Search Engines like Google and Yahoo have become intelligent in the past 4-5 years. It is very difficult to game search engines nowadays by manipulating tags and keyword stuffing. For a new site it may take 6 to 9 months to achieve competitive rankings at Google. From SEO point of view, I recommend the following steps for launching a new website.


i) Registering a domain name

Pick a domain name which either has keywords associated with your product/service or your brand name. It is better to go for short domain names which are easy to remember. If your target market is global, go for a .com domain. If you are targeting a particular country or language, it is better to register a domain name in TLD of that country. For example, go for a .jp or .co.jp domain, if you are targeting Japan. I recommend you to register the domain for at least 2 years; more the better to gain the trust of search engines.


ii) Domain Hosting

Host your site with a reliable hosting company. Stay away from companies which allow hosting of pharmacy, gambling and adult sites, or have a history of serving spam. If you are targeting a particular country/language, it is advised to host your site in that country to boost your rankings in the local search engines for that country/language.


iii) Registering with Search Engines

Since search engines give important to domain aging and can track parameters like the registration date & first crawled date, you better register your site with search engines as early as possible. Even if your site is not fully ready, it is better to make a temporary one-two page site and register with the search engines at the earliest. Getting indexed in MSN may take only 3-4 days, whereas it may take 2-3 months to get indexed in Google and Yahoo. To speed up this process, you should build incoming links from authority websites. More the links a site receives, the less it is ignored by the search engines. It also reduces the Google sandboxing time for new sites. Submitting your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central also ensures that your site would get crawled and indexed regularly.


iv) Build trust with Search Engines

To build trust with the search engines, you should build your incoming links and content at a regular pace. Keep your content unique and relevant to your products/services. Building links from relevant websites will boost your rankings.

SEO alone can not help in making an internet based business successful. Though there are many successful internet millionaires, most web-based businesses fail. Here are some proven tips for building and growing an internet based business.


1. Target a unique niche

If you are creative enough, you can virtually sell anything on the internet. However, you should apply the basic principles of marketing before you decide what product or service you plan to sell on the web. It is better to go for niche segments which do not have many players in the field. If you go for a product for which the market is saturated, it would be difficult and expensive to rank your site high in search engines. You should be able to differentiate your product/services in such a way that the web community would get interested in your site and send you referrals too.


2. Skills and Passion

You should have special skills for the product/service you plan to sell, and have a functional business model to support your internet business. You and the people around you should have passion for the job. So, if you plan to sell used cars on the web, you need to know everything about used cars, and have the right people who can help you in fulfilling the orders. Many internet businesses fail because people do not have the passion for the products/services they sell.


3. Building Trust

Testimonials and referrals play an important role in making your website trustworthy. If you can write a blog on your site where you can show off your work and make efforts to make your business transparent, it could build a feeling of instant trust with the site visitors. Making your site useful with an array of features not available elsewhere also makes a good first impression.


4. Prevent duplication

Though it is very easy to duplicate content, if you can offer features which are difficult to duplicate, it will give you a definite competitive advantage.


5. Control Costs

To keep your internet business profitable, you need to cut costs ruthlessly. Working from home, outsourcing, part-time staff can help you control costs especially in the beginning.

By David Leonhardt


From the obvious to the "Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before", here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.


Be bold. Use the tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.


Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. Here is an example of deep linking, in this case to my personal happiness workbook.


Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?


Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.


First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page


Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?


Article exchanges. You've heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else's article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)


Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.


Not anchor text. Don't overdo the anchor text. You don't want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, "Gumbo Pudding Pop" occasionally, "Get gumbo pudding pops" as well, "Gumbo-flavored pudding pops" some other times, etc.


Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?


There you have it: 10 of the 52 Top SEO Tips, a free tip sheet that comes with Don't Get Banned By the Search Engines:


There is a lot more to search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings.



20 Hard Core SEO Tips - The Explanations



Change is the only constant you can count on in search engine optimizatioin. Although we often say that the fundamental principles of search engine optimization don’t change, pretty much everything else does. If you want to be really, really good at this, you cannot be inflexible. You cannot afford the luxury of becoming emotionally bonded to any particular idea.


