Improve Search Engine Ranking

By Mike Gillishttp://www.mgsecrets.com/blog

Visit my blog for more SEO and Internet Marketing Strategies

This is a free report. You can give it away or add it as a bonus.The only restriction is you can't change any of the content.

Table Of Contents

10 Costly Search Engine Mistakes To Avoid

Link Relevance

How Linking To A Bad Neighborhood Can Get Your Site Penalized

Natural Search Engine Optimization Linking Strategies

5 Ways To Get Inbound Links

The Secret Of Using Class C IP’s

4 Tips For Raising Your Search Engine Rankings

How To Become An SEO Ninja

10 Costly Search Engine Mistakes To Avoid

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It's the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.

Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it's going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a "pretty" website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement.

Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site...after all, isn't that what you want.

1. Not Using Keywords Effectively

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating The Same Keywords

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing Pages From Other Websites

How many times have you heard or read that "this is the Internet and it's ok" to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don't do it. It's one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using Keywords That Are Not Related To Your Website

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as "sex", the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn't have anything to do with the page topic.

However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword Stuffing

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the "alt=" HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying On Hidden Text

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn't hurt. Wrong.... Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying On Tiny Text

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming All Search Engines Are The Same

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using Free Web Hosting

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting To Check For Missing Web Page Elements

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever.

Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase.

Link Relevance

We are constantly being told by SEO experts and the Search Engines that the importance of a link is determined by its page rank and relevance to our own web sites. Consequently when developing a linking strategy we should only be concerned with relevant links. That is other web sites which have some connection to our own.

Now this sounds simple and straightforward and if we did this we would end up linking to about twenty sites. This number is not in any way sufficient for us to compete with our competitors who have many hundreds and in some cases thousands of links recognised by the search engines.

How Does Google Determine Relevance? I would suggest that it is a completely random process. If I look at my own back links which Google are registering then many are relevant in terms of the definition above, but many are not.

None of our suppliers who provide us with a back link and incidentally have high page ranks form part of this list and yet they are highly relevant? It may be that these form part of Google’s count but they choose for one reason or another not to divulge these. It remains a mystery.

How Does A Mathematical Formula Work Out Relevance? If I back link to my customers who are a very divers group to me they are relevant but apparently not to Google. We have many back links from construction and building companies because we carry out builders cleans for them.

Yet these are seemingly not deemed to be relevant but a mortgage company is? Builders and construction firms are mentioned several times on the web site and so a relevant connection should be able to be made.

If I look at the back links of my major competitors then the situation becomes even more confusing. Very few would appear on the surface to be of any relevance at all but who am I to judge? I do not have inside knowledge of the workings of these companies and their possible connections.

To me the whole process seems completely arbitrary and I will continue developing links to sites that I consider relevant. If Google paid attention to its own advice in only developing links to relevant sites then presumably it would only link to other search engines?

It is an easy statement to make for Google and SEO experts, ‘only develop links to relevant sites’ but the reality is that they have no way of knowing what is truly relevant and what is not. Consequently my advice is to continue developing your links to websites that you consider of some relevance either to you or surfers who come across your site and continue to be astonished at what Google considers to be relevant!

How Linking To A Bad Neighborhood Can Get Your Site Penalized

The bottom line is "If you link to sites that are banned by Google for spamming, you are inviting the risk of getting banned for linking to a bad neighbor."

So first we should know that what is a bad neighborhood and how can we know that a site is a bad neighbor to link to before you get penalized by the search engines.

Bad neighbors are those websites who use unethical methods to get high rankings or are banned by the search engines for spamming. You should not link to a website if it uses unethical methods for achieving a high ranking in a search engine, spamming may work for them now but bet me it will not for longer periods.

As soon, as search engines know that they are spamming they will banned and also the sites linking to that site may be penalized by lowering their rankings or even can be banned.

How the search engines understand that whether a site should be banned is a matter of controversy and those changes from time to time. Today a methodology may be ok, but tomorrow (in the next update) it may be considered unethical.

Google is one of the search engines that can classify sites as spam sites very quickly they can catch you as soon as you do it. If you exchange links with a site which has a PR 7 but it uses unethical methods so... what's going to happen, it may work for you now and you may also receive a PR of 6 but as soon as google catches that website. You may see your PR 0 in the next update.

You may heard of an ad network company, SearchKing. Their concept was to place text ads on sites that have a high PR score and use that PR as a way to gauge part of the value of the ad. An ad from a page with a PageRank of 7 cost more than an ad from one that had a PageRank of 6.

But, there was another effect of this network in Google's pagerank analysis system. When a site with high PR links to a site with low PR, a part of the importance is passed along to the site with low PR.

Now when a high PR site feels another site worthy to link at because of the content, it is alright as it is the natural way to build PR. But in this case they were linking to poor quality sites against a payment and as a result in Google PR analysis, those sites were deemed as important one.

