize the name of their product or a relevant celebrity when creating their own search engine optimization content. But if one really wants to improve their search rankings, they need to use online tools from web sites like Google to research what key words are searched the most frequently. Also, don’t be afraid of using relevant synonyms. For example, if you are a small online bakery, and after researching search rankings don’t see “online bakery” as being searched frequently, then move on to figuring out what synonymous search engine optimization content will improve your traffic. “Online bakery” may not improve your search rankings, but “Christmas cookies” might.

Maintain A High Density Percentage - Phrases like “density percentage” and “key word density” often seem a bit daunting to new search engine optimization content producers. But anyone who has taken a junior high school math class can master this simple concept to improve their search rankings. Key word density is simply the amount of relevant key words divided by the total number of words in the article. For example, if you constructed an article that had the key word “car stereo manufacturers”, you would count the number of times “car stereo manufacturers” was used and then divide it by the article’s total word count. You should aim for somewhere between two and twelve percent if you want to improve your search rankings. However, anything over twenty percent is often rendered unreadable. While SEO is crucial to your small business, nothing turns away potential customers like bad search engine optimization content.

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Sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are great sites for networking, chatting, and catching up with old friends. But, these sites can also be valuable marketing tools as well. If you know a bit about search engine optimization and great content, you can use all of these sites to your advantage.

How?

If you plan to go the social networks route, get ready to spend a lot of time online. Building up your clientele is possible via these sites, but it is not a simple task. You will have to spend hours networking, joining groups, and writing educational content. Is it worth it in the end?

Many modern marketers swear by these networking sites. Those that put time and effort into building up their online presence often see quick results. Still, you have to know how to use a site properly in order to gain anything from it. Here are some fast tips:

• Network: as in real life, you will have to find key players online that you can network with. Join discussion groups, speak with those in your industry, and connect with important decision makers. The trick here is to find only those people that can increase your business - in short, don’t add every person you know to your page.
• Tip-Toe: don’t start selling your business right away online. If you come off as trying to pitch your product, people will turn away from you quickly. Instead, spend some time on a site, begin to meet people, voice honest opinions, get your name out there, and then start to talk about your own business.
• Blog: set up a blog that contains recent, informative, articles. Now, some people tend to include lots of SEO (search engine optimization) keywords into their blog articles, but this must be done with skill. You don’t want people to know that you are trying to increase site traffic.

The Art of the Article

If you have never been gifted with words (or a keyboard), don’t try and write your own articles - this can lead to immediate disaster. Articles that are full of misspelled words, typos, and errors will not put you in a professional light.

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SEO, or search engine optimization, serves a purpose by not only boosting web traffic to your website, but also as a service that most companies need. Without the use of professional studies, but by day-to-day research of your own, most people find a website for the first time by searching through a search engine. For the company or individual who created the website, developing a search engine friendly website is a necessity, rather than an option. A website is not effective if no one can locate it. A low ranking website equals low visitation and zero revenue. As more people have learned about this topic, the need for SEO Services has increased. SEO services and SEO web design work hand-in-hand in designing powerful, visible websites.

It’s likely that every major U.S. city has a SEO services company not far from them. Not every SEO Services company is alike though. So for those working in web design or web development, it is important to perform research to find out the range of SEO web design services offered at a particular SEO services company.

What to Look For When Selecting SEO Services

SEO web design is currently a hot selling draw for businesses and individuals. SEO services should include a team of search engine optimization experts who have a proven track record of success. As a webmaster or individual who seeks to employ an SEO services company for SEO web design, it’s important to consult with the company to strategize a plan of action. You should already have an idea of what you would like your website to illustrate. At your first consultation discuss budget, ways to improve your ranking and have the SEO services company design a personalized analysis and package of their marketing services. Some services do not require a long contract or upfront setup fees (you pay after seeing results). Inquire about the need for paid advertising services like pay-per-click and work together to establish realistic goals for improving rank.

A great SEO services company will house a team of SEO web design experts who provide the latest technology to boost traffic, while reducing some Internet marketing costs.  SEO services companies should also offer an excellent account management staff, client testimonials with high success rates and proven SEO web design methods that are not currently banned on any search engines.

Basic Web Design vs. SEO Web Design

Internet marketing is an area of web development that should be heavily catered to and comprehensive. Services such as web statistics, search engine optimization and branding help to intensify visibility, revenue and placement of websites.

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Search engines have tremendous power over the success or failure of any on-line business.  Webmasters can use these SEO strategies to their advantage and optimize any websites for increased SEO resulting in greater brand recognition.

SEO Strategy #1-Optimize the website’s linking structure

The web pages’ linking text structure is one of the most important aspects of SEO, Visitors to your website depend on being able to navigate freely.  If a website is confusing or difficult to navigate, it will lose site visitors.

Search engines put a lot of importance to a site’s anchor linking structure. Good anchor text makes linking easier and allows search engine “spiders” to navigate freely throughout the site without getting stuck. This will help prevent engine spiders from stopping in the middle of indexing your website.

Here are some SEO linking tip examples:

A static text link looks like this. <A href=”myPage.html”>My Link Text</A>

Add your keyword phrase inside this anchor text linking it to a relevant web page like this: <A href=”/seo/seo-articles.html”>browse through our large selection of free seo articles</A> In this example notice the link text as well as the directory (named articles), and the page name it is linking to, all have the same keyword phrase. This will significantly increase SEO.

Google highlights the key search terms present in a website’s “URL.”  Google also takes key terms from a URL’s body text content whenever there are no key search terms present in the site’s URL.

