Lewis Talbert Austin, Texas SEO Guide

Author: Danny Brown

Getting traffic to either your website or blog is one of the most important factors for many people. While businesses may have thousands of dollars in advertising and marketing budgets to bring traffic to their website, lone bloggers and website owners aren’t so lucky; therefore, they have to look at other methods to bring visitors to their part of the web.

Since it can be a long drawn out process, a lot of people get extremely frustrated and resort to underhand tactics such as blackhat SEO to achieve the traffic and visitor volume they’re after. Blackhat SEO is a method of using highly suspect and questionable tactics to make your blog or site look more popular than it actually is. These tactics can range from buying links to your site; placing keyword stuffed pages on your site, but hiding them from public view; and submitting false pages to the search engines.

While these tactics may work in the short term they will always fail, and the penalties can be very harsh. Google, in particular, doesn’t look favorably on blackhat tactics and will blacklist your site from its search engine if you’re found guilty of using them. Considering that Google accounts for over two thirds of all search engine results, and you can see why its not a good idea to upset them. So if blackhat tactics don’t work, how do you get traffic to your site?

Simple - unique content that is frequently updated, latent and organic keywords, relevant inbound links and community participation. This is the only way that you will climb the search engines, and maintain a healthy position once you’re on the top pages.

Unique Content
People that visit your blog or website are just like you - they don’t want to read rehashed information or poorly written tips and advice. Instead, they want to know why something works the way it does, or what makes something tick. They’re looking for you to provide that information, and this is where unique content comes in. By providing fresh, original unique content that both advises and entertains, you will gain far more traffic than just recycling someone else’s work.

Organic Keywords
Combine this content with strategically placed keywords and keyword phrases and the effect will be even more dramatic. This is where many people go wrong, unfortunately, and basically drown a web page in keywords. The aim is to have content that is keyword-rich without actually looking like it is, and this is where organic keywords come into effect. Use natural phrases built around your keywords - “online GPS dealers”, for example, as opposed to simply “GPS”. Use your keywords at the start of your content and at the end for maximum effect as well.

Relevant Inbound Links
One of the best ways to increase your search engine rankings, and in turn bring more traffic to your site, is by having other sites link to you. The more inbound links you have, the more popular and relevant your site looks to the likes of Google. However, don’t just have any website linking to you - have ones that are relevant to what your site is about. This will increase the authority to the links, and help you climb the search engine ladders. The best way to get relevant inbound links is to become part of the online community.

Community Participation
Everyone’s heard of forums and discussion boards - but did you know that they can act as a great way of increasing traffic to your site? By participating in forum and message board discussions, you’re actively making new friends. These new friends will then check out your website and if they like what they see, they’ll tell their friends and so on. Pretty soon you’ll have a pretty good line of traffic coming to your website, all from a simple message on an online forum.

There are many other ways to increase traffic to your site without resorting to blackhat SEO tactics - article marketing campaigns as well as search engine optimized press releases distributed online, and social media networks like Digg, Newsvine and Technorati. All of them are highly effective at gaining an audience for your site, and they use ethical SEO tactics into the bargain - trust me, it’s the best approach.

Author: Robert Palmer-7155

The phrase internet marketing” is one that is quite broad to say the least. The fact of the matter is that internet marketing may mean one thing to you, but to another it could paint a different picture entirely. But although you may see this as a problem, it is actually a good thing. This means that internet marketing is a vast industry that can be tackled in a number of different ways.

If you want to get started with internet marketing you will need to learn a bit more about this industry. First off, why do you need internet marketing skills? The main reason for this is if you own a website. When you have a website you will want to drive traffic to it. And of course, internet marketing is the best way that this can be done.

When it comes to getting started with internet marketing, you should gather as much information as possible. This is a popular topic, and for this reason you should not have any problems finding plenty of information both on and offline. Just make sure that when you are searching for internet marketing information that you are getting it from people who are knowledgeable.

If internet marketing is a bit out of your realm, your next best bet is to get in touch with a firm that specializes in this. There are many companies that will work on your behalf to make sure that your internet marketing campaign is a success. Sure, you will have to pay for this service, but in the end you will more than make your money back.

As you can imagine, getting started with internet marketing is only the tip of the iceberg. After you have decided that you need to form a marketing campaign, you will then need to look into all of your options. As mentioned above, internet marketing is a large field and you can do many things to make this work to your advantage.

Overall, to learn about internet marketing you will want to do your own research and also consider hiring a firm to work on your behalf.

Author: Just Tupeu
The goal of this article is to give you some concrete guidelines that you need to follow when you’re optimizing your page. Some of the factors that I’ll present have a greater impact on the search engines and others have quite a bit of controversy around them. I’ll mention this supplementary information on each factor and I hope to make it clear to everybody.

Here are the factors :

1. The title tag

It is generally accepted that the title tag had, has and surely will have a great amount of importance in the eyes of a search engine. So be sure to make it descriptive for your site, unique for each of your page and also readable.

