4 Techniques For One-Way Link Building

by Cleva Smith

On the Internet, search engines are deities you have to appease for them to give you blessings in the form of more site traffic. Now, the Google god and the almighty Yahoo look at many aspects of your site, like the amount of traffic you get or existing penalties. Inbound links, however, have proven to be a particularly effective way to improve your rankings, so you should maximize every opportunity to get them.

Link Directories

Using link directories is a very direct way of getting one-way links for your site. Take note, though, that not all link directories will necessarily be good for your site. It's a very thin line between link directory and link farm, and search engines have been very much against the latter.

If possible, look for those link directories that have admin-approved submissions and require reviews or descriptions for each link. Measures like those mean that the directory has some sort of quality control, and would thus be good for one-way link building.

Blog Commenting

With Web 2.0 in full swing, blogs are plentiful on the Internet. But it's not just the owner and the authors who can benefit from blogs. With a little research, you could get links even from blogs that you have absolutely no affiliation with.

Most blogs have a comments section where readers can post their thoughts or reactions to what's been written. This is a great place to insert links to your site, especially if it's a very well known blog. Even as part of a comment, that URL still counts as a one-way link to your site, and will still improve your rankings.

Social Bookmarking

Once again, Web 2.0 comes to your rescue with social bookmarking, one of the newer trends in SEO. Essentially, it's just people sharing interesting sites and links with other people through bookmarked URLs. Imagine the volume of extra traffic you could get if your site was among those bookmarked. The key to social bookmarking is to make your site look particularly interesting and unique, even to just a niche market. It's usually those sites that get the most circulation on social bookmarking networks. But you should submit your URLs to the networks in any case. Because they'll store the URLs in a database or a repository somewhere, that will still count as a one-way link coming from a very popular site.

Article Marketing

The Internet today is all about information. You have to offer one of three things - products, services or information - in order to get noticed on the WWW. But since you're already offering the first two items, you could use the third one to promote your site.

Article marketing services basically place links to your site inside chunks of text content that's related to a certain niche. The niche content ensures that you'll be reaching out to your target market, to some extent. And once your marketing articles get posted on sites and big directories, each of those links will help boost your rankings as well.

While article marketing is touted as the most effective among these four, there's no rule that says you should limit yourself to just one. Try to use as many of them as possible so that you get to cover all the bases and eventualities.

Why Is Keyword Research Critical To SEO?

by Kurt Steinbrueck
Like a foundation for a building, there is one aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is more important than any other. Without this foundation, you may be wasting all your time and resources. Proper keyword research should be the basis of your optimization.

Why is Keyword Research Critical?
Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough. For example, "search engine optimization" gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while "search engine marketing" gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target "search engine marketing", you may get great rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for "search engine optimization". There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a lot of time and significant amount of link building regardless of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.

Drawing on the analogy in our search marketing parable (found on the Church Marketing Online blog), optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it's a key component of search engine optimization.

What Do I Research?
There are two main aspects to keyword research. The first is popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, and MSN don't share the actual number of searches for specific keywords; however, there are a few tools online which are generally thought to be pretty accurate and Google does offer a free tool that gives the "approximate" number of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (other than Google's) use the search data from a number of other smaller search engines along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are being made for specific keywords. It's not perfect, but it gives you an idea of which keywords are most popular. Since Google's figures come from…well…Google, they are probably the most accurate, but even their figures are only estimates and I've found that many keywords return a "Not enough data" result. You may wish to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.

The second aspect to keyword research is competition research. Competition research starts with analyzing your web pages to determine how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords. This is sometimes referred to as page strength. I should note that there are really two aspects to page strength, the general strength of a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I will use "web page" for both. The next step is to examine the keywords themselves to see how competitive they are. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for this keyword, though other methods can be helpful as well. This can be tricky for two reasons.

1. No one other than that search engine designers knows how each search engine determines how competitive a site or page is and the search engine folks aren't talking.
2. Each search engine has a different way of determining how competitive a site or page is. So, even if you could figure out one, it wouldn't necessarily be so with the other search engines.

