There comes a time in every bloggers career they have to make a choice about monetizing their blogs. Monetizing isn’t the right thing for every blogger, surprisingly enough. There are plenty of vanity bloggers or those who blog to support a separate business venture. You can rest assured that when I finally get my novel in print there will be absolutely no ads other than products on the corresponding site/blog.

Just as not every blog is meant for monetizing, not every blog should be monetized in the same way.  Most people recommend starting off with adsense, which for sure is (was) the easiest program to get into.  As I understand it from a great many noobs plenty of sites are getting rejected these days and many more are getting their accounts cut within the first couple of days of going active with Google’s normal no explanation given email.  If this has happened to you, don’t get worried over it since it happens to a lot of bloggers with no rhyme or reason.  Also don’t get bent out of shape over it since there are alternatives to Adsense, which usually work a lot better for most bloggers.

The one thing most bloggers have a hard time with when it comes to adsense is actually getting enough traffic to make any sort of money.  With the maximum allowed banner load you need something in the order of about 1000 page views a day on a low pagerank site to pay out every month.  When you covert this to the traffic the average blogger gets you might get paid once a year by google.  This is the sort of thing that causes most bloggers to give up.  Fear not though, once you discover if adsense is right for your site, and I encourage everyone to try it, you an move on to bigger and better things.

The program i want to tell you about today is one I have been using for about six weeks, Amped Media.  Unlike Adsense. Amped Media is an affiliate marketing program letting you pick and choose whcih ads you want to display based on your blog’s niche.  They have a wide range of programs and once you are accepted into the program you can always shoot a message to your affiliate manager to help you find the right ads.  In affiliate marketing, an Affiliate Manager’s pay is usually based in part on your performance so a good manager will be willing to do whatever it takes to find you ads that make money.

There are a couple of ways to make money with an affiliate program, email, banners, social media and referrals.  It is the referral income which makes most of the big name bloggers, the bulk of their income in truth, and one you shouldn’t necessarily discount from your own repertoire either.  Not only do you have referral income, something that you will never get from Adsense, most affiliate programs pay out at between $25 and $50 monthly.  I know what you are thinking, $25, I still only make a $0.02 a day with adsense.  The difference between adsense and affiliate programs comes back to you choosing your own ads based on the sort of traffic you get.  Take these three ads for example:

This ad for Cool Aid is something you might see on adsense. If you had it on your site and someone clicked on it, you might get a penny or two from adsense no matter what the person did with the page on the other end. As an affiliate ad you aren’t getting paid unless some action is take after the click.  This might seem a bit unfair since you are displaying the ad and getting nothing for doing so.  That assumption is however completely wrong.  The chances are if someone sees the ad and clicks on it they want what is being offered.  If you smartly picked ads readers are likely to click on, then you are going to make a lot more money.  This particular ad takes you to a form and they want you to fill it out, in my experience about 1 in 4 people will fill out a short form on the first page of an ad click.  At most you are going to $0.20 from adsense and more like half that with this sort of ad getting 4 clicks.  With an affiliate like Amped Media it pays out more than a buck and a quarter for every form fill out.  At that rate it is also on the low end of payouts.  If you do the math and I think you will figure it out which is more profitable.

This isn’t the only type of offer available either there are also offer that are sales based and incentive offers.  I will go more into those types of offers in the next affiliate program I review for you.  Stay tuned for next weeks review, MonetizeIt.

Attracting Traffic with Banner Ads
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nowshade_Kabir]Nowshade Kabir

Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing business on the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day brick and mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more dramatic
and may have greater impact than in a conventional business. Success in this climate can only come from quick response to the changes. Look at web advertisement! Just in a few short years, we have seen rise and fall of banner advertisement, email marketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number of other marketing tools.

Consider banner advertisement. In the beginning of Internet era, banner advertisement was one of the primer methods of online marketing. There were not many quality sites in those days. In search of good feature and content filled websites visitors were clicking through banners aggressively. Today, things are totally different! Over using of banners on the web pages forced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more. Visitors tend to avoid clicking through the banners unless there is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that mean the banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon!

Although, banner click through rate is quite low in comparison
to what it used to be, depending on your objectives banner
advertisement can still be very effective. Banner ads are
used today, either for creating brand recognition or for
bringing in more traffic to the website and consequently
generating more sales.

