As the industry is changing as rapidly as Google tweaks their algorithm, it is hard to decide what the most important factors are. The On-site and off-site are the two major factors in SEO which is necessary for every type of website. Normally, most of the webmasters starts with the on-site SEO, because your aim is to get your website recognize by Google. If they don’t, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword?

The search engine spiders that crawl your E-commerce website will be looking at several different attributes on every page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google search engine.

Another factor worth mentioning is a Keyword. What is a Keyword?

A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your E-commerce website. I am using a Bodhost.co.uk website as an example. People could search for “Web Hosting”, but they might also search for “Cheap Web Hosting”, “VPS Web Hosting” and “UK Web Hosting Service”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases.

However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note that almost all On-site SEO has to do with is placing high-quality keywords throughout your E-commerce website content where search engine robots, spiders, or software might be able to decide what your website is about.

6 On-Site SEO Factors That Can Influence Your SERP Ranking:

• The Title of the Page
• The keywords used in the text on your website
• The keywords are used in H1 Tags
• Keywords used in your domain name
• Keywords used in the URL of a webpage
• Meta Keywords

3 Major Off-Site SEO Factors That Can Improve Your Search Engine Ranking:

Backlinks to Your E-commerce Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a UK Web Hosting, and you provide that service, they may link to your website with “UK Web Hosting” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Bodhost’s official website or something along those lines.

The Age of Your E-commerce Website

The reason I listed this as an off-site related issue, because it really doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks.

I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. As compare to Google, Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this.

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Selection of right keywords for your site is a key or an art which can either make or break your website. On the internet, potential customers hunt the web for the sites they wanted or liked, and what if your website doesn’t have those popular keywords they are seeking for?

Keywords are the main factors in SEO that give visibility to your website and help to reach audiences across the web. In simple words, a keyword or keyword phrase is the word or group of words that internet users use to search some specific information in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

To choose the right keywords for your website, you need to put yourself in the customers place and think of the possible keywords you will use to search your site in search engines. You should remember when writing your site that you need to use words that are not only related to your content, but are popular search words as well. This is called Keyword Optimization, or choosing the most searched keywords related to your site content.

Give some time listing all of the keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your website content. Get ideas from everyone you can think of and list them all. Analyze your rival sites and check the Meta tags they have used. Research on those tags and you are ready to build your own keyword phrases.

There are many free keyword tools designed to assist you in keyword optimization. Some of them are listed below.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: This tool is basically designed for the publishers to generate the right keywords for their product or service. It provides you some 100 other keywords related to your search. Also, Google gives you a rough estimate of how many searches for that particular word occurred last month, an average occurrence and the amount of advertiser competition for a listed search word. The tool is very simple to use, but extremely effective and can help you choose the right keywords that your customers will be searching and ultimately draw more traffic to your website.

Wordtracker: The Wordtracker helps identify keywords that will help your ranking on search engines. Wordtracker also gives you other keyword combinations that you may have overlooked.

The Keyword Tumbler: This free tool takes your existing keyword phrases and mixes it up to form new phrases and variations that you can include in your meta tags.

A great website is not so great if no one finds it. Remember to research your keywords carefully from the consumer’s viewpoint and then sit back and watch the traffic roll in!

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

Many people think that networking is a dirty technique, but as a social networking site LinkedIn is totally different from other sites. It is a professional, business and career oriented social networking site which allows you to connect and meet professional experts in different industries across the globe. LinkedIn is all about connecting, but before we connect, we look for what we have in common.

Currently, there are millions of professionals on LinkedIn and these numbers are growing as we speak. The LinkedIn community enables you to connect with like minded people who in returns allow you to grow your business contacts and network.

As a registered member, you get to create your own personal profile with information about you, your company, your products and services. You can also mention your professional accomplishments. Once you’ve done this, you can begin to maintain a list of contacts which are known as connections and actively invite others to join your network and that whether they are existing LinkedIn users or not.

Increasing and Managing Your Contacts

In the business, your contacts are everything. You don’t need to know everyone, but make sure you know the people that know everyone!

That being said, the LinkedIn community is a great place to begin connecting with real professionals in order to begin growing your list of business contacts which could be done pretty easily. Just like any social networking site, you should approach like minded people to initiate the first contact (make sure that you’re not spamming people with your ads) and regularly keep in touch with them so in the long run, they’ll know, like and trust you.

Also, you can import almost any digital address book and web email contacts (Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc…) from the LinkedIn user account to increase your contact list.

