Discover the Answers to the Top 10 SEO Questions

Any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this 'expert' advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing. Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they're looking for, in the places they are looking, they'll find you and place you in their results when a person is looking for your information.

The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking...what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your webpage content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.

2. How Important is SEO?

Let's just put it this way. What's better, a few visitors who stumble upon your website or hundreds of visitors that go to your website with the direct intention of learning more or making a purchase?

With more and more people searching and shopping online, getting on the first page or two of the search engine results can mean the difference between keeping your day job and becoming an internet millionaire.

3. What are Text Links?

Links are just one of the tools you can use to increase your search engine optimization. The more quality links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. Text links are links that contain only text. Wikipedia is a great place to examine internal text links. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them they are taken to a different page on the same website. The kind of text links you're looking for will be text links that will take readers from your article, ebook, or web copy to your website.

An excellent tool to generate incoming links is to write copy for online audiences like article directories, blogs, and ezines and insert text links in the copy. Webmasters will link to the content and thus to your site. Additionally, when you allow free reprints of your copy and provided the links are maintained, you're encouraging links to your website.

4. What are Link Farms and Link Exchanges?

Search engines don't accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality company. This means you don't want to participate in link farming. If a search engine suspects your links to be lacking, they'll actually penalize you. Link farming or link exchanging is essentially the process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase your search engine ranking. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites. Stay away from link farms. When you generate a link from another site, it had better be relevant and coming from a real web site.

5. What is Duplicate Content?

The definition of duplicate content is web pages that contain substantially the same content. Search engines will penalize you for this. How do you avoid duplicate content? Don't publish the same article in several locations. There are many tools available online to help you re-write your content so that it is 30%, 40%, and even 50% different. However, the best way to avoid duplicate content is to simply write new content.

6. How do I Find the Right Keywords?

There are several steps to finding the most profitable keywords. The first step is to generally do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords you think people will use to find your products. The next step is to research supply and demand for those particular keywords. Supply means how many other websites are using those same keywords and demand is how many people are looking for those particular keywords.

The key is to find keywords with high demand and relatively low supply. There are many effective and useful keyword tools to help you find this information and to generate keyword ideas. Once you decide on a few keywords, it may be useful to do a bit of testing before you commit to them.

7. How do I Optimize My Web Pages?

Placing your keywords in the right location is a good start to optimizing your web pages. Search engines look to the headings, subheadings, domain name, and title of your website. They also look in the content on your page and primarily focus on the first paragraph.

Try to get a domain name with your primary keyword included. When you include your keyword in your URL it tells the search engine spiders immediately what your site is about.

Title Tag. Your title tag is the line of text that appears on search engine results pages that acts as a link to your site. This is a crucial element of your webpage as it describes to your visitors what your page is about.

If you view your source code, your title tag will look something like this:

Keeping your title tags brief, descriptive, up to date, and keyword rich will help to increase the relevance of your site in the eyes of the search engines, as well as giving your potential visitors a good idea of what they can expect from your site.

Meta Tags have lost their importance to the search engines, however, it is still helpful to place your keywords in your meta tags. In your source code they look something like this:

8. Do I Need to Submit My Site to The Search Engines?

The simple answer is - no. Search engine spiders are always out there doing their job and collecting information. Every time you update your website, add content, or change your keywords, the search engines capture the information and record it. However, if you want to be listed in a directory, like the DMOZ Open Directory Project, then you will need to submit to those.

9. What are Spiders?

Search engine spiders are also called web crawlers or bots. They're basically automated programs which scan websites to provide information to search engines often for the purpose of indexing or ranking them.

10. How does Content Help My SEO?

Content is one of the best tools to improve your search engine ranking. It is a great place to emphasize keywords, encourage linking to your site, and increase traffic. The key to content is to make sure you're offering quality content and you're updating your website and your content frequently. Content can be provided in many forms including:

• Blogs

• Forums and chat rooms

• Articles

• Reviews

• Case studies

• Reports

• How to guides

• Tutorials

• e-books and much more.

By Jeremy Gislason (c) 2009

Learn How to Make Money Online With no False Promises

If you want to learn how to make money online the right way, with no hype and no false promises, then you will have to make the effort to ignore all these seemingly unbelievable offers that are being made to you. If you have recently lost your job, then you are vulnerable, and prey to every shark in the internet waters – and there are lots of them.

I know what it is like because I was like you. I lost my job, and tried to make it online but found it very hard. I spent a lot of money trying to learn how to make money online: one lump sum of $6,500 to be taught what I now know was elementary stuff. I was taken for a ride, and when I eventually found out that the Corey Rudl that I paid for this was one of the most well respected internet millionaires online, I was disillusioned.

These guys have no shame. They are still at it. I have just been offered an unbelievable opportunity, only about 40 slots left, to learn how to make $300 a day that can expand to many times that. The guy selling his ideas that made him so much money is doing it because he wants to ‘give something back’. Why do I find it difficult to believe that?

