Web Matters

by: Tony Newton

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

About The Author
Tony Newton is a Director of Smart Online Solutions Ltd. A UK SEO Company that will help you get more targeted traffic to your website.
sosl.co.uk

by: Rick Hendershot

"Traffic" is what linking is all about. Without traffic your website is useless as a tool for selling your products or communicating your ideas. Getting links from other websites is not the only way to generate traffic, but it is probably the most important one.

But how do links generate traffic?

**Direct traffic from links**

First, links generate direct traffic. Links from sites that share your target audience will be an important source of traffic to your site. A visitor to the other web site sees the link to yours, clicks on it, and becomes your visitor. Some estimates put the percentage of internet traffic resulting from this kind of link as high as 21% of total traffic.

Why do people click on these links? One reason is they may view a link to an outside source as an endorsement. They assume the webmaster is saying "Here is a source you will find interesting or helpful". They are looking for the kind of service you provide, so they click on the link to check you out.

But just as important is simple curiosity. Someone sees a text link with intriguing wording like "Powerful Cheap Advertising" or "Win a Free iPod" or "See Pamela Anderson Video" and, depending on their interests, a certain number of people are likely to click on it.

This suggests at least three things about your links. First, you should get as many links as possible on pages your target audience is likely to be visiting. The more people see your links, the more traffic you are likely to get.

Second, your anchor text (the words that are linked) should be intriguing. It should be short and sweet, and suggest a benefit -- a reason for people to click on it.

Third, your links should be on pages that people actually look at. Having hundreds of links on pages that nobody ever looks at will not result in traffic -- at least not direct traffic. Putting your link on a link exchange page containing hundreds of services similar to yours is not likely to generate very many clicks. This is why exchanging links with link directories is such a questionable waste of time. Web visitors rarely look at these directories.

Finding good pages where you can place your link is not always easy. One method is to systematically do searches for your most important keywords -- the search phrases people are likely to use when looking for your kind of product or service. Many of the results will be competitors of yours. But one or two may be secondary sources such as directories or reference pages. Getting your link on some of these secondary sources is almost guaranteed to result in traffic, so it is worth the effort -- and sometimes the cost -- of getting listed in the resources that score high for your keywords.

**Traffic from Search Engines**

The second reason for getting inbound links is to impress the search engines. Most search engines use the quantity and quality of your inbound links to evaluate the importance and relevance of your site to specific keywords. For instance, if you sell a product like "Full Color Vinyl Banners", or you are a Real Estate agent servicing "Kitchener Real Estate", one of your objectives is to rank high for searches done on your primary search phrase (and other similar ones).

This will result in traffic because when people search for your important keywords your site is more likely to show up in the search results. The more inbound links you have that relate your site to full color vinyl banners or web promotion services, or "fill in your keyword here", the higher your site is likely to rank for these terms, and the more search engine traffic you are likely to receive as a result.

**Using Articles to get traffic and impress the search engines**

Embedding your links in articles is one of the best methods of rapidly increasing your inbound links. Many times a well-written article will show up in hundreds of places on the web. And if it has your link embedded in it, that will obviously increase your inbound links. Webmasters pick up these articles because they want content to enhance the value of their sites.

Articles will also generate direct traffic because people who read them are already interested in your subject matter, and are therefore more likely to click on your link.

This suggests that the most valuable place to publish your article is in a themed or categorized article resource. For instance, if your product is "health" related, having it published on health-oriented sites will be more valuable than having it published on generic sites.

You can even take this a step further. If your article is about something more specific like "mesothelioma advice", then getting it published on sites that focus on "mesothelioma" will get more "reads", and have a greater influence on the search engines.

Second, when embedding your link, try to use anchor text that contains one of your important keywords, not just your URL or web address. Remember that search engines are dumb. One of your objectives is to have them relate your website to specific search terms (keywords or key phrases). And the best way to do that is to use them as your anchor text.

About The Author
Rick Hendershot heads Linknet Promotions ==> http://www.linknet-promotions.com | Get links in articles and blog posts ==> http://www.linknet-news.com/linknet-news.php | Linkpopularity durch professionellen Linkaufbau ==> http://www.thinex.de

by: Adrian Lawrence

You've finished your website, and it's beautiful. You ensured it would be content rich; you have a plan to maintain fresh content, whether it's through blogs or rotating content. You hired a professional writer to ensure that your content was keyword optimized for the search engines, to raise its rank. You've even paid attention to tags and how they are focused on your web page, and image descriptions for your graphics.

So now you can submit it to the search engines, right?

Wrong. You don't want to submit at all.

The Right Way To Be Found

Instead of submitting directly to search engines, allow your page to be found naturally. The spiders are constantly running down the trail of every link, cataloguing where pages are and recording them in the search engine database. Allowing your site to be found this way allows it to rise naturally in the search engines as each new link is catalogued and included in your placement algorithm.

What you want, then, is to be found because of links to your site. If you're starting with a fresh slate, you should first list your site with directories. Directories appear similar to search engines, and are used, like search engines, to find sites of interest. But search engines use spiders to fill a dynamic database. Directories, on the other hand, are dependent upon manual registration of each site. If you want your site to show up in directories, you need to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it.

The best part about directories is that each one provides you with a one-way link to your website – the exact thing that the search engine spiders seek out.