It was possible that after a certain period of time those not-so-worthy sites would have started to attain top ranks in the results, finally affecting the quality of the Google results. If they allowed this company get special treatment, the search results would get so messed up that they'd totally lose their relevancy after sometime. It was a threat to Google's successful business model.

Obviously, Google penalized the sites. SearchKing, the ad network site got a PageRank Zero penalty in the latest Google update. The main pages of the network of all hosted sites saw its PageRank reduced to half. These were the pages that had a high PR.

Their problem was that they were trying to sell and pass on the advantage of having a high PR to sites that may not be worth getting that importance.

So How Do I Classify Who's A Bad Neighbor Who's Not?

We have already mentioned in this article some of the practices that are a reason for search engines to ban particular sites. But the “sins” are not only limited to being a spam domain.

Generally, companies get blacklisted because they try to boost their ranking by using illegal techniques such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content (or lack of any original content), hidden text and links, doorway pages, deceptive titles, automatic-generated pages and etc.

Search engines also tend to dislike meaningless link directories that conceive the impression that they are topically arranged, so if you have a fat links section on your site, double-check what you link to.

If you have outbound links to many different sites, such checks might take a lot of time. Fortunately, there are tools that can help you in performing this task. For instance, http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/ provides a tool that reports links to and from suspicious sites and sites that are missing in Google's index.

Natural Search Engine Optimization Linking Strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between a small, barely profitable or visible website and a traffic magnet website. There are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to influence the search engines. Some search engines react to certain strategies better than others.

Some even have conflicting strategies that they react to. To document all of these things would require a significant number of pages and research that goes beyond the scope of this article.

However, there are a number of things that can be documented that will work for most if not all search engines. And let's face it; there are really only 3 that make a difference between a successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy. They are the big three: Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines in any given month are responsible for over 90% of all internet searches.

So, what is this article about? It's about what you can do as a website owner that will influence the search engines using commonly accepted practices of linking to other websites (outbound) and getting website links (inbound) back to you.

There are basically 4 strategies that a website owner usually will employ to increase their website value in the eyes of the search engine.

They are reciprocal linking, one-way linking, multi-site linking and directory linking. A website owner should not think that using just a single strategy is the right answer - sure it will help your SEO but it won't be the Best answer. The Best answer is to employ all 4 techniques and to do it naturally.

Each of the four linking strategies has specific descriptions that can be summed up as:

1. Reciprocal Linking - Site A links to Site B, Site B links back to Site A

2. One-Way Linking - Site B links to Site A

3. Multi-Site Linking - Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site D, and Site D links back to Site A. Could be 3..N number of sites involved.

4. Directory Linking - Site Directory A links to Site A

That seems simple enough but it takes time and effort to perform all 4 strategies and most website owners aren't willing to spend the time or don't have the time to spend on it.

As a website owner, SEO needs to be one of the highest priority tasks that you need to address, just after Order Processing and Fulfillment and Customer Service. Without free traffic from the search engines, other traffic generation strategies that usually require payment must be engaged.

Now doing the 4 strategies above is great, but it gets even harder because you have to do it in a way that doesn't trigger the search engines to enforce a penalty upon your website. No one except the search engine engineers know all of the exact penalties but we have some good theories for some of them.

The first is the rate at which links are created. There is a certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to the age of the website according to the engine.

For example, a young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying links.

The second is that having a link to every site that links to you will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach your sites full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies will appear more natural to the engines.

The third is having all inbound links to your site on "linking" pages will make those links less valuable than having a natural link on a contextually relative page for a percentage of the inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage, the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it requires more time and effort for both website owners.

The fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking sites. If all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased your links and that is not natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and it is.

However, you should not expect the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 - 10).

The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links varied. It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have the same text on the link description. The natural tendency would be to have a certain percent be the sites name, but after that it should be a wide variety of description. Your link text description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your website.

Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your inbound links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all point back to the home page of your website. It's most natural for a good high quality link to appear in the text of a page and have it point internally within your site.

So, when you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of these things in mind and don't be impatient. Impatience could incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in the "sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being manipulated.

Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered.

5 Ways To Get Inbound Links

I've listed the methods below in the order you should use them: from the beginning (things you should do when you first start out a site) to the advanced methods, the ones you should use when your site is a little bit older and you're already getting a fair amount of visitors.

Before we get down to business, I have to tell you this very important detail: don't start promoting your site until it has some content - it's unlikely that you'll get good results when you promote an empty site!

1. Directory Submissions - this is a very important step for a new site, because this is probably how search engines will first find you. What you will need:

5 different versions (except for the site URL) for each of the following - site URL, title, description, list of keywords.

An email address, specially created for directory submissions. This email should be on the domain of the site you are submitting or else it will be rejected by some directories.

A list of seo-friendly directories – Top 100 Free Directories

Now here comes the hard part: take that directory list, visit each directory and submit your site cycling your titles and description on each submission. This is the hardest part mainly because of the amount of workload - don't worry, this can be made bearable by using 2 utilities: Roboform - which you can use with Internet Explorer and Firefox that has free and paid versions) Informenter (a Firefox only plugin).