LinkedIn Answers Tool

LinkedIn Answers is a great and most important tool which lets anyone to ask questions on any topic and allows anyone to answer those questions. Using this answers tool you are able to interact with many different people you don’t know. It’s a great way to grow your connections.

Asking questions is also a good way to interact with other experts. Your questions will be read and answered by so many people and you can make use of their expertise to do joint ventures or share business ideas.

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups allow you to join any group that you want. You’ll then be able to meet great people and keep in touch with prospective business partners and clients.

Make sure that you’re a contributing member of each group you join. Post great content regularly, keep in touch with the other group members, etc…This will literally help you brand your name, your products, services and even business opportunities because people will begin to relate to you.

LinkedIn Jobs

LinkedIn is also a great place to post jobs or recruit employees to your company. Thousands of companies are hiring and recruiting on LinkedIn so if you’re a business owner looking for prospective employees, there you go!

If you’re looking for employment, there are so many great companies on LinkedIn offering great career opportunities.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is one of the toughest things and takes a lot of efforts and learning to become an expert. As because, LinkedIn is well ranked in all top search engines, your LinkedIn page will easily show up in the top 10 in search engine results for certain keywords. That means, you will get the free organic traffic to your page without any SEO efforts.

LinkedIn is a great social networking site. If it is used properly, it could really your business visibility and brand name. It also adds more credibility to your image and brand. LinkedIn Answers” easily allow you to become a known expert in your field of expertise. Keep in mind that LinkedIn should not be used a mass marketing outlet like Facebook or MySpace or even Twitter (you should only target what you’re looking forward to accomplish). Use this powerful social networking site and maximize your profits.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

There are many effective ways to promote your website and SEM is one of them. To improve the website ranking in the search engines, Search engine marketing or SEM is the most effective way. It also describes purchasing paid listings among other search engine related activities. Before, starting with an SEM campaign, knowing the concept and benefits of optimization is always very important and then employs techniques that will bring prospects to your site. Just as when getting browsers to enter your store in the real world, the goal is the same here, convert those visitors into customers.

Why Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

In today’s Internet and World Wide Web, I’ve noticed that more consumers are turning to search engines to find the products and services and they seek.  If you are out to establish a strong base of customers and strengthen your bottom line, making friends with the search engines is the way to go. SEM is a proven technique that has worked wonderfully for business owners looking to increase their website visibility online through the SERPs. Using this effective method will increase your online visibility so that the consumers who are after your products and services will find you very easily. As the method include a great combination of various effective techniques.

In the past few years, it has been seen that nearly 85% of website traffic is produced from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN. Due to these results, almost every online business owner is looking forward with optimization and marketing their websites for search engine traffic and to get most out of it. As we revealed earlier, SEM includes a wide variety of techniques and the most important of all is the optimization.

The most popular and similarly used methods of SEM are mention below:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The concept simply known as SEO, search engine optimization describes the act of creating web pages that appeal to the search engines.  In general, it includes building link popularity and highly important, implementing relative keywords potential visitors are most likely to type into a search engine. These relative targeted keywords are inserted into the body text of the web page as well as in Title tags and Meta tags. SEO can be so effective that other SEM techniques might not even be necessary. However, not every method is required for a successful SEM campaign; but without SEO you just can’t do it.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

There is also an alternative for the people who don’t have time to spend on doing SEO. Achieving high rankings in search engines is not so easy job, so those who don’t have time rely on Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns for high profile placements. PPC is an SEM technique that focuses on targeted audiences and particularly, generating sales. This is the type of advertising where you pay a predetermined fee when an internet user either clicks or visits your ads.

The key to SEO and SEM in general, is to know how web surfers go about searching for products and services they are interested in. Very rare surfers use industry language to search products or services, so in order to attract them you need to think like your audience. This is the reason, why SEO specialists give more weight on the keyword research. Always remember that whether it’s genuine SEO, PPC or any other techniques, keywords are the key of a successful Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

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Posted under PPC, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization

Most of the time webmasters focus on optimizing their website for Google & Yahoo search engine and ignores the third most important search engine. MSN is the third important search engine amongst the major search engines. In order to be successful on the web, you should focus on MSN as well.

Generally, for all search engines SEO guidelines are same although, during the creation of the search engine the majority of the principles of optimization that were used won’t surprise professional participants in the on-line market, it is necessary to note several invisible at first glance differences in the optimization requirements for MSNBot, because of which the search engine can possibly be considered unique in its kind.