This is why naming your own links with key words/terms on each individual web page is so important.  Adding your keyword/phrase 3-5 times into the link text and having 15-25 inbound links present increase SEO.

SEO increases whenever the text link has been embedded inside a readable paragraph.  Please note that this does not take the place of other key terms in the paragraph text.  There still has to be a menu for navigation that will contain some of the same links.

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Alexa is a web-ranking service that measures the traffic a website generates by looking at both the number of times a website is viewed per day, as well as the overall “reach.” Alexa rating is important because many advertisers and webmasters look at it as a way to determine the value of a link on the website.  As a result, managing your Alexa rank is important if you are looking to use link advertisements as a way to generate money.  With this in mind, the following are a few strategies for increasing a website’s Alexa rank.

Increase the Proportion of Your Visitors that Use Alexa

Alexa determines its rankings based on the number of users and site views from those who transmit data via the Alexa toolbar, also known as Sparky. The Alexa toolbar is commonly installed on a browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.  As a result, visitors only count towards your Alexa ranking if they have the toolbar downloaded and installed.  Increasing your appeal to these users will rapidly result in your website moving up the rankings.

One group that often uses the Alexa toolbar is webmasters and other people interested in web design.  Developing content of interest to webmasters and encouraging webmaster visits will greatly aid in increasing a site’s Alexa ranking.  Another group that appears to have a great number of Alexa users is users in East Asia, based on the presence of several Asian websites in the Alexa top 500.  Advertising on Asian social networking sites may help increase the number of visitors with the Alexa toolbar enabled.

Increase traffic

The best way to increase traffic, long-term, is to develop quality content that leads to a strong base of users who visit frequently.  Aside from this, a few inexpensive Payperclick advertisements, such as those offered by Google, Yahoo or Exactseek, will increase traffic, and thus, your Alexa ranking. You may target keywords to audiences who may have a higher likelihood of possessing the Alexa toolbar, such as webmasters and other Alexa-heavy groups.  An alternative suggestion to this is buying banners or links from webmaster forums and websites.

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If you are starting a website, coming up at the top of a search engine results is a must, and doing so in a cost effective, organic method is most ideal. To this end, you may be considering SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  But did you know that getting hits on Google requires more than just optimizing your site for the right keywords?  There are a lot of ways to ensure that you are found with ease and relevance when someone is searching the web for products or services similar to your own.  Let us take a closer look at some of the key methods of achieving higher rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

1. Raise your profile

The easy way to do this is to launch a blog.  Launching a blog not only allows you to plug in keyword, helping you get hits, but it gives you a chance to cross-promote and generate authority on the web.  Not only will this help raise traffic on the web, but periodic articles will enhance your SEO and raise the chances that when someone is scanning the web, they will come up with you as a result.

In addition to, or instead of, starting a blog, you can try to cross-promote. A great way to do this is to profile prominent figures and bloggers in your field.  Not only will including other notable people and companies increase your SEO, it offers many opportunities to increase your hits via tapping into the audience that supports the figure with whom you are profiling.

In addition, including information on other significant companies, websites, and bloggers, will not only increase your SEO, but will encourage them to provide links and profiles of your website, giving you additional back links and traffic.  No one can resist free exposure, especially if it is high level, and it serves two purposes, not only will it increase your SEO and hits, but it gives the blogger a reason to mention you, which will only add to your hits per month.

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If you are an avid Foo reader, you may have already digested our previous article on inclusion in the Yahoo search directory. However, 5 tips were not enough and we have further expounded upon the tips to optimize inclusion in Yahoo’s directory. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!

Tip#5-Draw attention to your site’s unique content in your directory submission. Add value to the Yahoo directory by calling attention to unique aspects of your online business. Make sure you have unique content on your site and highlight it in the 25-word description or the extra comments field in the Yahoo directory submission form.

Tip #6-Get a virtual domain name for your company; (http://www.yourcompany.com) Yahoo wants legitimate organizations and companies listed in their directory. They tend to look negatively toward small start-up companies without domain names. These often dissolve before the coming year, leaving Yahoo with dead links to a URL in their directory. A virtual domain helps show Yahoo your business is legitimate and you are a serious business owner.

Tip #7-Try to get listed in one of Yahoo’s regional directories first. Commercial web sites must pay an annual fee to be listed in the Yahoo directory. If you are in one of the regional areas, you can often get your web site listed much faster in the regional directory than in Yahoo’s main directory.

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One marketing method to help drive traffic to your website is inclusion in an on-line search directory.

Yahoo serves as both a search engine and a major search directory, but be aware there are some distinct differences between the two. This article describes strategies that website owners can use to optimize their inclusion in Yahoo’s directory.

Yahoo has two submission options to their directory: “Standard,” which is free, and “Yahoo Directory Submit,” which involves a submission fee for use by commercial web sites.

If you are paying to submit, use the Yahoo Directory Submit Form. Yahoo editors will choose a category for you. All you need to do is fill out the form that is presented.

Yahoo Search-Part Spider, Part Human!

Part of Yahoo’s search results come from their search engine spiders and indexing software. The other part comes from Yahoo’s human editors called “surfers”. These web surfers view Yahoo directory submissions individually before admission into Yahoo’s directory.

Admissions to the Yahoo directory are entirely at the discretion of surfers viewing individual websites. The following tips will help you optimize your business’ placement in Yahoo’s directory

Tip #1-Use accurate and concise descriptions of website content to optimize Yahoo search directory placement. Business owners have some discretionary power regarding the descriptions that appear in the Yahoo directory.

Owners will be directed to select the most appropriate directory categories for their site and to write accurate descriptions of site content. Factors that affect directory placement are selecting the right category and writing a good concise description.

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