Blog archives for June, 2008

SEO Tips for the New Internet Marketer

For a newbie Affiliate Marketer, there are a couple of hints that I recommend to people who ask me about how to get number one on the search engines. One of the best pieces of advice that I can give is the domain name of your website.

When choosing a domain name, you should aim to have a domain name that consists of the keywords. For example, if your website is about cheap airline flights, then try and get a domain name with the words ‘cheap airline flights’ in it. If you’re able to purchase a keyword rich domain name then, chances are, you’ll have a better chance of ranking higher with search engines because one of the first things that a search engine does is look at its submitted domains. If your domain matches the keywords typed in by the visitor, the search engine will in most cases give a good result.

Once you have chosen your keyword rich domain name, include the same domain name keywords in the title of the page, the meta keywords and the meta description. The more you can reinforce your keyword rich domain the better.

By having a keyword rich domain name, it also helps when generating links. You can use the domain name as URL links and use the keywords in the domain as Anchor Text links. By doing this, you’ll be providing a more optimum result for search engines for the respective keywords.

Now, I’m not advising that you will be number one on the search engines just by having a keyword rich domain name. It depends on other factors such as the competition of the keywords, the age of your website, the amount of links and content on your site etc. All that I am advising is if you are new to Affiliate Marketing, you need to create a keyword rich domain name that represents what your site is about. By having a keyword rich domain name it will help you until your able to start another website or webpage with a more obscure domain name.

by Chris Gilmour

About the Author

Chris uses SEO Software to assist with his work from home business concept promoted by The Rich Pom.

How do you Improve our Google Ranking?

For the moment, at least, it seems that Google has won the ’search engine wars’. The search behemoth now has over 78% of the search engine market cornered. This means that 78% of all searches performed on the internet are done via Google.

At the heart of Google’s strategy to delivering search results is an algorithm called ‘Page Rank’. This is named after Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and is an attempt at measuring the popularity of a web page based, primarily, on the number and quality of links coming into a site. It is this algorithm that, ultimately, determines your site’s rankings within Google’s search results.

How Does Google Work?

Over the years many website owners have tried to claim (some even doing so in court) that Google’s algorithm was somehow ‘unfairly’ keeping them from the top of the search engine results. The truth is that Google, as a private company, is not beholden to the millions of website owners who all want their sites to rank well in the search engines. Rather, Google is beholden to its stock-holders and needs to be seen as delivering value to them.

Google needs to earn profits and the company does this by selling advertising. The company has determined that the best way to deliver value for its advertisers is to have the best and most relevant websites be the ones that are easiest to find on the web. Thus Google’s revenues from advertising are tied to Google’s website ranking systems.

What’s Google’s Real relevance in Search?

The question of Google’s real relevance in terms of how much search and other traffic comes to a webstie has. Been a vexed one. I asked this question of a number of my colleagues. We all have large websites in different domains and we pooled our information for the first 6 months of 2008 to arrive at the following figures:

Total search traffic 54.8% of which:
53.7% Google Search Traffic
40.2% Other main search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Windows Live etc)
6.1% Other search engines (the tiny ones)

The remaining 45.2% of our traffic all came from link sources: articles, blogs, recommendations, forum posts and links from people referring our websites.

So, only just over half the web traffic comes from the search engines and almost half comes from other links! However, the good news is that the way to garner more search engine traffic and more general ‘link referral’ traffic is one and the same!

How to Rank Well

As was mentioned above, Google’s ranking system works with both the number and quality of in-bound links. One of the best ways of getting these links is to write and submit articles. Many article directories have excellent page rank and lots of site visitors. This means that submitting articles and including your URLs in them are a great way of gaining more links to your site. But they’re also a wonderful, direct, way of getting traffic to your site (remember the traffic figures above).

There are, however, a few key SEO considerations to take into account when writing your articles.

Article Links and SEO

One big advantage of writing articles is that you can define your own ‘anchor text’. This is the text in the link that defines what the person looking at the link sees. It also gives the search engine spider following the link an indication of what the page it’s navigating to is all about. This is why you should never, ever, put something like ‘click here’ in your links!

You link text should be related to the subject of the page you’re linking to, as this makes it more relevant to the search engines. Now, if at all possible the text of your links should also match the key words you are targeting on your web pages as these give the keywords more relevance and will improve your rankings for them.

Also, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that term. Indeed, if you are just starting and a keyword is very competitive (’computer’, for example) then you may never, realistically, be able to rank for it. But if you target a keyword like ‘extreme computer construction’ you are far more likely to be ranked for that term. Be clever and don’t try and bite off more than you can chew.

Indeed, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that keyword. In this case it may well take you many weeks before you will notice any effects from your article writing efforts.

But for less competitive keywords you may notice a jump of several tens of positions in your rankings with as few as 3 articles. In this case, you get out what you are willing to put in.

One thing to note is that Google takes not of all the link text that comes through to your page. If you have more than 60% of the links with exactly the same text this marks-up a red flag an your rankings may well drop. As a result you should vary the link text and you also need to alter the text surrounding the links.

Given enough time and commitment you can use article marketing to elevate any single web page on your website into multiple top spots in Google’s SERP rankings. However, this does mean that you need to write and publish articles on a daily basis. Few people have that level of commitment to their websites

About the Author

Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles Directory where you can freely submit high quality articles. If you really want high quality back-links to your sight then you need to check out his free eCourse on How to Maximize your Web Traffic.

Driving Traffic Using SEO

About the Author

I decided to put together some of the best internet money making programs on one website to make it easier for people to look at what is being offered and to compare programs. If you want to take a look and see what may be useful for your business or money making idea go to http://www.topinternetcourses.com

Thanks D Carter

by Derek Carter

copyright Derek Carter