Brand recognition

As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies place
banners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently posted
on high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of your
products or services popular to certain niche market, you
should find websites catering this particular audience and
post banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whether
they click on it or not – same like traditional bill boards
and TV advertisements – it helps you building consciousness
to your brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be as
effective as television advertising as far as brand
recognition is concerned. A survey was conducted among
members of American Online who saw an ad of a product
as a banner on the website and on TV commercial. The
result indicated that 40 percent of the audience remembers
the static banners and 41 percent remembers the TV
commercial at the time of the poll conducted a few days
later.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brand
recognition effect from online ad campaign in comparison
to traditional forms of advertisements for around 60
percent less cost. However, same like offline ads, in
order to create a sustainable brand recognition, your
online advertisement campaign also needs to run for a
prolong period of time.

Generating traffic

Banner ads could be a good source of high quality traffic
for your website if you manage your banner ad campaign
wisely. If your main purpose of the campaign is to generate
more sales by attracting traffic – which is any way should
be the main goal of any e-commerce site – you have to select
sites to post banners where you target audience frequently
visit. Pay per click search engines like Overture or Google
Adwords are good options for your textual banner ads. Since
the visitors are already looking for a website like yours
by searching for the keyword that you have selected to
place your ad, you get highly targeted traffic from this.

There are no fixed rules of effective banner ads campaign.
You have to learn the program works best for you by trial
and error. The principal idea behind any advertisement is
to grab viewers’ attention, ignite their curiosity and
motivate them to act. For banner ads it is no different!

The following tips should help you getting better result
from your banner advertisement campaign:

1. Choose an attention grabbing content. Space is so
limited in a banner – same like newspaper headlines – you
have to come up with something that really gets viewer’s
attention. Since you have to do it in one or two sentences,
try using something funny, outrageous but intriguing.
You can also use pictures, which deliver similar effect.

2. Call to an action. Many people like to be guided. Tell
them what to do such as “Click here” or “Go to the website”.

3. Focus on one offer. Your banner ad should carry one
single message. By including several offers in one ad,
chances are you will confuse viewers rather than intrigue.

4. Make it readable. Even a greatly designed banner will
fail to motivate a viewer if the text on it is not readable.

5. Avoid information overload. Too many pictures, colors
and texts make banners look clumsy. Viewers tend to ignore
this type of banners. Animated banners should have less than
four frames.

6. Don’t use heavy banners. Make sure that your banner file
size is less than 5K. Bigger files take longer time to load.

7. Test your banners before publishing. Check how your
banners will look with different browsers. Verify that the
banner link URL is correct and linked to the right page on
your website. Whenever, you make changes to your website,
make sure to double check your banner ads.

Recent practice shows that a banner, which looks like a text
has 4 times more click through rate than a conventional banner.
So use text banners to increase efficiency of your banner
ad program.

Since advertisement is the main source of income for many
websites banner ads are here to stay. Although, there is no
doubt that their look and use will constantly be evolved.

By Sharif Aly

Technology makes our presence lively. So maintaining an online identity is a necessary thing in this biz-world. In this scenario, where everything has been made online, it’s essential for you to make the readers hooked up on your site. There are millions of pages that are available online and your site has to stand out from the rest. So what makes your site more unique? Is it your design; or the content which make your site attractive? Absolutely not! Of course your design should match with your prose. But beyond these aspects, there is a term called Traffic. So, how can it be done? Its quiet a meticulous thing that has to be done with at most care. To traffic a site is something tricky. This can be done in many ways. Every site owners follow their unique ways to traffic their site.

The most general way which is followed by many users is Site Engine optimization. Popularly termed as “SEO optimization”. Though it’s a common term, yet it can be done in numerous ways. Now a days, lot of soft wares are available in the market which can make this work done in minutes with just a few clicks.

We can summarize the methods which are adopted widely by the users around the world.

In order to make your site listed in popular Search Engines, you have to submit your site in the respective search engine portals (like Google, Yahoo, and MSN). This is a simple thing. But your job doesn’t end here. Its just a formal procedure. In fact it’s a laborious process and it takes lot of time for your site to get listed in top search engines. This way is called as Organic traffic.

The most widely used method is by introducing attractive advertisements in your site.

It can be done by placing an attracting add related to your web contents. There are lots of scripts available in market to enable this option. So it’s all about purchasing the apt one and placing in the right place in your site. In fact, this is the most efficient way to earn trough CPC (Cost per Click) concept.