Despite these difficulties the search engines do give us some general information about what makes web pages competitive (what determines page strength). I'll look more into how you determine keyword competition in my next article.

Without good keyword research, your search engine optimization efforts will be like firing a gun into the dark. You may hit something, you may not. You may choose keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site at that time. It's best to know what you need to be targeting.

Short summary of SEO strategies and secrets - Part 1

by Alla Babin

Here is just a short summary of the SEO techniques that can be helpful in promoting your website. You can find more articles on SEO, Marketing Strategy and other marketing and web related issues.

Part 1

How to increase a website search engine Page Rank (PR) and improve SERP?

1. Put a lot of content on the page. Make your web pages content clear and attractive.
2. Make it informative, unique and useful for HUMAN visitors.
3. Build a sitemap for your website and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.
4. As little as possible outgoing links.
5. More pages with more content and less outgoing links
6. More inbound links (preferable one-way links) from sites with a page rank higher than yours.
7. Good internal links structure.
8. Update your website as often as possible by adding more unique content.
9. Publish articles on various free Articles Directories. Do it often… as often as possible.
10. Leave comments with your site URL in various relevant blogs.
11. Submit your website to quality directories.
12. Make sure all the pages of your site link back to the Home Page.
13. Make sure the loading times for your website are not too long. Google seems to take it into account when calculating the PR.

General SEO tips

1. Create site map and upload it to Google.
2. Create a robots.txt file.
3. If you really want your content to be correctly indexed by Google, it must be within HTML.
4. Submit your website only to QUALITY directories.
5. Do not submit your website to link farms.
6. Do not submit your website to directories with low page rank.
7. Write articles and publish them on Article Directories for free. Submit more articles, and more… this really works.
8. Link your website to social networking websites.
9. Minimize your pages loading time. It affects their ranks.
10. Give Google some time to rank your site. It doesn't happen overnight. You may expect the first ranking at the next "Google Dance," which happens every 4-12 weeks.

According to what criteria does Google evaluate sites?

1. Number of incoming links
2. Authority of incoming links
3. Age of site
4. Page rank
5. Keyword prominence

How do web spiders/crawlers work?

1. They don't understand text, nor the language.
2. They are handling words and work with them.
3. They find frequencies, removing non-significant words (e.g. is, the, a )
4. They evidence correlations.
5. They work with thesaurus and synonyms (only advanced crawlers)
6. They find correlations between words and phrases from meta-tags (keywords, description, etc.) and words and phrases from the content of the corresponding page.
7. They count those words and words combinations (phrases) and figure out their density and distribution throughout the page.
8. They like the density of about 3% - 6%. Higher density may be considered artificially created content. This reduces web page rank.
9. They like even distribution of the keywords and key phrases throughout the page.

What is the best way to write titles?

1. Use main keywords.
2. Keep your entire title below 90 characters.
3. Use the Page name first, then, if you still have free characters, use your site name.
4. Think of what your potential visitors would be searching for. Make sure the title tag clearly reflects the content of your web page.

Short summary of SEO strategies and secrets - Part 2

by Alla Babin

Does a domain name (URL) play any role in SEO and how to choose a good domain name?

1. Google does not appear to give any weight to keywords in URLs. The keywords in URLs appear (are highlighted) after the calculations for ranking have been completed. They are not counted in the algorithm; they won't help you get better rankings by trying to manipulate them for search engines.
2. Yahoo gives a little weight to keywords in URLs.
3. MSN gives a lot of weight to URL names.
4. It's better to use hyphens than underscores. Hyphens tend to split the keyword phrase whereas underscores are treated as one keyword.
5. Google announced that they treat hyphens and underscores the same way, however it's not the case with Yahoo and others. Stick to hyphens, it's safer.