You can increase the website visibility using various techniques but Microsoft has gone on the record to stress the importance of a well designed, optimized website. The software giant even went on to say that you may want to consider hiring a reputable SEO firm to boost your chances of being properly indexed by the MSN search engine. This makes perfect sense as the MSNBot, Microsoft’s aptly named search engine spider, is attracted to web pages that are easy to read and navigate.

Hiring SEO services is not always possible for everyone, so we have provided some important tips for optimizing and creating your websites impression on MSN search engine.

• Along with Google and Yahoo focus properly on your incoming links anchor text, so that MSN indexes more web pages of your site than other search engines to get higher ranking pages quickly in MSN search engine.

• As per the Microsoft guidelines for site owners, it is essential for MSN that you use well-formed HTML code and ensure that your site doesn’t contain any broken links.

• Create a robots.txt file to control how MSNBot indexes your site; using a robots.txt file is important for other crawlers, too.

• Put descriptive content near the top of each web page and make sure each web page has a clear topic and purpose.

• Don’t forget to add your website description into a Meta Description Tag. If you change your content, update your website description immediately.

• Contents are king for MSN; limit all pages and pictures to a maximum size of 150KB. Adding a sitemap enables MSNBot to find all of your pages easily.

• Don’t use the irrelevant words on your loading web pages to increase a page’s keyword density and avoid using hidden text or links, MSN might consider it as a spam and may remove you from their index.

• MSN is a very content and keyword sensitive search engine and if you focus more on to your keywords and content, in return you may get good search engine rankings by MSN Search.

On-page optimization is very much important for Google and Yahoo search engines, but increasing your website visibility in MSN search engine can help you attract good amount of targeted traffic and your ranking will improve in other search engines as well.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

Getting indexed in search engines is very much necessary to drive web traffic to your website. To get noticed by people you need to get index in search engines. If you submit your site manually to Google or any search engine it will normally take more than 4 weeks to get indexed. In this article I will show you the easy and fast way to get your website indexed in search engines.

First of all, indexing your website means to get your website visible in search engines. In order to get indexed, you have to follow few simple steps and will need the below listed things.

• Already built website and well-optimized for search engine traffic.
• Top 5 keywords, key phrases related to your website content.
• A clear head.

Content Bait

First of all, take top 5 popular keywords or key phrases and make 5 article titles using them. For example, if my keywords are software, website & article, then my article titles could be:

How to use software
How to create a website
How to write an article

Of course you should be more original than this using your own keywords but you get the idea. Now that you have your article titles, you now need to write a brief article for each title. It doesn’t need to be the best article in the world, just make sure that it’s original. Around three paragraphs for each article are good. Try to use as many of your keywords or phrases in the article content as possible but don’t over do it to the extent that the article doesn’t make sense.

Creating Blogs

Now, that you have your five articles ready, select the one that you think is the best and most relevant to your website and put it to one side, we will come back to that one later. We now need to create a couple of blog accounts to house our articles. First of all visit blogger.com and create an account using one of your most popular keywords… For example if your keyword is “shoes”, make sure your blog URL is shoes.blogspot.com or sports-shoes.blogspot.com.

Take the time to modify your new blog a little, create an introduction post, change the template, and put bit information in the profile, that sort of thing. Once your blog is looking ok, its time to post two of your four articles on your blog. Remember I told you to use as many keywords as possible in your blog. Before submitting your post, convert a couple of these keywords to links to your website. Again, don’t over do it and try to link to separate, relevant pages on your website, not just the homepage. Once your done and your blogspot blog is published on the web its time to move on to the next one. Visit WordPress site, get another blog containing your keyword and repeat the steps for your other two articles.

The fifth article

So,  now you have two Blogs all setup and ready to send you traffic but what about that fifth article I told you to put to one side earlier. Let’s get that one out there too. We are now going to submit your fifth article to some of the many article directories out there. Now you of course you could do this manually but I’ve found the best solution is to use one of the many article submitters that are now available. Simply search Google for “free article submitter” and I’m sure you will find one.

Make sure to fill in all the forms accurately and thoughtfully. The objective is to get your article published so don’t scrimp on the description etc.

Ping the robots

The next step is to tell all the search engine robots about your blog. There are literally hundreds of these so called ping services out there but for this article I’m only going to use only one because that’s really all you need to begin with. Visit pingomatic.com and enter the information for both of your blogs. Remember to enter your information carefully and accurately.