The Major Directories

For years, Yahoo! has been recognized as the premier online directory. That's only natural; it started life as a list of Jerry Yang's favourite links in 1994. Today, Yahoo! has both a search engine component, included in 1998 as a feed from Alta Vista, and a directory component. You should submit your site to the Yahoo! directory manually; certain sites may have to pay to be listed.

The other major directory is Dmoz, an open directory that shares its data freely with hundreds of other websites. Dmoz is always free to list with, and is surprisingly underused.

With either major directory, you should list your site by hand yourself; only you can properly determine what category you should appear in, and your categorization is critical to how well you're ranked by the search engines; list in the wrong one, and you won't make a dent.

Other Directories

Besides the major directories, there are thousands of free directories for every imaginable niche market; you should list with any of these that are appropriate to your site content.

In addition to the free directories, there are a number of paid directories you can list with. Though you should first go ahead and register with the larger free directories you find out there, later you should go back and register with some of the paid sites as well. Not everyone will pay to acquire this link, and many of the paid sites are seen by the search engines as more authoritative, and will be weighted more heavily than other directories.

About The Author
Adrian Lawrence is the webmaster for http://www.indexplex.com a leading Web Directory Please feel free to republish this article together with working hyperlinks.

by: Daniel Smith

There are literally billions of web pages out there. Everything you can imagine, businesses selling all sorts of goods and services, information for free and for sale. Saying that the internet is a phenomenon is not doing it justice. The internet has, in fact, changed everything. It may sound cliché, but there has arguably never been an invention in the history of humankind that has such a major impact. Indeed, the only thing that may even come close is the advent of agriculture millions of years ago. Understanding the sheer power of the internet is the first step to using it to your advantage and learning how to use the benefits derived from text links is another. There is a universe of opportunity out there if you know how to harness and utilize it and one of the ways to harness the opportunities offered on the Internet is to take advantage of text links to increase your page ranks.

That being said, how do you get your business and your web page noticed among all the billions of other web pages. You may have a product or service that you think is unique, but in truth there are probably many other businesses around the globe selling the exact same product, service, or information that you are trying to sell. Before the internet, all but the largest companies only had to worry about competing with people in the same town; now even smaller businesses have to figure out how to make a name for themselves on the world marketplace to compete.

Start by doing an experiment. Go to your favorite web-based search engine: Google, MSN, Yahoo, Excite, ICQ, Dog Pile, etc. Any one will do for your purposes. Now, type in the keywords for your business, let’s say you sell aromatherapy soap, so you should type in aromatherapy soap into the search engine window. How many different web pages come back? Well, for aromatherapy soap, a search on Google returns nearly 4.5 million web pages. If your potential customer specifies shop in their keyword search, that number dwindles to 1.75 million web pages. That is still a heck of a lot of competition.

It is a well-known fact that people tend to only look at the first page or two of results to find what they are looking for. That means that for your business to succeed on the internet, your business needs to appear as close to the front of that search as possible, in other words, you need to increase your page rank. When people type in the keywords for your business, your business web page needs to appear on the first page or two of the search results. So how can you accomplish this? Keyword density helps, but it will only get you so far. What you really need to increase your page rank is links. You need other sites, many other sites, to provide a link to your site. Not just any other sites either, you need popular sites to link to your website, you need to tap into a network of popular websites. This is by far and away the best way to increase your page rank on Google or any other search engine for that matter.

This may sound like a daunting task, but it really doesn’t have to be. You can get all sorts of links to your website with a minimal amount of effort by making sure you submit your pages to many different web directories. There are many web directories out there on the internet. There are some that are free, while others you have to pay for. Not only are their general interest directories, there are also directories that exist for specific areas. Taking the example used earlier of the business selling aromatherapy soap, you can submit your links to general interest web directories, health and beauty related directories, arts and crafts directories, just be creative.

Another way to increase the number of pages that link to you is to ask appropriate people to review your product. Just like book reviews can propel a book to the top of all the best-seller lists and positive movie reviews can increase box-office sales, positive reviews on you and your product can increase your page rank. Ask people who use your product and liked it to write positive reviews on it. You can offer incentives like a discount, and it would be well-worth it. There are websites that serve as places where ordinary consumers can review products they purchased on the web. Oftentimes, they can post a link to your webpage within their review. Keep in mind, however, that posing as a customer when you are the site owner is not only unethical, it will probably get you shunned from that particular board if you are ever found out. Again, be creative, there are literally thousands of message boards out there designed for the general population to share information about a particular product. Having positive reviews and links to your website will increase your page rank, and the positive reviews will convince people that your product is the best.

Another way to increase your page rank through text links is by placing links to popular, related (but not competing) websites in the text on your webpage. Deep linking, that is linking to a page buried in a particular site is frowned upon, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with linking to the front page of a site. For example, say you are still selling that aromatherapy soap. You can link to the webpage of noted psychologists or other professionals that will vouch for the efficacy of aromatherapy soap. Or say you use only animal-friendly products; you can link to a page that is considered an authority in cruelty free products. By putting the links to popular websites within your website, you are increasing your own page rank.

These are just a couple of the ways that you can use text links to increase your web page’s rank on all of the major search engines. The same rules apply now that have always applied, have a good product and provide great customer service. If you think about it, networking on the web isn’t so different from getting business via word of mouth in your hometown; you just need to go about it a little bit differently.

About The Author
Daniel Smith writes about Text Links and Page Rank http://www.LinksAttack.com.