How to build Back links (or inbound links)

1. Submit your website to search directories under related categories. It's recommended to use those directories where no back links from your site are required.
2. Submit your articles in Articles Directories. It's free.
3. Don't forget to use good anchor text with your main keywords. (Anchor text is the text that contains a hyperlink to your website.)
4. Use forums and communities to promote your website there.
5. Don't put links to your site on the websites whose Page Rank is lower than yours.
6. Simple reciprocal links (from site A to site B and back from B to A) are not efficient any more since Google "learned" to recognize and ignore this kind of "artificial" optimization technique.
7. Checking back links to your site, do not rely on the Google "link" command (link:mysite.com), it is flawed. Instead search Google for the string: "mysite.com" -site:mysite.com . This will show you all the pages indexed by Google, which are not part of your site. The "minus" sign in the string tells Google NOT to show the site itself, but only external links to the site.

How to optimize a blog ?

1. Find operators of other websites that are willing to swap links between the pages where your blog is and their pages. Swap links with these pages.
2. Make your subject matter topical, such your opinion of the news of the day or of issues that are of concern to a majority of people. This will result in other pages linking to yours.
3. Give the title of your page a unique name, but one that is easily searchable. The easier it is for the search engines to find your blog or website.
4. Search engines tend to ignore blogs that are less than 250 words, so use that length as a minimum.
5. Set up meta tags including a description and several keywords, which should be there in your blog. Search engines will use these to find your blog or website.
6. Use headlines and subheads in your blog. Search engines tend to rank these fairly high when they examine your website, and they should increase your ranking.

Is it Ok for SEO to use Flash sites?

1. Quite recently Google has announced that they have been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, they've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology. However, this technology is not yet as effective as html crawler and it's still preferable follow the below rules.
2. Use Flash effectively: i.e. a few banners on site, some short animated text, etc.
3. Google can "read", although not very effectively, text and content of a flash file.
4. Other search engines can't do it.
5. Avoid using Flash to display content.
6. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can't "read" links in a Flash file. Never build a site with Flash-only navigation. You should at least create a parallel html navigation (NOT in javascript).
7. Remember that robots do NOT run javascript and can't "see" whether graphics are coming from flash or pictures. If you want your site to be easily and effectively indexed by robots and spiders:
   • Make sure that all the content is in full text. Of course it prevents you to use fancy and smart fonts, and might look less nice, but by getting these pages indexed you give surfers an occasion to find your pages.
   • If you use fancy navigation (Flash, javascript, or picture maps), be sure to put in parallel some html-coded navigation.
   • You may also consider building an html map of all your pages, where visitors, as well as search engines, will be able to see links to all of your pages with one-paragraph descriptions of each page.
   • The html-coded text on each and every page should have at least a link to the home page and to the page of the map.

How to avoid Google penalization to your site or blog?

1. Google can penalize a website that has:
   • Bad link structure;
   • Hidden text;
   • Small fonts;
   • Paid links;
   • Duplicate content;
   • Excessive link exchanges;
   • Back links from online casinos, adult and drug related sites.
2. How can you know if Google penalized your site or not
   • Using Google Webmaster Tools , to "tools". If your site has been banned, you should see a link to "resubmit your site.|
3. What to do if Google penalized your site?
   • First of all, eliminate all the possible causes of the penalization (see # 1).
   • Resubmit to Google, explaining what exactly you have changed.
   • Do not try to justify why this happened.
   • Remove all the links to any sites unrelated to your content.
   • Submit your site only to quality directories that do not require a return link.

SEO Strategies That Always Work

by Jeff Schmidt

When it comes to what works in the search engines, a ton of recommendation you read is the newest flavour of the week or loophole that somebody's exposed that may help you get great search engine rankings… for about a week.

Learn how to increase website traffic at UltimateTrafficBlueprint.com

It is also true that tiny things change on a or weekly basis. These tiny changes can be virtually impossible to keep up with.

So what's an individual meant to do to get great search engine rankings? Easy . Stop targeting the tiny things, like tweaking your keyword density, or changing your meta tags, and target the factors that are going to matter long term.