You can customize Pop-up Ads in your site which will make the visitors more interested to click those, if it is something they are looking for.

Another way is to place Search engine bar in your site. This will avoid the chance of the users to switch over to a new window for search option. This can be customized with a script, so that your contents will be given more priority and gets a better page rank when the user search from the search box placed in your site. This will fetch you further traffic to your site.

Placing recent updates, and interesting news articles will make more traffic. There are numerous sites available which are providing news articles free of cost. So it’s easy for the users to customize the script in their site from the article providers.

Making more In-bound and On-bound linking mechanism fetch you a great way to make traffic.

We can make use of popular social networking portal like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut or Linked In, to familiarize your site. Also there are various “Ad pasting sites” which are available for this purpose. We can make use of these sites too. And make sure that, too much of traffic will lead to complications. As some Pop-up ads will annoy some users. So its is necessary to use a genuine method to traffic your site. Lot of reliable Soft wares is available in the market today. So get a genuine one and enjoy he maximum benefit or else go for organic traffic procedures.

By David A Robinson

I’ve just had a meeting with a potential client regarding their website. They launched into a list of things they wanted including, videos, animations, 360 degree images etc. What they hadn’t thought about was the whole purpose of the site. Who is was for, what it was for, who the stakeholders were and what success looks like.

Building a website is a time consuming and costly exercise. There are many component parts to a website, the look and feel being only one of them. The problem is many people only focus on the pretty pictures and Flash animations, only stopping to think about SEO once the site’s live. This is a recipe for disaster.

SEO starts before a single line of HTML is written or a single pixel has been added to an Illustrator canvas. SEO can be used to help you figure out some of the BIG questions you should be asking when developing a website.

SEO will help you better understand your market, SEO will ensure you understand what your potential market is searching for, SEO will help you understand the competition you are up against. In extreme cases SEO may even help you decide if your proposed enterprise is worth pursuing at all!

Leaving SEO until after your website is live is a big mistake and one that will ultimately cost you dearly. You will be left scrambling around desperately wondering why your site isn’t attracting customers and why Google and the other search engines are not listing your site when people search for what you offer.

Get SEO sorted from the get go and reap the benefits.

David A Robinson – Red Evolution (Aberdeen) Ltd

Specialist advice on all aspects of SEO

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_A_Robinson
http://EzineArticles.com/?SEO-Shouldnt-Be-a-Retro-Fit-Add-On,-Its-Way-More-Important-Than-That!&id=1973114

By Leonardo Wood

Google Analytics is a handy tool that you can use to help you with your SEO and traffic generation.

Google Analytics is a Free Tool which you can utilize to learn more about your website visitors google.com/analytics. You can use it to find out where your website visitors came from, what they searched for to find you, how long they were on your site, how many pages they visited etc. It is an invaluable tool for helping you test, measure and maximize your SEO and online marketing strategies.

To install it on your website you simply open an Analytics Account and get a code that needs to be inserted into your website. Your website designer will be able to do this for you, it will take them a few minutes, if they are going to charge you for this, start worrying.

You may already get statistics from your website designer or hosting company but with Google Analytics you can go into the Account and have a real good look round for yourself.
Google Analytics will give you charts and graphs which will enable you to easily view the statistics of your website traffic. You can enter different date ranges and compare the results which can be very valuable.

Example: Install analytics and check your visitors for the next 30 days, start optimizing your site and next month you will be able to see the increase in your visitors.

Some methods of SEO techniques or online advertising may be out-performing the others you are doing. With Google Analytics on your site you will be able to see exactly which of your online efforts are achieving the best results. With this kind of information you can then focus on what works best for you as a means of driving visitors to your website. Without a statistics program like Google Analytics you will not be able to confidently pinpoint your best performing traffic sources.
Check out Google Analytics to find out exactly how it can help you with your SEO, traffic generation and website conversion rates.

Want to know more about how you can get your website listed on the 1st page of Google check out my Free Report: SEO Secrets

Leonardo Wood specializes in teaching website owners how to do their own SEO.

For Instant SEO Tips to Help You Get Your Website on the 1st Page of Google click:
SEO Tips

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leonardo_Wood
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-Do-I-Use-Google-Analytics-to-Help-With-My-SEO?&id=1968441

By Tinu Abayomi-Paul

The Budget Webmaster’s 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google

You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30’s, 50’s, or heaven forbid, the 300’s. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”.