Redesign your Web site once or twice a year. Why? Because you’ll find things you broke the last time around and you’ll be able to fix them. Because you’ll finally be able to tweak the optimization for pages you have known could do better but for which you never found the time to do anything. Because you’ll have an opportunity to improve your visitor experience and make your presentation more competitive (but avoid the “Web X.0 pitfall” — don’t marry your site to any particular concept).


Add 5 pages of content to your site every week. Why? Because it gives you opportunities to expand your search visibility. Because it gives you opportunities for more free links that actually help. Because it gives you opportunities to try out new ideas. Because it increases the value of your Web site.


Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year. Why? Because obviously those titles weren’t helping your least successful pages.


Stop using keywords in your URLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page.


Stop using keywords in your titles. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a Web page without stuffing your title, then you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. Titles and URLs are options, not requirements, in search engine optimization. Learn to understand and fully appreciate the difference between being able to do something and needing to do something.


Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question. Why? Because looking at someone else’s mistakes and brilliant ideas with an unemotional, critical, helpful point of view will only help improve your own self-analysis. Keep your ideas and opinions to yourself. Just share your feedback on how other people’s sites look. You’ll learn more faster by helping with your honest, gut-level reactions than by helping forum idiots attack people whose ideas they don’t agree with. You’ll also look more professional, too.


Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month. Why? So you have all your favorite advice in one easy-to-read-and-search compendium. Don’t sell it. Just use it.


Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step. Why? Because after a year of using all the advice you put in the previous one you’ll have a far better idea of just how much crap and bullshit you’re getting from SEO blogs and forums. But that also means your next SEO book will be ten times better than the last.


Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page). Why? You can’t do better than to nail the number 1 position for a query, so why not aim for a second query? If you can optimize a page forwards and backwards, you should be able to handle just about anything.


Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional. Why? It teaches you just how hard it is to build a good community, and maybe you’ll appreciate what “good community” really means before you act like an ass in an SEO forum or blog and flame someone else for disagreeing with you. But there is another reason. Keep reading to see if you can find it in the explanations given below.


Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you can never write too many advertisements. Your audience is always changing. Your venues are always changing. And GOOD ad copy (not the cheap, shlocky crap you see most of the time) makes GREAT meta description tags. BTW — you should write that ad copy for sites other than your own until you learn to stop using cheap, shlocky crap expressions like “Proudly announces”, “pleased to admit”, “best prices”, etc. Be informative. Be compelling. Be classy.


Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week. Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you should spend some time promoting your site while you learn how to become a better search optimizer. Besides, practice makes perfect.


Get a text editor like Wordpad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch. Why? Because when you’ve seen just how stupid your templated CSS code really is, you’ll begin to understand why ugly works better than pretty.


Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less. Why? Because you should never write a press release that starts out with, “John Shlock Smith the Shmuck proudly announces….”


Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site. Why? Because it’s an opportunity for you to create an honest, sincere resource that no one else on the Web has the ability to create. Because people are actually more interested in your opinion of OTHER people’s Web sites than your opinion of your own Web sites. Because if you haven’t found 20 sites you wish you had created that no one else has talked about in your regular Web communities, you need to spend less time with your buds and more time with the rest of the Web.


Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site. Put it into every forum profile you have created. Why? Because it makes you look confident, professional, and less like a shlocky self-promotional shmuck who doesn’t know what forums are for. More importantly, it will teach you to write compelling content (think of those 25-word advertisements I mentioned above).


Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site. Why? Because you’ll never compete with anyone harder to beat than yourself.


Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics. Why? Because you need to know what it takes to become an influencer without cheating through social media Web site spam.


Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site. Why? Because I’ve had to suffer through the frustration of not being able to take the computer away from someone who wants to do it their own way. Misery loves company. Besides, it teaches us to be humble and appreciate the people who at least listen half the time.


Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts. Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months. Why? Because you need a competitive advantage that you cannot possibly get from using someone’s backlink checking tool. Because you need to understand and appreciate that there is more to the Web than links. Because you need to be one step ahead of the other guy, who may very well have his own metrics in place before you even get started.