Quit tool

Quit is a tool developed by Eli at Bluehatseo site. You can find a link to the tool in the header on the blog. He won’t tell anybody exactly what it does but I can assure you it works. Again make sure you fill in all the information about your two blogs correctly before you click submits. Only click submit once, the tool can take about 20 seconds to work so be patient.

Directories, Directories & Directories

If you have completed the above steps completely and properly it shouldn’t be more than 24 hours before your website is indexed by Google, Yahoo and some of the other search engines. So what do you do while you are waiting? Directories my friend. A lot of so called SEO experts say that submitting your website to directories is no longer worth the hassle but don’t listen to them. Any inbound link you can get to your website, no matter what the quality is worth its weight in gold.

If you take your time and submit your website to the correct category of directories I can assure you it will increase the amount of bots visits and indeed user visits to your website. You can find a huge list of directories on my website at the large list of directories page. Take your own time to choose the good ones to suit your website.

Link Exchanging

Finally as an extra step to getting your website indexed you should try asking other webmasters to exchange links with you. There are literally hundreds of link building companies and services out there or you could visit forums such as the Link Exchange Forum and post your link exchange request in the correct topic.

Make sure you follow the above steps properly, and watch your website getting indexed very quickly.

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Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization

According to Wikipedia, Link popularity is a measurement of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a particular website on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In simple words, link popularity is the factor which is measure by the quality backlinks pointing towards your website.

In the search engines, Link popularity acts as an important part to get the visibility of a website among the top of the search results. Therefore, all the search engines expect at least one or more links pointing to a website, or else your web site will drop from the search engines index.

Some major search engines like Google uses a unique link analysis system to remark the web pages. The viewpoint of link popularity is that major and important websites will draw huge links and the sites whose content in not so good may not be able to attract the links. Link popularity gives more weight on the quality backlinks and not the number of links.

Search engines think that if your website is good and has any value, then other websites should link to you. If no one links to your website, it means that something is wrong with your site. If the number of links pointing to your website is more then your chances of popularity, authority and relevance is high.

Except Yahoo, all the other search engines factor link popularity into their algorithms though, it is calculated differently. As Google gives weight on the quality of the links, Yahoo measures it on the total number of backlinks pointing to your website. Google and the other search engines are interested in providing the most relevant and topical information for search queries at the top of the SERP’s because this increases the chances of the searcher finding what they are looking for and thus amplifies the perception that the particular search engine provides relevant and applicable websites for search queries.

Link building is a very specialized task which needs a good knowledge of the link building, where and how to find and build high quality links.

A booming link building strategy includes: directory submissions, both general and niche, internal blogging links, linking to business partners or local businesses, social bookmarking sites where you can get good backlinks and writing good articles and press releases that can get your website some high quality links. A link building strategy encompasses all the available mediums online, from social networking sites to the traditional directory. Link building is not only about requesting links but it is about developing a strong brand and websites to which the key online communities want to link to.

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Posted under Search Engine Optimization

What makes the readers to get back to your website? Something that reminds them that you are here and you got something new for them. Something, which tells them visit your website and check it out the new thing. You will get the traffic only when your viewers will know that you got something really interesting and thrilling stuff. To do this RSS feeds is the best and easier way to ping your readers about your latest news.

In simple words, RSS is known as Really Simple Syndication, and are usually used to get your latest news and content to your readers. RSS is a great tool to improve the websites organic search engine ranking in very less period. RSS is as simple as XML file format, not much difference. RSS is the quickest way to distribute your web site information to many users on different places.

Latest content and similar content are two major terms that search engines use to determine the effectiveness of search engine results. RSS works in the same manner, as the fresh content that you add to your site/ webpage, or add a blog posting/ pod cast; can be easily syndicated to the top search engines Google and Yahoo and data aggregators. Therefore your content (with your web-link) is read by thousands of hungry web-viewers searching for your offerings.

Why do you need RSS?

Comparing the Optimization Techniques and RSS, it has been noticed that optimization techniques may take more time to get the search engines to even notice your website but, RSS gives the results very quickly. The only reason, because RSS permits you to get your content right to your targeted readers as soon as it is updated.

One more feature of RSS is the capability to achieve subscribers for a website, this act as a fantastic way of generating re-occurring visits from users.  The web has traditionally populated content as HTML-based web pages and search engines / directories had been listing html pages in their search results. But thanks to rapidly increasing number of content sources more users are using RSS newsreaders / aggregators to keep themselves updated and to gain from better exposure and visibility.