Not necessarily.

If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How?

The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood.

Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to:

http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php

You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.

So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:

http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/

I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it’s also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it.

Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts.

Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page.

This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details-http://www.gorank.com

Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com – it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done.

Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right?

Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member’s sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days.

Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight– my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5.

So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it’s great new changes.

And yes, there’s an even faster, better way to get Google.com’s search engine spider to re-index that page, but that’s another article, isn’t it?

For more free traffic tips, subscribe to her newsletter at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit her feed enabled blog: http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/blog

By Vik Tailor

Lately, there have been a lot of heated discussions regarding link building. Is it ethical to create a link building campaign? Does Google or any other search engine penalize for “link farms” (a bunch of non-related links created for the SOLE purpose of increasing search engine ratings)? Is the “link building era” over?

Link Farms

Many webmasters claim that Google penalizes websites for link farms. If this is so, why are a link farm sites that have a page rank of 5 on their link farm page? Let me give you an example, go to Google.com, type in any popular keyword(s) and append the word “links” to it. For example, “ABCD Links.” Notice you’ll get tones of websites that are linking to unrelated sites, but still have a great PR. I do not encourage link farming in any way or form, but building valuable partnerships is something I do encourage. If you’re a jewelry site and you’re exchanging links with an antiques site, I think this is a great thing. It’s very possible that someone searching for jewelry may have an interest in antiques. I own a few sites and the hits I receive from partially related sites are phenomenal. Most of my websites are targeted towards webmasters so I receive hits from all sorts of sites. Remember, many webmasters claim to know the truth regarding search engine algorithms, but no one knows the EXACT TRUTH except the programmers at the search engines. Webmasters may have been penalized in the past for link farms and doorway pages (pages created around certain keywords for the sole purpose of redirecting surfers to the main page), but who’s to say why some HAVEN’T been penalized.

Who Should I Create Link Partnerships With?

1. Create link partnerships with sites related to your site.

2. Create link partnerships with sites that have an audience that may be interested in your products

3. Exchange homepage links with websites that fit in your genre. You’ll receive a link on a page with a good ranking and you’ll get quality, targeted hits.

How Do You Find Link Partners?

1. Signup with an automated links management provider that organizes your links and helps find link partners. Automated tools are the best because they help you save time. Uploading and downloading your pages for every link exchange can be a huge pain and very time consuming. Automated tools are NOT link farms because they give you complete control of who you exchange links with. If a member exchanges links with every website, he/she might be abusing the tool. If a member uses the tool responsibly, it can be very effective.

2. This is a great little exercise I would recommend to anyone.

a. Write down 20 search terms pertaining to your website

b. Go to http://www.google.com and type in a search term written in step A

c. Contact as many websites as possible listed under that search term and ask them to exchange inner page or homepage links with you. If they’re NOT interested, ask whether they would be interested in selling advertising space. If your website is fairly new, you may want to ask sites for advertising prices. Free hits are the best hits but sometimes you might have to go the extra lap and pay for service. I wouldn’t recommend spending over $100 / month for advertising UNLESS it’s a high traffic site with your site audience. The best deals are the ones that offer $10-25 / month. There are sites out there that will sell SUPER cheap advertising, and others that charge an arm and a leg.

EVERYONE gets rejected sometime or another so keep your head up and keep moving along! The internet is comprised of Billions of websites. If you’re rejected 500 times, you still have MANY business opportunities left! This is a continuous job so set aside time every week to do this. If you don’t have time for this, then you don’t have time to make money.

3. Hire a link building firm (this can be quite expensive but if you have money, its minimal work for you)

PageRank

Pagerank is a great tool but don’t use it as your ONLY measurement for success. I can’t explain everything about pagerank but a good explanation is given at http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html.

Conclusion

In conclusion, link building is not only for increasing link partners and search engine rankings, it’s also used to create partnerships and establish profitable relationships with other webmasters. Link building is a tedious process, but one of the best for getting free (sometimes not), targeted hits from other websites.