2. Keywords used in your document

Again, a factor with very little controversy around it and that is considered to have a big significance for your SEO. In short, if you want to rank well for a specific key word, you need to create good and quality contest related to that key word.

3. Internal linking structure

Be very careful on how you link to your internal pages. Choose descriptive anchor text and make sure every page is available within 3 clicks from your home page. Also, an internal page linked from your most important pages will probably rank pretty good, while a page buried deep inside your site will have a hard time getting crawled and indexed.

4. Unique content

Having content that has been copied from another older and more significant website will get you nowhere. You will get banned and it will probably take a long time until Google decides to take another go at your website.

5. Outgoing links

Choosing to link to the right websites may actually prove helpful. It is best to link to websites related to your content, but careful about overdoing it, or you might lose a considerable amount of visitors.

6. Website age

Your website age seems to play a smaller role in Yahoo and MSN algorithms, as new but content rich website seem to be able to rank well soon after they have been indexed. With Google, it’s an entirely different story, as it seems to prefer older domains, even though their content is not as good as new websites.

7. The meta description tag

Alot less valued than in the past, because of the spamming it got, the description tag is still a tag to use because it has a bit of influence on the search engines, and even more, it may entice the people who search for your key words to click on your website.

8. Key words in your URL

Using your targeted keywords in your URL can tell the search engines that your website is more significant, and place it on a higher position. Use hyphens ( - ) to separate your keywords, or simply join them ( example : key1key2.com ). Don’t use _ , because it is treated as a different keyword.

9. Alt and title tags

Using the alt and title tags for your images can also prove helpful, especially for images you can click on, as these tags will act just like the anchor text on a regular link.

10. H1, bold, italic and strong tags

Highly controversial, it seems that these tags still keep a little amount of importance, although alot less in the past, because they have been heavily spammed. Don’t use them too much, or you might trigger a spam filter.

11. Page depth

In short, don’t expect a webpage buried deep inside your site to rank well. Still, it isn’t impossible it that page gets alot of inbound links or links from your most important internal pages.

12. Webpage language

Choosing the right website language can prove useful for regional searches, as your website may get a boost if the search is being made from a regional search engine ( example : google.jp ) or from an IP address in the same region.

13. Rate of content change

Some web pages rank well just by not changing for a long time, which shows they offer strong information, and others update their content very frequently and still manage to rank well. My advice is don’t edit your pages just for the sake of fooling the search engines. If you do edit your pages, do it for your visitors.

14. Webpage size

Webpage size ( both in KB and in the number of words ) is not a very important factor, but you can notice that, for the highly competitive keywords, only websites with a considerable amount of content about that subject manage to rank well.

15. W3C validation

Although it is highly unlikely that a crawler checks if your website is W3C valid, validation is useful because you give the spider information about the char set you use, so it can interpret your page correctly. And, if it’s a standard nowadays, why not go with it ?

Author: Joshua Wills

If you’re a small business with a website, but no SEO plan, you’re missing an excellent opportunity to promote your products or services. Plus, SEO is not very expensive - with a moderate amount of time and money, you can start getting traffic from the major search engines.

Assuming you’re ready to start optimizing your website for top rankings on Google, Google UK, Yahoo UK, Yahoo, MSN, etc, there are three basic steps you should follow in your SEO plan.

Step 1 - Choose your keywords.

You first need to choose the keywords that you want to rank well for. I’d suggest that you start with 3-5 main keywords.

Keep in mind that bigger, more completive keywords are much harder to rank well on. You want to choose keywords that quite a few people search for, but that the competition is low to moderate on. You can check the search volume and competition for a keyword with overture. Use Overture’s keyword suggestion tool to check the monthly search volume, and the bid prices tool to check on the competition. (Generally, the higher the top bids for a keyword are, the more competitive the keyword is.)

Step 2 - Optimize your site.

The easiest way to optimize the pages on your site is to use a free tool like WebCEO. This tool will check and analyze your pages according to the search engine algorithms, to ensure that you have the correct keyword density, etc, for your selected keywords. WebCEO comes with plenty of documentation, so I won’t include instructions in this article.

Step 3 - Build links to your site.

Building inbound links to your site is actually the most important part of SEO. There are many ways to build links to your site. A few of the best methods are link exchanges, directory submissions, and article submissions. One could write an entire book (in fact, many have been written), on building links, so I won’t go further into the details in this article.

If you are SEOing for a particular country, like the UK, be sure that you either have your site hosted in that country and / or your domain uses that country’s extension.

The principles in this article should give you a good start in getting the knowledge you need to SEO your site for top search engine rankings. Have fun!

Author: Paul Steven

A website alone won’t make you money or get your services known - no matter how good it is - if people don’t know it’s there how are they supposed to buy from it or know you exist?

Imagine you are about to launch a new website. You have viewed and critiqued the search engine results pages for your niche and feel that your site has a credible chance of breaching those top positions and soon enough will be driving traffic, leads and sales straight to your door.

Launch date goes by and so do the weeks and months - you scan your web traffic stats, barely a blip. Its a familiar story. Like any off-line business you need to work hard promoting your services or products - you need to make people aware that you exist. On-line SEO Marketing is the ideal solution to expose your website to your targeted audience and propel your on-line reputation.