Why not just carry on earning his ‘many times’ 300 bucks a day? Why go to the bother of having a website designed and everything else involved in marketing his offer when he is already earning at least $30,000 a month if we are to believe him? Personally I am sick of it all, and after a few years in this business trying to make a living have concluded that they are all in it together; there is a clique of well-known names, and I know them all; they help each other to screw the rest of us.

You won’t learn how to make money online from these guys. The way that I did it was to teach myself, and then to figure out what these guys were actually doing. Many of them were software engineers, designing software to carry out keyword research, or to enable you to check your website statistics or something else in that vein. Others were ex-sales guys who knew how to lie, and yet others would come up with a good idea, run it to death till it was no longer working, and the sell it to us showing how much money they made from it – only it couldn’t work any more because:

• Google had banned it, or


• Clickbank had banned it, or


• Technology and rules had changed and it was no longer any good.

These are the only circumstances under which these guys are going to give you their internet secrets. That’s a fact. So what is the best way to learn how to make money online? Honest truth? There is no best way. I have found that there are several ways, and they can be made to work, but they won’t earn you 300 bucks a day.

Perhaps two or three together might, and if you used each of them you could make a good living online. It’s the old saying: make $20 a day from one website and all you need do is to do the same with another 50 websites and you have a grand a day. Sure – only the guys that say that aren’t doing it. So why not if it’s so easy?

You can learn how to make money online if you are prepared to accept that you won’t do it overnight. If you are prepared to learn the groundwork, and then build up from a solid foundation, it is possible to make a good living. That’s what I found, and part of the way that I do that is what I am doing right now: writing this article. Article writing, article marketing, call it what you want. It doesn’t matter. It lets me advertise free.

That might not seem a lot to you right now, but it will, believe me. Free advertising is worth every penny you pay for it, and that’s not all that there is to online success. It’s taking every opportunity that comes, knowing what to do with it and making the most of it. You don’t have to make a fortune from every opportunity, but you should remember what I said earlier: make $20 dollars from one website. . .

Suddenly it looked possible to me, and do you know what the major factor in all this was? Education! I don’t mean college education, though I have that. I mean learning how to get things working online. How the internet works. How the World Wide Web works, and how to use what I learned about marketing and advertising and designing websites to actually sell stuff online.

Not just my writing skills that I did as an article ghostwriter, but how to use the online tools that are available free to everybody, and the genuine information available, not that trash given to us by millionaires that feel like screwing us for another million. How to use all that to make money online.

It can be done. You can learn how to make money online. I had my fill of false promises and being sold redundant software and redundant ideas. I did it and so can you. You might just survive with your online home business, but you must learn the basics – that’s where the strength of your home business will come.

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This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

5 Tips for Saving Money on Your PPC Campaign

Do you feel like you are spending a lot of money on PPC but that you are getting little in return? For small business owners and internet entrepreneurs, spending even a couple thousand dollars on PPC can feel like an incredible amount of money. To ensure that your ads actually bring your business results and to make the most out of your PPC investment, implement some of these money-saving tips.

1. Make sure your ads are geographically targeted. If you are a dry cleaner in Brooklyn, only place ads for people in your local area. This will help to lower ad impression, raise CTR, and give you better ROI and a higher quality score.


2. Use the negative keywords match feature to your advantage. When you use the negative keywords match feature, you can filter out keywords for which you do not want your ads to show. The words “free” and “cheap” are common elements of negative keyword phrases. For example, if you sell web templates, surely you don’t want people searching for “free web templates” to click on your ad. You will have to pay for those extra clicks and all of those unwanted impressions will lower your CTR. Use the negative keywords match feature to filter out such negative keywords. However, you may find that some negative keywords would be of benefit to your campaign. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, choose “negative” in the drop down menu under Match Type, and determine which negative keywords may serve you.


3. Create separate ad groups, ads, and landing pages. Rather than targeting a slew of keywords with one ad and one landing page, group similar keywords in individual ad groups, create individual ads for them, and then point them to your designated landing pages. By doing so, you can improve your CTR and conversion rates because the landing pages will be more relevant to the terms that users are searching for.


4. Use ad scheduling. Ad scheduling allows you to control the day and time that your ads appear. For example, if your business offers a special Tuesday deal, you can schedule your ad campaign so that your ads promoting the Tuesday deal only show on Tuesdays. Or if you are running your ads 24 hours a day, you might find that by running them only during a certain time frame of the day instead, you get better conversions. Let’s say you have a health website. You will probably get more clicks and conversions in the morning for keywords like, “morning after pill,” “morning sickness,” “morning headache,” and “hangover.”


5. Don’t use broad match. Many people are simply unaware of the different keyword match features that are available in Adwords. By default in an Adwords campaign, your keywords are set as a “broad match.” The problem with broad match is that your ads will show up when people search for different variations of your keywords, even if they are not on your keyword list. Google is likely to consider many words as relevant when they are really not. Use the “phrase” keyword match type to ensure that your ads only show up when people search for the exact keywords on your list.

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com