:Forest Folk

Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of
visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google?
And it’s not constantly improving your position in Google search
engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which
can take some time after working on your search engine marketing
campaigns.

I take this example from Google because I’ve experienced it some
time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining
a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic
sources that you haven’t exploited yet. We are still talking
about search engine traffic here.

What’s that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but
it’s a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It’s not
creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no
content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the
homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it
well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.

The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which
are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages
related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a
product for instance.

Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make
9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.

Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate
a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each
page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic
and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.

So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day
and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per
day for free. You see the potential now.

Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search
Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
are valuable keywords with lower competition.

If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com, a
keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking
and bring you traffic.

If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you
can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding
relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These
pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on
it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just
an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.

They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they
must have some optimized content which is readable by your
visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.

If you have a good website which is crawled by Google’s robot
called “Googlebot” often, your new pages will get spidered
and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of
targeted traffic.

But be careful when adding pages, don’t go in a frenzy with
this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a
sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in
Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once,
your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in
rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis
say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of
pages to be added.

Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key
is to research your keywords well first, work on your content
and create these pages afterwards.

Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will
attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword
phrases.

Good luck and happy research and optimizing.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as
it’s not modified in any way including the author bylines,
plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below.

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook
Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed,
a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for
the beginner to intermediate level webmaster.

Comments Off

Why is it that webmasters are so quick to blame Google if their website falls down the search rankings, or out of the rankings altogether? Can it never be their own fault?

I read an amusing forum post headed “What’s up with Google?”. The writer had a website just 2 months old, which had only had 2 visits from Googlebot, a Google robot. The poster was a bit grieved, and was blaming Google.

It seems they had extrapolated their own situation into one they had witnessed with other webmasters on another forum. They were also upset, this time by Google’s latest update, as their websites had been badly hit. Of course, the drop way down the rankings had seriously affected their income; what right had Google to do that to them, they were demanding to know?

So grieved were this group of webmasters they were trying to drum up support for a boycott of Google. Big G was too big for its boots and was going to be brought down by these few innocent souls. Who were they trying to kid, apart from themselves?

What was it these webmasters had in common that brought them together in this “bring down Google” brigade? Apparently, their websites were directories.

Now, let’s apply some intelligent marketing thought to this little situation as Google faces obliteration by a few small directory owners. As a company, Google has a tendency to get its basic marketing right, eventually. In the case of search, its customers are those using the Google search facility, as many millions of us do every day. So, Google’s first duty, when someone makes a search on a particular keyword or phrase, is to supply a list of what it considers the best websites for that search. Does that make Google the big bad monster? No, of course not; it’s trying to look out for its search customers.

I have been searching on the internet for many years. If ever I have searched for the omnipresent “widgets”, then it has been “widgets” I have typed in. Not once in my memory have I typed in “widget directory.” I have never even wanted to use a directory online; they take too long drilling down to find anything useful. As for the proliferation of online directories recently, they are often junk sites, using some automation software to create them in the first place. Many have been set up to deceive search engine robots into “thinking” they are valuable sites.

It is absolutely no surprise that Google has found a way of homing in on directories, if that is what they have done, and given them a shove down the rankings with their latest algorithm change. If their customer does a search on a keyword or phrase, that’s what they are looking for. They are not looking for a directory which, more often than not, is just a whole load of other links that may be related. I find such sites extremely irritating if I’m searching; am I the only one? I doubt it; people want to get directly to a site that has information on what they are looking for; something with added value.

No directory owner has the divine right to syphon off Google’s hard won search customers. Google is doing a decent job at marketing: trying to look after its customers. The directory owners calling for a boycott of Google are doing no such thing. They had found a way of getting high rankings, and now that method may have gone down the pan.

It is up to webmasters to do their own marketing, and Google is an important part of our market place. In the long run, we need to see Google as a customer and partner, as it sees us a customer and partner. Google is actually a very helpful company to webmasters, Google Sitemaps being a recent example of their desire to co-operate.

While some blinkered webmasters may see Google as an enemy (friend when they have a high ranking), it is up to the rest of us to try and apply some basic marketing practice. That means understanding what Google is looking for and trying to supply that need. After all, that is what Google does so successfully. We can all learn something.

