Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search

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Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search
Engines
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This week we will discuss the key to improving your sites listing in the top Internet search engines.
When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’ into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:
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Ask your competitors
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This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites like yours. Open the top site, and once the home

page has downloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then
‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build the Web page, including all the keywords that have been specially inserted.

For example, let’s say one of your websites sold nutritional supplements. You could carry out a search for ‘vitamins’ in Google. The top site there is called DrugEmporium.com, and the keywords they list are "The Katz group, Snyders, Drug Emporium, Drug, Drug Store, pharmacy, stores."

Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site. Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lots of other keywords that aren’t obviously listed—like ‘vitamins’ for example. But you can repeat the process on other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty long list.

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Ask the pay-per-clicks
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Pay-per-click sites actually let you see how popular a keyword is. They’re not being kind; they’re trying to make money. The more webmasters bid on those keywords, the higher the bids are going to rise—and the more money the pay-per-clicks are going to make. FindWhat, for example, has
a Keyword Center, and Overture a Keyword Suggestion Tool. Both are very handy, but they also require you to open an account. That can cost a few bucks, but when you have a lot of sites covering a lot of different areas, it’s usually worth the expense.

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Use a specialized tool
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Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped up to supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best of these is WordTracker.com. They’re not bargain basement, but you get what you pay for. They’ll give you all the keywords you need and in my experience, they’re a sound investment.

Googlefight.com is another useful tool to see whether one keyword is more popular than another. The site compares two keywords and tells you which is more popular. It’s free and has a limited use, but it’s fun to play with.

As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it’s also worth looking at key phrases. It’s quite possible that a user looking to buy flowers online might search for ‘red roses’ or ‘cheap bouquets’ as well as just ‘flowers.’ Key phrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you’ve got a
pretty good chance of getting a high placement with the right combination.

Don’t worry too much about the competition though. Some people will tell you that you’re better off trying to find keywords that no one else has thought of—as if there were any!—and others will tell you to throw in keywords that are only slightly relevant to your businesses.

In my experience, that’s a waste of time. If your competitors are using certain keywords, it’s because they know they work. And if you pick up any users using irrelevant keywords, you’re not going to sell them anything. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure out the most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put on your site.

Whichever of these methods you use—and I tend to use more than one—you should end up with a pretty comprehensive list of keywords that you can stick into your website. The next question then, is how do you use them? When a search engine assigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in a
number of specific areas.

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Title Tag
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The title tag is written in the head section of the Web
page and after the title tags. It’s usually the line listed in the search results as well. For example, the New York Times’ title tag is “The New York Times on the Web: Daily international, national and local news coverage from the newspaper, breaking news updates, technology news,sports, reviews, crosswords, classified ad listings.”

That looks long, but the title tag is usually between 50 and 80 characters including spaces. Different search engines have different limits so you want to make sure that your most important words are near the beginning of the title. When you look at the New York Times’ site, you only see “The
New York Times on the Web”.

The rest of the title is made up of keywords and phrases but in fact, you don’t want to put in too many keywords here. just place one keyword as the second or third word in the title. Too many, and your site could be seen as spamming.

You can also list more keywords in the meta and meta sections of the head area, but because these areas have been so abused in the past, a number of search engines today will skip right past the title tag and go straight to the Web copy.

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Web Copy for SEO
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The search engines will scan the text on a Web page to see if your site is relevant to the search term. That means that in effect, your Web copy is going to have to do two things: to persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engine it’s relevant.

When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, but throw in between four and eight keywords. You’ll have to try to balance a smooth text flow with getting in all the keywords you need to be listed. You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create
opportunities for link exchanges.

So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position of your site in a search engine. More important than where you put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s not
really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to have done the job for you.

Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’t mean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google. One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve been online, so success on the search engines won’t come overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the
sooner you can start to rise.

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Choosing a Domain Name

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Choosing a Domain Name
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In this article you will learn how to chose an effective and
memorable domain name and learn how you can actually
increase traffic by using an old, expired domain name.

Times wasting so lets get started…
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In the physical world, you can distinguish a business
because of its structure, window displays, or signs. You can
tell that a bank is a bank, or a clothing store is indeed a
clothing store.

In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story
altogether. Your domain name is

the only clue to your online business. You do not have visual clues: no location, no
look, and no store design. Instead, users have to type in a
word or a set of words to reach your site. Your prospective
visitor has no way of knowing what your site is all about
until he/she finds it and reads its contents. Who can ever
tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that Excite is a search
engine?

Your domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A
good domain name is the best asset you can ever have. It can
make your business stand out in the crowd, or just float
aimlessly in space.

The need to provide immediate clues to an online business
led to the prevalence of generic domain names. Generic names
instantly provide the user with an idea of what a business
is all about, what to expect and look for in a site. For
instance, Etoys.com is a toy store.

The temptation of the generic name has been so powerful;
that some companies even paid ridiculously high prices to
get the name they want. The domains Loans.com and Wines.com
were both bought for $3 million each. Telephone.com was
acquired for $1.75 million, while Bingo.com sold for $1.1
million.

However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz”
that you’d like surrounding your website. Branding has
always been about proper names: McDonald's did not name
their store Hamburger. Hertz is not called Car Rental. FedEx
is not Mail Carrier. Kodak is not Photographs. Microsoft is
not Computer Software.