Fortunately, there are some basic principles that you can apply that will help you weather the storm of continually fluctuating search engine algorithms. These are techniques that have worked for years, and will work for the obvious future.

One ] Write Great Content Make the focus of your website on having really good content. I'm sure that if you have read some of my previous articles, you can know that I continually harp on the significance of having great content. Well, the rationale is that the search engines need to rank the sites that have the best material the highest. Also, folks will naturally link to great content. Give the search engines and people what they want - quality content. Dodge quickly thrown together crap, and if you hire writers, make sure they know the subject matter they are writing about.

2 ] Update Often Your website should be updated frequently. This suggests not just going in and modifying what's already on your website, but having a steady stream of new content flowing into the site. I love to use blogs for this purpose since they're really straightforward to use and maintain.

3 ] Get Links Build up your links. You need to always be searching out quality one way links. If you are using article selling, directories, or press releases, be proactive in getting new links to your web site. Once you start focusing on long term optimization methods, you'll find that your rankings will improve without you having to go in and make tiny changes each time you read about what the search engines are favoring that month. Your content will rise to the top over time without you needing to continually mess with it.

How To Get Your Web Site Listed At The Top Of Google

by Leo Emery

The biggest challenge every single website owner has (including me) is getting traffic to his/her web site. And bar none the best traffic you can obtain is Organic Search Engine traffic.

So what is Organic Search Engine traffic?

Simply put, when someone is searching for a product or service they type their query into the search engine (google, yahoo, MSN etc.) and then the results of that search are displayed. And you want your web site to come up in that search query.

You probably already know that the majority of people will not go past the first page of the search engine results and even less people will go past the top 30 results. Therefore, your challenge is getting your website listed on the first page of the search engines for the keywords relating to your site.

Now there are tons of people that will tell you there is some mystical voodoo secret mojo to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And if you're not familiar with the term SEO. Simply put SEO is where you build your web site in such a way that the search engines like it and the result is getting better rankings on the search engines.

Well I'm here to tell you that it is not as mystical as everyone would lead you to believe. Just like anything, advertising, google ad words, article marketing it takes constant work to achieve the results you want and in this case, that would be to maintain a top search engine ranking.

I will admit there are many things you can do optimize your web site but I am going to touch on the basics. I have been doing this for some time now. I was taught from some of the best people in the business, so I am passing onto you what was taught to me.

What I am going to share with you is for google. Since it's the big guy on the block that's whom I optimize my sites for. There is a lot of info I want to share with you so I have broken this article into 2 parts.

First, just as important as learning What To Do. Is learning What Not To Do.

These are known as black hat techniques. Just stay away from them, if your caught your website will be penalized or even worse banned completely from google. Then you have to start all over and that's just not worth it.

If you want even more information of the Do's and Don'ts by Google, just type into Google:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Ok here are the no, no's of SEO.

1) Door Way Pages. A doorway page has been designed just for the search engines and not for human beings and is redirected to the goal page. The goal page is the page you ultimately want people to see. So what the webmaster does is makes minor changes to the page and resubmits it to the search engine over and over again.

So when someone finds that page he/she is redirected to the real page and this is usually done with a fast meta refresh command. Google no longer accepts pages using fast Meta refresh. Google see's these page(s) as duplicates and exclude them from their listings.

Don't confuse a doorway page with a landing page. Landing pages are ok as they provide a lot of information, have relevant links pointing to them and can be seen by both humans and the search engine spiders.

2) Hidden Text And Links. As the term suggests keywords and keyword phrases are hidden on the page. Usually this is done by having the text the same color as the page color.

Not only Google but the other search engines have the ability to recognize that white text is being displayed on a white background or black text on a black background and so on.

If you want to see if your webmaster has used hidden text, start by looking for large blank areas at the top, bottom or sides of your web page. Now simple scroll your cursor over the area any hidden text will appear. Or you can look at the source code.

You can also hide Hidden Text in your "ALT" tag. The "ALT" tag text will appear when you place your cursor over the image. It will also display the text if your image does not display.