Vik Tailor is the owner of http://www.linkexchanged.com and http://www.buyadvertisingonline.com. He has been in the online advertising industry for over 4-5 years and has extensive online marketing knowledge.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Vik_Tailor
http://EzineArticles.com/?Link-Building:-To-Link,-or-Not-to-Link,-That-is-the-Question&id=4619

By Craige Stacey

Recent studies suggest that more than 80% of new visitors to any web site get there as a result of a search engine query. If this study is to believed, it certainly suggests that working to get high rankings in the search engines might be the most effective thing you can do to bring traffic to your site.

The following 12 design tips will help you get started in optimizing your site’s search engine placement.

1. Design for Specific Search Engines – there are hundreds of different search engines, but for best results you should design your site to take full advantage of the search criteria of the big three – Yahoo, Google and MSN. If you can get high rankings in these three, you won’t need to worry about the other search engines. Knowing how these search engines rank sites (as well as why they will penalize a site) is important. The rules change often, but the tips below are the most current.

2. Know your target audience. Before you apply any of the tips below, do some research and find out what are the most likely key words and phrases your target audience will be searching for. In most cases, the key words or phrases won’t be your site name, but will be something related to the solution to a specific problem or the answer to a specific question. Knowing the question that will be asked is half the battle.

3. Use Meta tags. By now just about everyone knows about Meta tags. These are commands you can place in the html on your web page to help the search engines categorize what your page is about. The two most important Meta Tags are ‘Keyword’ and ‘Description’. The description Meta tag should describe what is on the particular page, and the keyword Meta tag should include the important key words from the page. Avoid using ‘fluff’ words and phrases as these will be ignored by the site.

Warning: If the keywords in the Meta keyword line are not found within the text on the web page, some search engines will penalize the page or simply not list it. This is done to prevent ‘meta tag’ spoofing.

My advice – have a different Meta description tag on every page. And be sure that keywords in the keyword tags are used on the page.

4. Optimize your Title tag. Many search engines give considerable weight to the html title tag on the page. It is the first element the search engine will scan and weight. Not including a title instantly reduces the search engine ranking your page will receive. When yo create a title tag, include keywords and write it to catch the attention of the users be scanning lengthy lists of titles in search engine results.

For higher ranking, make sure the title tag matches headline text on the page. And be sure to use a different title tag for each page on your site. (Pages with the same title tag will often be ignored.)

5. Use Keywords in page headlines. Page headlines are important – to your visitor as well as to search engines. Use short keyword phrases, including hot button words and phrases. Avoid ‘fluff’ and generic words.

My advice – use a strong headline on the page, and use the same headline in the title tag.

6. Use interesting text. Search engines actually count all the words on a webpage, then rank those words by frequency of use. The more often you use a word or phrase(up to a point), the higher you will rank with that word or phrase in the search engine. For that reason, be sure to include words or phrases that are likely to be searched for on your pages.

My advice – Keep your text short, on topic, and packed full of keywords. Avoid useless and meaningless words, and certain phrases that will place you in the penalty box.

7. Use the AlT tags on all images. Search engines are starting to index sites by the images found on the site. They accomplish this by looking at all the image tags on the page, and cataloging the ALT tags accompanying the image. Obviously if you don’t use the ALT tag, then images on your site won’t be properly cataloged. When using the alt tag, be sure to use a keyword or phrase describing the content of the image.

8. Use the Title tag on links. Search engines look at all text on the site, including the title tag on the links on your site. Most sites still don’t use the link title tag, so when you do, you gain an advantage. The link title should be a short keyword or phrase.

My advice – Check out how the pages on my site have a left navigation menu filled with department names. I try to make these names keywords for my site, and the link to the departments all make use of the title tag. Doing it this way means that the search engine ranks the department names twice. Once as text, and again as a Link Title Tag.

9. Provide a Link Trail. Search engines coming to your site follow the links on the front page that lead into your site. These links should provide a 2 level trail to all pages on your site. If you don’t provide a link trail, the search engines probably won’t find all your pages. (And even if you do provide a ‘link trail’ – if you use the same title tag and Meta tags on your pages, the search engine may ignore all the pages beyond the first one.)

My advice – check out how every page on my site has a one click link trail to any department on the site. You are never more than two clicks away from any page. Plus every page has at least 30 different link trails (through the departments) making it easy for visitors as well as search engine spiders to move through the site.