As mention already, RSS feeds are the updates of your websites fresh content in very simple format similar to XML. By submitting these RSS feeds to different search engines as well as web directories will definitely help in increase of your websites search engine ranking.

To enjoy the benefits of RSS feeds, you need to keep updating your website by adding new fresh content frequently. Content is the key to success in search engines. To get more searches in search engines like Google, you need add more unique content so that the search engine will have more information to be indexed. The more information the search engine will have, the more chances of increase in rank. The more relevant content available for indexing, the more search engines consider your website to be an authority on a particular topic.

Updating the fresh content frequently also provides you the capability to put a cross link within your website to boost page ranking of those pages too.

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Posted under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization

Many small and big companies that are serving to their local customers find it hard to target them via SEO even by targeting the top and finest keywords. As this is not an unexpected matter as many of them, although capable in running their off-line businesses, typically trip up over two major points.

Targeting local markets through SEO, many of the companies ignore the need to think rationally because they are advised by SEO experts to target the big three search engine users and sometimes get confused and tackle this feat on a global level resulting in global traffic. The direct fall out of this step is exposing your business offers, products or services to the world at large only to dilute all other local online SEO efforts. If your product is not global you are in trouble. So here is the major stumbling point number one.

• Not using localized target keywords, however good they are, will leave your new websites way down the SERP’s locally. The localized keywords should be targeted through which it will bring you a steady stream of natural traffic.
• The second major point where you might probably fall, especially if you are new to web and optimization is wrongfully assuming internet marketing techniques as something radically different and for removed from the earthly- worldly affairs that we all do by trial and errors over and again. The crux of the matter here is SEO for local markets is only a small part of larger marketing exercises, with certain twists, to get exposure with local locations. Here is the second stumbling point in SEO for local markets.

Local market SEO is not an internet marketing technique but a sophisticated local technique of optimizing websites on a local basis. Obviously, the one who knows every beat of the market is not an SEO expert but can supply his knowledge to the SEO experts.

What is Local Market SEO?

Let me show you some tips to Target Local Market via SEO.

• Localizing your targeted keywords. This includes prefixing or suffixing local terms, names, and names of areas, cities or zip codes with target keywords. Example: “remodeling contractors Orange County”, not “remodeling contractors”.
• Submit to local search engines (find one, if you don’t know already), directories and web based yellow pages.
• Display your mailing address with street address, zip code and complete. Once your site is indexed, these words gain prominence as a part of content.
• Submit to local listing sections of Yahoo and DMOZ which is in addition to generalized listing.
• Don’t leave out general SEO techniques because you want to SEO for local markets which the power of link building which can be done globally as there might not be enough local sites to beat you competition.
• Get on the local maps of Google, Yahoo, as this generally puts you on front of the local search engines.
• Exchange your links and banners with local businesses as the local traffic exchange will bring you new and repeat in business. Avoid changing banners or links with competitors but exchange them with businesses that will complement you. Verify there traffic so it’s an almost even exchange.

Dominating local SEO can be done fairly easy you just have to either hire a professional with a proven track record or take time to learn local SEO. The main concern is to be patent as it takes at least 3-5 months to start seeing results.

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Posted under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization

Many people think that Google sitemaps are worthless, but let me tell you the real benefits of the Google Sitemap. 

Google Sitemaps is one of the biggest inventions made by the Google. Recently, Yahoo has also taken interest in it and even the “Yahoo SHLURP” bot is requesting the sitemaps.xml file. The sitemaps is a map of your well-structured website which contains each individual url and its priority for the website. The priority is very nice to be set up carefully and therefore put larger value to the main page www.example.com and less value on the pages that are not going to change after their creation, because the higher this value is, the highest priority in their list this url will have and will be the first indexed on a deep crawl…

On the other hand the Update rate value is really worthless thing because most search engine do not obey it and that‘s a well known fact. Search engines will visit your url only if they stumble across a link to that page and in most cases they will index only the page that is linked. During the deep crawl (which is done once a month) then the whole page with all the urls will be indexed. Don‘t think that when Google opens your website it will get the whole thing at once .. nope .. the situation is a bit different and Google will index few urls, then make a pause and come back again until the whole website is indexed.

One more benefit of the sitemap is that you can add it on the Google webmasters Center to verify it and to get the highest benefits out of it. Suppose if you’re using the Wordpress it will automatically ping or send a request Google to get the sitemaps file.

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Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Optimization