If a few words or even a sentence appears that's ok. If an entire paragraph appears or a lot of words that don't read as a sentence appear, that's bad. Your web master has tried to stuff too many keywords inside the image's ALT tag. Get rid of them.

It is best to use 4 or 5 words or a sentence of 4 or 5 words long in your "ALT" tag.

3) Cloaking. This is where the content presented to the search engine spider is different to what is presented to the browser (you). By doing this a page that other wise would not be displayed is displayed.

So what happens is the information being delivered is based on the content on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.

4) Link Farms. I'm sure you've heard of the term link farm. All a link farm is, is a system where all the members are linked to each other via a common set of link pages. The result is that all members have a links page with the other members' web addresses on them.

Many of these link programs have several hundred or even thousands of members, so by joining you have almost instant access to hundreds of other web sites that point links to your site. This can lead to your site looking very "popular".

The big problem with this is that you are artificially boosting the popularity of your site. You see when a spider from a search engine (Google) comes to your site it checks out your links. If it sees you have a lot of inbound links you can achieve a higher ranking because the more inbound links you have the better. However, it also checks out the quality and relativity of those links to your site.

So if you have a site about "dog training" and most of your links have nothing to do with dog training you will not receive a better ranking. In fact anyone using this type of linking will be penalized. Either your site will get dropped down in the search engines listing or you will be banned all together.

5) Duplicate Content. The search engines only want to index original content. They don't want to index the same content 1000 times. If duplicate content/site is detected only one will be indexed. The rest will end up as supplemental context and won't even rank.

6) Keyword Stuffing. Yes you need to have your keywords on your site and in your meta tags, but there is a delicate balance. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely you'll rank for it. Just don't go crazy.

I have about 25 keywords in my meta tags and all of these keywords are used in the content of my site. But they are used only when the content calls for it.

Keep your writing natural and use the keywords as you feel suitable. Using them too many times will make your site look spammy, which doesn't sit well with either your human visitors or the spiders that crawl your site. Might not get you banned but you certainly won't get a favorable ranking either.

And here's an update many search engines Google for one, do not use Meta Tags as part of their ranking system any more. However some still do so that's why I mentioned it.

7) Duplicate Sites. This is when you clone your site under a bunch of different domain names with the same content and then you have the pages linked together so the can get a better ranking and get the top spots for your keywords. This is a really bad idea, and sure way to get banned. Short and sweet, never do this.

Ok now you know what you should not do, let me share with you what you need to do in order to get a top ranking on the search engines. In this case specifically Google.

And that I will share with you in my next article.

To Your Success Leo Emery

TOP 5 Free Keyword Research Tools For Web Developers And Online Marketers

by Cory Threlfall

The benefits of finding the best free keyword research tools online today are plentiful for you. With so many popping up online you often ask yourself which one is worth using for my basic keyword research needs.

Well in this article I'm going to give you some great links to what I think are the best free keyword research tools on the web to help you with your keyword analysis. They'll give you some great stats to work with and hopefully do the job you were hoping for.

There's just one thing I want to mention about these free keyword research tools below and that is they only give you the amount of searches for that given keyword phrase. What they don't give you is your competition for those given keyword phrases.

But what we're really trying to do here is find out if there's a market for your interests and passions before you start building and marketing your website.

So with that said here are the free keyword research tools I think are the best for you to get started with and are very easy to use.

Lets start with the first one.

1) Wordtracker

With this free keyword research tool all you need to do is enter a starting keyword to generate up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume.

Go to: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

2) Google Adwords

This keyword research tool I think is by far the best because it allows you to enter keywords for analysis or a website URL(Hint: Great for analysising your competitors sites).

Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

3) SEO Book

SEO Books keyword research tool is powered by Wordtracker's API, plus it cross references Google and Yahoo search results to give you a detailed view of your keyword analysis.

Go to: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

4) NicheBot Classic

With NicheBot Classic which also uses Wordtracker's API allows you to insert your keyword and will give you the TOP 50 keywords and there daily search count and competing pages in Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Go to: http://www.nichebotclassic.com

5) Good Keywords

Good Keywords is a free Windows software for finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages. Good Keywords is completely free. No registration, no payments and no nag screens.