For better branding results, your domain name should be
memorable and easy to remember. Remember the following tips
when creating a domain name.

* The domain name should be short
* The domain name should be simple
* It should be suggestive of your business category
* It should be unique
* It should be easy to interpret and pronounce
* It should be personalized
* It should not be difficult to spell
* It should not be difficult to remember

Domain names can be registered through many different
companies (known as "registrars") - a listing of these
companies is available at ICANN: http://www.icann.org. You
can register for 1 to 10 years - prices can vary anywhere
from $10 to $20 per year. Most web hosting companies, as
explained later, will handle the registration process for
you, but make sure that you are properly listed as the owner
of the domain when it is registered. If you have registered
a domain name for a specific period, make sure you renew it
in time. You can be surprised at the number of cases, where
site owners have let a domain name slip by if they have not
renewed in time.

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Using expired domains to skyrocket your traffic
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At some point while you’re building your website, you’re
going to have to buy a domain name. This is the address that
users type into their browsers to reach your site. That
takes about five seconds, and depending on the name you want
and whether anyone else owns it, it won’t cost you more than
a few bucks.

But domain names are also a golden opportunity to make some
easy money.

I’m not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up
good names and sell them on for a profit—if you haven’t got
into that now, forget it. The bottom’s fallen out of the
market and the best domains are long gone.

I’m talking about expiring domains.

Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to
promote their site and build up traffic. Many of them then
lose interest and move on, leaving their site active. That
means that although they still own the domain, they’re not
actively promoting it. But they don’t need to. All the
automatic marketing systems they’ve put in place are still
bringing in traffic. The site runs itself.

Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going
to expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back
onto the market, you’ve got a pre-built stream of customers.
You can either rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to
your domain. You could set up an affiliate program get paid
for users someone else paid for.

It’s that easy.

There are tons of options, and lots of easy ways to make
lots of money with very little effort. Opportunities like
these are everywhere.

Websites such as www.expiredtraffic.com or
www.deleteddomains.com actually do all the legwork and let
you reap all the rewards. Expired Traffic even has an
affiliate program and www.snapnames.com allows you to
back-order a specific domain name.

Do be careful when using other sites though. There are some
swindlers out there that will sell you subscriptions,
provide you with outdated lists, take your money and keep
the good domains for themselves. It happens, and there’s
little point in taking a risk when www.deleteddomains.com
does such a great job.

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Blogs

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Blogs
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In this article we will discuss a relatively new intertnet
tool – the Blog.

Blog (also known as Weblog) is traditionally a webpage where
pre-surfer or a blogger “logs” all pages he/she finds
interesting. In other words, it is a Web page that contains
brief, chronologically arranged items of information.
Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality
of the author.

Weblogs provide a series of annotated links to items such as
news stories, and often include personal rants. They are
maintained by one person, most commonly someone who is
involved in Web design or some other

tech-related field.

A blog is often a mixture of what is happening on a
particular website and what is happening on the Web, a kind
of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many
unique types of blogs as there are people. Blogs can be used
to introduce products to potential customers.

People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but
the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated
published systems, most notably Blogger at blogger.com.
Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify
and accelerate the publishing process.

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Blog as a marketing tool
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Blogs offer huge marketing potential. They are highly
strategic tools that can strengthen relationships, share
knowledge, increase collaboration, and improve branding.
Besides, blogs can represent the real voice of the website.

A weblog can take the form of a diary, a news service (or
summaries of and links to current news items on a topic), a
collection of links to other Web sites, a series of book
reviews or products, reports of activity on a project, the
journal of an expedition, and much more. Businesses can use
this tool to effectively advertise their products or
services.

One of the most interesting ways to use a weblog is by
allowing it to function as a discussion forum for customers
of your products or services. In this case, the webmaster
can give posting rights to other people – visitors and
customers, and their posts may or may not be reviewed before
they are published to the Web page. Customers, in such a way
can post favorable comments about the websites offerings.
Some weblogs are set up in such a way that only the owner or
the owner and certain other people have posting rights, but
anyone else can add comments to the posts.

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Weblogs when used with newsletters present immense marketing
opportunities:
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* Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog,
extending life and creating a massive conversation.
* You can offer a bidirectional forum to customers to get
true, personal opinions on your products and services.
* Company experts can start a blog and become industry
experts, helping your company edge out competition and,
through this interactive forum,draw customers into another
exchange of information and thoughts.
* The beauty of this interplay is you can layer your blog
with editorial controls.

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How to create a Weblog?
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The majority of weblogs are now created using software or
services designed specifically for this purpose. Some of the
software is free - and some of the organizations that
provide weblog software will also provide free server space
to house a weblog so that it is publicly accessible on the
Internet. There are also commercial versions of some of the
free software; these commercial versions often provide more
features. Some weblog software is available only as
commercial software. Alternatively, bloggers can create and
maintain their weblog using free software or a free weblog
service, but use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to load the
resulting weblog to their own Website.

There are many blogging softwares available easily on the
Internet. One of the most popular weblogger is “Blogger”
which can be downloaded for free at http://www.blogger.com.
Most webloggers simplify the process of Website creation.
However, they do require basic knowledge of FTP, Website
structures and a few technical terms. Besides, creating an
advanced weblog requires knowledge of HTML.

So get out there and start your own Blog…it’s free,easy and
can work seamlessly with the rest of your website or
newsletter. Until next time…

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