20 Hard Core SEO Tips - What They Mean




You have to keep moving forward. When you stop learning about search engine optimization the idea of getting back into the game becomes overwhelming. Worse, if you become dependent upon any one tip or technique, you hobble yourself in ways you cannot possibly imagine.


Let the idiots spend their days arguing in the SEO blogs and forums. They don’t need your help to look stupid.


You can learn from other people by watching them, helping them, promoting their sites, and putting the community ahead of yourself. They won’t always appreciate what you do. But you can knock a self-promotional shmuck out of the search results any day of the week if you know more about search engine optimization than he does.


You get to that point by doing it, not by talking about it in SEO blogs and forums.

For those of you loyal readers who wish I would just take a break from the theoretical musings, here is the type of list of SEO tips I rarely give out. You may have seen some or all of these ideas before but I’ll explain some of the benefits for each tip below.



20 Hard Core SEO Tips - The List




  1. Redesign your Web site once or twice a year.

  2. Add 5 pages of content to your site every week.

  3. Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year.

  4. Stop using keywords in your URLs.

  5. Stop using keywords in your titles.

  6. Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question.

  7. Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month.

  8. Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step.

  9. Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page).

  10. Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional.

  11. Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone.

  12. Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week. Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone.

  13. Get a text editor like Wordpad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch.

  14. Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less.

  15. Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site.

  16. Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site. Put it into every forum profile you have created.

  17. Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site.

  18. Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics.

  19. Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site.

  20. Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts. Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months.

It’s the dream of every blogger to get a lot of traffic, but something first time bloggers often don’t realize is that just publishing a few posts will not get them regular readers. I am no expert in getting traffic, but I have been working on a few things which has increased my traffic a lot.
When I first started this blog I used to get only about 10-20 visitors a day. After the first few months, I started getting traffic from Google and other search engines and my unique visitors increased to about 100 a day. Now for the past few weeks I have been getting about 550 visitors a day.


The sudden increase in traffic I had from about 100-500 visitors was mainly because my recent posts were linked back from many sites. So yes, linking can get you traffic depending on which sites link to you. Links can be thought of as the currency of blogs.
I received a lot of emails (even while writing this) from bloggers asking how they can get more traffic, I hope this helps…


Blog Design
A good design won’t bring you traffic but it will get your visitors to stay longer. No one will stay on your blog too long if the layout or navigation annoys them. So the first thing to do is to select a good theme for your blog and then design your own header. The goal is to have a unique blog that stands out from all other blogs (making your visitors want to come back again and again).
Often bloggers select a theme and forget about the design. The problem here is that your blog will look similar to hundreds of blogs that use the same theme.
Your design should allow your visitors to access the main pages of your blog and to contact you easily. Your blog should have an about page and an author photo. The more a reader knows about you, the more they trust your content. You can find more info on this on my recent post - Common Weblogging Mistakes.


Quality Content
Your blog should have good content inorder to keep your visitors coming back. By good content I mean well written posts that are unique and useful at the same time. Writing original content is definitely the key.


Do not copy-paste contents directly from other blogs to your blog. Re-blogging is a bad thing and will kill your traffic. The solution here is to write that content in your own words adding your own unique ideas to it. And don’t forget to link to the original post.
The more engaged you are with your content, the more interesting it will be.


Get Links
The more links you have the more traffic you get. Like I said before links are the currency of blogs. So how do you go about getting links to your blog?
Well written posts are often linked back by many sites. You are lucky if you get linked by heavily trafficked sites.


Another way is to get links from other bloggers. Link to their blogs and ask them politely to do the same for you. Also visit the ‘links’ section of a blog (if they have one) and check for a link exchange form. If there is, submit your blog after linking to theirs.
You may also take part in other link exchanging programs.


Join Conversations
Most of my first visitors came to my blog because I left a comment on theirs. When you comment on a blog leave your blog address. Often people like to know who is reading their blog and will come visiting you.Readers of that blog will also pay a visit to your blog.But do not comment just for the sake of it. Make genuine comments that relate with the post. In the process you will not only get visitors to your blog but might also make friends.