Go to: http://www.goodkeywords.com

So there you have it, 5 of the TOP free keyword research tools available to you on the web for free to get you started with your keyword research.

There are of course paid services and software that give you more detailed keyword analysis but if you don't have the money to spend these are a great starting point for you.

It all starts here with your keyword research because what's the point of starting a website or paid advertising campaign without this valuable information in your hands.

I hope this list of free keyword research tools helps you and the best of luck with your websites and advertising campaigns.

3 Way Links Critical Overview

by Brian Garvin & Jeff West
I'm reviewing today called 3 Way Links. In the SEO Game, google loves links. And yes they want lots of them. But the I'll link to you if you'll link to me scheme won't work with google like it use to. The first thing I notice on this page is a 10 page Niche Website he created with this system from zero to about 2,500 hits within 4 short months. Keep in mind this is a good accomplishment for a Niche Website so small. Now this website doesn't earn Donald Trump money, but it does hold it's own. It only took him a 5 hours to create it, or lets just say a day to be safe. And in just 4 months it's earning him $157.00 per month in Google Adsense Revenue.

So in a year this site will end up making about $1,800.00 for 5 hours to a day of work. And the site keeps earning a little bit more each month, not less. Theoretically if someone could do this over and over, they could retire within a very reasonable amount of time. Now he's got me interested. This program claims that you can use 50 of your top websites with an account if you have that many to begin with. I want to make a note that this service seems like a semi-advanced one and assumes you already have niche websites in place or know how to get them up.

The concept behind 3 Way Links is that A would link to B, B would link to C and C would link to A. Notice there are no reciprocal links in this equation. So a 3 Way Link is basically broken down into 3 One Way Links so Google will give each link full SEO Credit. This linking technology Jonathan Leger offers is totally automated. All you have to do is add your domain and keywords to your account, add a php file to your server and link to it from your home page. The entire process only takes 10 minutes to implement. Once you do this everything else runs itself, and remember as mentioned earlier you can use this service and do this with up to 50 websites.

I think you should at least read the sales letter even if you don't want to purchase this service and here's why. He actually spills some beans and gives you some pretty nice free information about what google wants and expects in order to rank well. And I wouldn't get pumped up about the 50 site thing. You don't need 50 sites to earn a million dollars on the Internet. But I can't take anything away from someone who puts up a site in one day and makes $250 per month with it in one year. But for me and my partner, we want to concentrate on 2-3 authority sites over the long haul to retire us.

This will also give me time to give google what it really wants as far as Anchor Text Diversity, which you'll read on the 3 Way Links sales letter. My thoughts on this service is that it really could help put you over the fence as far as ranking on specific keywords. But I definitely wouldn't use this as a sole promotion mechanism for any of your niche sites. I'd also in throw in Article Marketing, Social Bookmarking and Blog Posts or Forum Posts at a bare minimum.

Search Engine Placement Optimization by Michael Price

by Michael Price

Search engine placement optimization requires you have a detailed strategy outlined. The detailed strategy should include three parts. It should include keywords, meta information, and a marketing plan.

Below I will briefly discuss the importance of keywords, meta information, and a marketing plan and how they are affected for search engine placement optimization.

Keywords: Before you even begin creating a website you should have several hundred keywords pre-established to determine exactly what keywords you want the search engines to index your website for. If you have already created your website and have not established keywords yet, it is ok because you can still do so now. In order to gain a healthy amount of keywords, you need to use a keyword tool. There are many keyword tools out there that charge outrageous fees to provide monthly search volumes in search engines, and they are all 100% false. Do not get scammed. Search engines do not release their search volumes. For the ones that used to such as Yahoo, they have reported that their search volumes are extensively inaccurate so how in the world could a keyword tool provide accurate search volumes of the search engines themselves can not figure this out? Get it now? Ok. Good. There is a free keyword tool called seobook. Google seo book keyword tool, and the exact link will pop up. Seobook gives you up to 100 keywords and estimated search volumes for free. I use them and I love them, and most importantly I don't pay a dime.