Search Marketing Visibility

There are many services that a website can use to help boost its visibility on-line. Each on their own can generate traffic to your site, new or old, but together they are a potent force.

The potential for sites to excel on-line is exciting indeed. Traffic can be driven by so many differing factors and a website does not have to be held to being reliant on just the search engines. Although, if its conversion you are after then this is still the staple source for the best on-line revenue avenue.

The following are considerations that I would tell an on-line venture to consider - seriously - if they wanted their site to be visible:

Pay Per Click is a fast way to get your site noticed on-line. It can be expensive but if your geared for conversions then this can produce a speedy return on investment.

SEO is a specialized area where your site undergoes specific attention to make it as search engine friendly as possible for your desired keywords. Highly effective when done correctly and can generate traffic and sales long after an SEO campaign has finished.

Blogging is a great way to add fresh content to your site, allows readers to participate in communication via comments, builds a community readership, can help drive traffic quickly to your site.

Link Building can cover many areas including directory submissions, article releases, press releases, forum participation, blog commenting, social media bookmarking, link baiting.

Social Media Marketing is still in its infancy but no matter if your advertising within its boundaries or submitting posts or voting on submissions it is an effective way of creating a buzz much like a real world underground word-of-mouth scenario.

On-line Networking places such as Twitter or Facebook. Applications where the ping is all powerful as in Skype or Messenger. And still the grand-daddy of them all the on-line forum is a great place to make a noise about your site.

Viral Marketing no matter if its email, video or pod-cast if you make the right noise to the right people this can fly and drive many-a-visitor and link to your site in a very short timescale.

By approaching and embracing Search / SEO / Social Marketing you are giving your site a fighting chance to being as visible as possible and creating a successful online venture.

Author: Robert Emmerson

How to Generate Traffic using Viral Marketing.

If you look around the internet at some Blogs, you will see a button saying something like “Digg this” or “Delic.io.us” etc. These are shortcuts to some of the 46 plus “Social Book Marking” sites that have sprung up all over the internet. If you have ever wondered what those are or why they are there read on.

What a Social Bookmarking site is about is telling other members what you have seen, liked and why you liked it, on the internet. They are extremely popular right now, so they are a SEO dream.

If you draw the attention of the community, enormous traffic will be sent to your site. even if you don’t you will come across the few that will like what you have and poke around your website. The bookmarks can be categorized in virtually any topic, so you wont be sending people looking for something totally unrelated to your site.

I have mentioned in prior articles the importance of building links to your site. Each post on these Social Bookmarking sites counts as a link to you. As I said there are over forty of these sites, so you could literally put forty links to everything on your site if you had the time to visit them all, but who does?

I have come across a very cool little tool, and yes it is free, to help with all of this. There is a site called “SocialMarker” that will allow you to post to ALL of them in an almost automatic way. You simply select which Social Book Marking sites to submit to from a list. You can pick and choose, with various types of sorting, from the most popular, to those that do follow, or just one or two you want to use.

I am not talking about spamming, I hate spamming. I am talking about semi-automating what you are doing. You will still have to enter the codes to prove you are human, and work through some quirks on each site, but instead of spending hours going from site to site you are brought to each site’s submit section with the fields usually pre-filled for you.

If you are not a member of the sites you will need to become a member, which will take some time just filling in the forms and replying to the confirmation emails, but once you do that you are done.

Once you have become a member, all you have to do is click the button, or install the button on your browser (took me 3 seconds to figure that part out, it is just drag and drop). Hit the submit tab in the top right of the SocialMarker site, and you’re off. When you are done on the first site click the next tab, and do the same thing, until you have submitted your website to as many, or few, of the Social Bookmarking sites that you choose.

A very big benefit of this is that your link will be noticed, and indexed by the major search engines sometimes within minutes. The reason for this is the popularity of these sites, there is constantly new information being posted, so the crawlers keep coming back for more.

Author: Sean Ray

SEO is one of the most effective things you can do online, getting your web site optimized in such a way that the search engines will reward you by basically sending traffic your way. SEO is not really that simple, but the bottom line is, if your page is optimized both on page and off, you generally get higher natural search engine rankings, which leads to traffic for you.

If you’ve spent time online recently, you’ve probably read the term “SEO,” or “Search Engine Optimization. But what does it mean, exactly? “SEO” is a term that is used to describe the process by which traffic to a particular site is increasingly generated by search engines by way of search results. The quality of visitor traffic to a site can be measured by analyzing how often a visitor who uses a specific keyword phrase in a search actually performs what is known as a “conversion action.” That is, how often those visitors make a purchase, download materials, request information, or interact with the site in any other way that indicates interest in the product or service the site offers.

Simply put, SEO is marketing through an understanding of how search algorithms work combined with a knowledge of what human users might search for. The end goal is to create a site that contains words for which people will likely search when looking for information such as that contained on your site.

SEO is an extremely powerful tool online – use SEO wisely