Take part in Blog Top Sites
Submitting your blog to Blog Top Sites like topblogsites.net, blogtopsites.com and top100bloggers.com is another way to get more traffic. These networks make your blog easier to find and search for as well. After you sign up for an account on their website, you just need to copy a bit of code and paste it somewhere on your blog.
You can also take part in blog traffic exchange communities like BlogExplosion and BlogClicker.
To join these blog traffic exchange communities - visit the site, sign up, confirm your account, add your blog to the member directory and then start visiting other member’s blogs.
Basically, you need to earn ‘credits’ in order to get blog traffic exposure. These credits are often gained by visiting other member’s blogs. When you have enough credits, your blog becomes eligible for promotion. Usually, a link or graphic to your blog will be shown on the main site or in fellow member’s blogs. This is how other people find your blog.
Of course, the more members there are in the community, the more potential visitors. So, if you are part of a blog traffic community, it’s good to promote the communities you belong to as well. Besides, when you promote the community through a referral system, you get more credits too.


Tag Technorati
Technorati is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. People find your blogs easily when people search by technorati tags. Technorati will rank your blog based on the number of links from other websites.The higher your rank the easier your blog is to find when people search for things.
If you do not have a Technorati account, signup here. After you have setup the main settings, such as your profile, you need to claim your blog.
Make good use of Technorati tags by tagging every keyword in each of your posts. If you use WordPress, I recommend Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) which makes tagging Technorati a lot easier.
By tagging your post effectively you will get a lot of quality traffic to your blog.

Follow these simple rules for search engine optimization and your blog will rank much higher in Search Engines.


Use your primary keyword in your blog domain
The first thing to do is to ensure that your blogs URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. Using the targeted keyword in subdomains also helps.

For example, if you want to start a HTML tutorial site then the primary keyword you want your URL to contain is html. So choose a URL like www.htmlhelp.com.

You can also use the keyword in http://webmaster-vn.com

Use your primary keyphrase in the title of your posts
If your primary key phrase is html help make sure that the word html and help appear in your blog headers such as H1 and H2 tags as well as the title of each of your posts.

Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post
If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post. The theory is that the more times a keyword appears within a Webpage, the more relevant the page is likely to be for someone searching those keywords.

But do not overdo this by repeating the same keywords over and over again. Google bots can find out if a keyword is too frequent on a page and might just remove your site from their index.

Use your keywords in the anchor text of links
Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages of your blog. Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily
Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

Get backlinks from other blogs
You need as many links as possible to link back to your posts or blog because it will help you build pagerank and get your blog to rank higher in search engines. The more links you have the higher your blog is ranked in Technorati helping your blog to be found easily.

So how do you get backlinks?

The first thing to do to get high-quality links is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories.
Start by submitting your blog to all the directories listed on this page:

http://freesitetemplates.info/directories/list-free-directory-update-per-day-submit-here-t146.html

http://mm99.info

Link exchanging with other similarly-themed blogs will help you to form richly interlinked networks or communities.
If you find an interesting article on another blog, link to it generously. The trackback will become a link back to your blog.
Lastly posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs will help you get backlinks. Regularly post legitimate comments in similarly-themed blogs with high traffic to get many backlinks.

Update your blog frequently
Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

Stick with your blog
Once you start posting on your blog, stick with the same domain or you could end up losing a lot of your traffic and regular readers.

Also stick with the topic you selected for your blog. If it’s about pets don’t suddenly switch to another topic such as Gadget’s because you will loose traffic.

Spider:
A spider is a robotic program that downloads web pages and looks at the code of the page. The spider doesn't have any visual components at all, if you right click on most web pages and go to view source that is what the spider can see.

Crawler:
While the spider is downloading pages, it is the crawler's job to strip apart the page and look for links. It is the crawler's job to look at the links and then decide where the spider should go next determined on the links or a pre-defined list of URL's.

Indexer:
It is the indexers job to analyse different aspects of a web page. It looks at Entities such as, titles, headings, links, text, constructs, bold, italic, and other style portions of a page that are ripped apart and analysed.

Database:
The database is where all the results and pages are stored, considering that there are an estimated 10 billion web pages on the Internet this can take a huge amount of storage space, which will be increasing indefinitely.

Search Engine Results Page:
The results page is where the clever stuff takes place; this is where the engine decides which page matches the query that was entered in the search box of their home page.