After you've gathered your keywords you need to ensure your meta information on your website is written appropriately.

Meta Information:

Meta information is the title and description tags in your website. They let the search engines know what your website is all about and they rank you accordingly. So for example, if you sold keychains and your website is keychainstoday.com, do not just put your domain name in your title tag. Your title tag should read: Keychains | Keychainstoday.com. In your description tags area you need to write a brief two to three sentence description about your website. Last but not least are the keywords. Put up to ten keywords in this section. Do not put more than that, otherwise the search engines will consider it keyword stuffing and they will penalize your website and possibly even de-index you from their search engine.

Marketing Plan:

The marketing plan is now ready to be put into overdrive after you have followed the advice above. Search engine placement optimization relies on backlinks and the best way to get backlinks quick, fast, and in abundance is article marketing and mass article submission. Article marketing allows you to write articles and submit them to directories. The best part as that the article directories allow you to place anchor texted backlinks in your author bio box. Obviously you would want to place your website as an anchor texted backlink in the author bio box.

If you submit enough articles to enough directories, you will be indexed for the keywords of your choice in no time.

5 Most Common SEO Mistakes

by jhon

I am going to write about 5 most common mistakes made when optimising your site for the search engines like google, yahoo or msn.com. If you are new to SEO do study them carefully and the search engines will love your site and rank it high in the results. But there are plenty of mistakes to be made, so don not be the one who is making them. Without further talking, let us go straight to the 5 most common SEO mistakes:

1. Using duplicate content

This is quite a common mistake. You start a blog or a website, make a few posts or some sub pages. But now you're getting too lazy to continue writing unique content (don not worry, happens lots of times to me too). And now you start copying text from other sites and putting it on your page. This is a NO-NO for google or other search engines. It will lower your page rank, lower your ranking for keywords related to your website and eventually ban you from the results altogether. So stay away from duplicate content.

2. Reciprocal linking with own domains (websites)

I have made this mistake myself many years ago. I thought:"Hey, why not link my domains together, so I'll get a better ranking in google!". Oh, was I wrong. You should never link your own domains together (for example put a link on domain1.com which points to domain2.com and the other way around too). Lower PR, lower ranking and if overused also a ban. You might try it, but it's very complicated (different website IP, different server, different registrar data, etc.) My advice - just do not do it!

3. Irrelevant backlinks

Now that you have a website, you should get some reciprocal links (or one way links, which are WAY better for your rankings - it means that a website is linking to you, but you are not linking back). But there are mistakes to be done here too. For example if your are selling computer keyboards on your website do not make link exchanges with sites that sell or are related to clothes. Find websites that match your website content and exchange links with those. Do not link (one way link) to websites that are not related to your content too.

4. Not using a "title" tag for your page

You really should always make a title for every page that you make. It is very simple to make one and it should be related to the content of the website. Leaving this empty will decrease your search engine position and people will find your products harder or even will not at all. It is really not that hard to do it.

5. Poorly written content, not optimised website

You might see this a lot of times. A site has only about 5 sentences of text, an image (that might even be broken - does not show), some fancy flash animation and colors which are really hard to read. Don't make those mistakes. Every webpage you make should have about 200 - 250 characters of well written text that is related to that website, have about 1 - 2% keywords in that text (for example if you're selling apples, use that keyword in the text of your website). Also use the keyword in the "title", "description" and even on the website under h1, h2 and h3 tags. And the alt tag of the images on your website should also contain a description of that picture. And use text and backgrounds that are easy to read (for example black text on a white background - a winner!).

There are lots of other small mistakes that can be make when designing your site for the search engines, but if you avoid these most common five, you should be on a good way to make your site search engine friendly and get good results. And do not forget to be patient, because patience is the key here. Thinking long-term is always the best method in search engine optimisation.