Just look at Google’s Home Page. The message is: “Ok, we know you’re here to search, so get on with it. Here’s the search box.”

The message is not: “Hello, look at my pretty page. Do you like my Flash, and my clever graphics? And what about those links all over the place, aren’t they nice? You want to search? Hang on a minute, there’s lots of pictures for you to look at lower down, and how about going off to read about loads of other products. Oh, alright, you want to search; there’s a search box somewhere; near the bottom I think. You’ll find it….eventually.”

The secret of real marketing is to understand your marketplace as it is, and how it is likely to develop. Google has made it obvious for a long time what they want; quality content that fills the needs of their search customers.

Hands up anyone who’s really searching for a directory?

This Google search engine article was written by Roy Thomsitt, owner and author of the Change Direction website.

Comments Off

Bringing visitors to your site from the main Search engines is more of a process than one event. The first step is to make sure your webpages are’Search Engine friendly’. This process is also called ‘Search Engine Optimization(SEO). You can begin by checking your keywords and making certain you have the appropriate balance in the main body of your webpage, and that these keywords are in your title as well. The title may be the most important area of your site to put your primary keywords or keyword phrases. Be sure that you do not try to target more than a few keywords or keyword phrases.

Meta tags, which are the invisible tags at the top of your html code, are of less importance nowadays. But you should probably include your keywords there nonetheless, as the tags are still used by some search engines when ’spidering’ your site for inclusion in their database. When making your Alt tags for your images, be careful not to place too many keywords there as the search engines appear to be getting wise to this practice. This is often called “keyword stuffing and it is a shady or “black hat” seo practice. In severe cases it could possibly lead to your website being banned from the search index. Not a good thing. It is vitally important to have your site properly optimized before they are submitted to the primary search engines. Many individuals optimize each specific page for a different search engine, but I suggest that you focus on the biggest Search indexes like Google and Yahoo (which should not be confused with the Yahoo Directory, an entirely different entity although a part of the same portal). Some major Search Engines such as Lycos appear to be fading in relevence rather quickly so try to focus primarily on the big players for the time being. After the Title tag the next most important component of your site for putting keywords is in the body, the main part people see. As a general rule of thumb, you should have around six to seven hundred words in the body of your home page. A search engine optimization method that works well is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your targeted keyword. Then find the ratio of keywords are in the document and then be sure your page has a similiar ratio. A good place to find more information in this regard is searchenginewatch.com.

When designing html pages, be sparing with java scripting and particularly flash, because certain search engine have difficulty reading it properly. Google even advises this in it’s webmaster guidelines: “If fancy features such as […] Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.”. Whether the Search Engines recognize flash pages or not, you might decide not to use Flash regardless since many of your visitors may use slow connection and they will not necessarily be thrilled about waiting for your animated company logo to load. They may even be a tad upset about it. And then there are those who have yet to install a flash player. But If you are truly bent on using it then at try to at least provide links to other pages which have enouph text and keywords that the search engines can readily find.

On that note, also be wary of images when making your site map. If your site navigation employs image links, add text links so that search engines can find your pages. Another thing to be wary of in your site design is frames. Generally speaking, I advise agains them since the possible negative results seem to outweight the benefits. After you have optimized your html pages, the next step is to submit them. You can submit your web url by going to the “Add URL” pages of each search engine you want to be added to. It is probably best to do this yourself because each search index has it’s own instructions. You can find detailed information about this at searchengineguide.com. In many instances you can simply submit the homepage (index.html) and the rest of the website will be spidered thereafter. Web directories such DMOZ, Yahoo, Joe Ant and Web World Index will ask for a description and possibly some other data, while many search engines (like Google or Alexa) only ask for your URL or a URL plus email contact info. If you do not have time to submit your site yourself, there are a number free automated submission sites which can help, although they may not be as effective. Addme and Submitit are popular. If you go to Google or Yahoo just type “free url submission” and a variety of these sites will come up in the search results.

For related articles go to articles go to Home Business Resources and find more useful tips.

Ryan Joseph is a writer/researcher. More info at
http://www.home-business-match.com/

Comments Off