10. Avoid the Penalty Box. Search engines are getting smarter every day, and they will penalize a site if it violates search engine rules. These rules include:

Keyword spoofing – using keywords not related to site content

Keyword spamming – pasting hundreds of copies of the keywords on the page just to get high ranking

Numerous doorway pages – using hundreds of index pages that do nothing but point to the site

Link Spamming – submitting links to the 500,000 link submission services

Page Redirects – not necessarily a major penalty, but can cause loss of ranking

Frames on Main Page – not necessarily a major penalty, but can cause loss of ranking

Flash Movie on Main Page – not necessarily a major penalty, but can cause loss of ranking

My advice: Keep in mind that search engines are intelligent software. When they visit a page they try to determine what the page is about, relying primarily on the titles, headlines, text, links, and images on the page. That’s why it is important to focus on those elements, and avoid the ones that can put you in the penalty box.

11. Check for errors. Before you submit your page to the search engines, run the page through an html checker and a spelling checker. Search engines do check and take into consideration spelling and html errors, and will penalize a page that has too many of either.

My advice – take the time to do it right. If you get a poor ranking on a search engine it might be six weeks before the search engine comes back to re-rank you. Get it right before you submit to the search engines, and then keep it right so when the search engine returns, you will continue to get high rankings.

12. Manually submit the site. Don’t be tempted to use an automatic site submission program. They don’t work, and can get you penalized. Better to manually submit your site to the top search engines. Yahoo, Google, MSN.

My advice – Start with Google.com, then yahoo.com, and then MSN.com. Each has a place to register your site with their search engine.

This may seem a lot of work, but if you do it right and get high rankings, it will pay off.

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for PublisherGate – membership website software

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Craige_Stacey
http://EzineArticles.com/?Twelve-Steps-to-Higher-Search-Engine-Placement&id=8012

By Leonardo Wood

After doing extensive research on SEO I have now found out how to optimize a website and currently have hundreds of my own web pages optimized to appear on the 1st page of Google. My methods are easy and anyone with a basic knowledge of the internet can use them to optimize their own website.

Where SEO is concerned you do not have to be at the mercy of your website designer, you can research what your website needs and then tell your website designer just what you want. Many website designers do not really have a clue when it comes to SEO so if you are in the know it will only help to give a boost the SEO of your site.

All you need to do is just learn a series of simple techniques on what to do to change your website to improve its performance on Google. As your website climbs in the Google rankings you will start receiving more visitors and can then use your website as an effective marketing and selling tool.

These simple techniques include researching your keywords, using your keywords in your page content, link building, using site maps, adding content to your site, etc.

SEO is very powerful and will help attract more visitors to your site but once you have them on your site you really need to be converting those visitors into customers to get the maximum return from your SEO efforts.

Want to know more about how you can get your website listed on the 1st page of Google check out my Free Report: SEO Secrets

Leonardo Wood specialises in teaching website owners how to do their own SEO.

For Instant SEO Tips to Help You Get Your Website on the 1st Page of Google click: SEO Tips

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By Leonardo Wood

Keyword research is a very important process that should be used in determining the best keywords to use to get the most visitors to your website.

Using keywords that have too much competition or, at the other end of the scale, are so far out that no one ever searches them can have a serious effect on how successful your SEO will be.

Here are some suggestions on how to decide on the best keywords to use and develop your keyword list:-

Firstly, decide on your main keyword eg. Restaurant in Boston

Then write down all the variants of these keywords:-

Restaurants in Boston
Restaurant Boston
Restaurants Boston
Boston Restaurant
Boston Restaurants
Restaurant in the Boston Area

Then come up with some alternative keywords relevant to Restaurants i.e.

Cafe
Places to Eat
Bistro etc.

Then replace the word Restaurant as in the above example with each of the alternative keywords e.g.

Cafe in Boston
Cafes in Boston
Cafe Boston
Cafes Boston
Boston Cafe
Boston Cafes
Cafes in the Boston Area

And so on.

Do this with each of the alternative keywords and this will expand your set of keywords and give you a nice list of highly relevant keywords for you to work from.

If you keep your keywords to a smaller local area initially this will ensure that you have a lot less competition than if you were trying to target national or even internationally. The best bet is to start small and then work your way up to a larger area.

Want to know more about how you can get your website listed on the 1st page of Google check out my Free Report: SEO Secrets

Leonardo Wood specialises in teaching website owners how to do their own SEO.

For Instant SEO Tips to Help You Get Your Website on the 1st Page of Google click:
SEO Tips

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leonardo_Wood
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