2. Reciprocal Links (link exchanges) - I personally don't use this method anymore because it's too much work and there are not enough rewards! Link exchanges used to be a very powerful method in the beggining of Google and PageRank, but not anymore. This doesn't mean that reciprocal links don't work anymore, it's just that they're not that important anymore.

However this is one step you could follow when you have little competition, somewhere in the range of 300,000 or 400,000 results for your search word or phrase.

3. Reprint Rights Articles (submitting articles to article directories) - this is one of my favorite methods of obtaining backlinks: it requires little time, it's free and you can (possibly) get a lot of return on your investment!

Writing articles gives you perfect control over the enviroment your links are in, and even a little control over the site where your article resides (considering the fact that webmasters usually post only articles that have the same topic as their site). Writing articles of high quality will ensure that your articles will be posted on many sites - a good article will get you a good number of backlinks!

One last thing about article writing: never, and I mean never post the article that you'll distribute on your own site! Considering the article could appear on very important sites, Google may apply a duplicate content filter on your site, thus possibly burring it in the SERPs. Your site should be as clean as a whistle, with as much original content as possible.

4. Buying Links - in my opinion, if you are not an expert in search engine optimization you should not try buying links to improve your rankings. There are a lot of factors to take into account when looking to buy links: theme of the site, the traffic that the page or site gets, whether that traffic is from natural and sustained (not from PPC, traffic exchanges or such methods), PR, anchor text and many more!

However if you decide on buying text links on other sites, do the following:

- Choose well established sites that have the same theme as yours.

- The Link Should Be Spiderable - check the robots.txt file, nofollow metatags and the rel="nofollow" link atribute.

- Make The Link Look As Different As Possible From A Bought Link - surround it with text and avoid placement in the site's footer or in an "Advertisements" or "Partners" box.

5. Link Baiting is one of the most powerful method of online promotion, but this should be used only when your site is a little bit older and stable - getting a lot of links in a short time span can actually hurt your site.

There are a few hooks that you can use to attract links:

News - get an important story first and you could be the focus of your industry sector, even if for only a few hours! People are always on the look-out for fresh stuff, and if it's good you could end up with a lot of backlinks.

Resource - gathering a list of useful pages in your industry, or maybe offering a new viewpoint on a certain research paper.

Controversy - this kind of link baiting can actually get you on the wrong side of some people because it requires contradicting a popular point of view or an authority figure. So tread carefully!

4 Tips To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a web site that needs more traffic. If your web site doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then it will be hard to find.

Since most searchers click on the first few results, you need to make sure that your web site is ranked highly enough so that people can easily find it on the first page of search engine results. Although no search engine optimization company can guarantee a high rankings for your site permanently, often times hiring a web marketing company will pay off many times over.

For those of you doing it yourself or those of you that want to ensure your marketing company is doing a good job, here are some tips for raising the search engine rankings of your web site.

1. Content

Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for web sites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. Keywords are an important factor and they should be used throughout the content of your website.

2. Web Site URL

Your web site’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings, you need to do more than just that. But still, it is one of the factors in improving a search engine ranking.

3. Keywords

Your keywords should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. If you want a good rank in search engines then these things that may seem small should be considered, as search engines can read the text but not the graphics.

4. Page Title

The title of your page is very important, and if you choose the title properly then it can surely make a big difference in search engine ranking. Terms such ‘free article on safe children's toys’, or ‘contact the children's toy expert today’ are good to use as titles on pages containing such content.

The titles themselves are very specific to the page and also may not have much competition being as specific as they are. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you utilize it.

Master these four tips and you’ll be on your way to getting free traffic. Look for other tips to keep your site moving up.

The Secret Of Using Class C IP’s

Here is an SEO myth that has not really been proven one way or another yet. The myth is that having links from the same class C IP address will not help you. If you don’t know what I am talking about here’s how you breakdown an IP address.

AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD

So where the CCC is that number needs to be vary. The reasoning behind this is that someone could get web hosting and put 1,000 different sites on it and then link them all to one site trying to gain its link popularity. So the search engines put an end to that by using the IP of the sites to calculate how much weight to give the link.

There are quite a few people that don’t believe that this myth is true just for the simple fact of how popular shared hosting is. If this myth is true then all those sites on the same shared hosting server cant help each other out with ranking.

There is some evidence that can prove this myth though. I have followed many discussions on this topic and have seen some results that make me a believer. The results basically just prove how a site with far less links can out rank a site with a ton more links. This is because the site with less links has a ton more different class C IP’s links than the one with just more links.

Like I said I am a firm believer in this myth and I don’t even like to refer to it as a myth but until proven beyond a doubt I will call it that just to make people happy. So when you are doing link building be sure to check out the IP address on where your link will be placed in order to make sure your link will pull the most weight.

How To Become An SEO Ninja

Every website listed in the search engines has a position, or ‘ranking’, and each one of these rankings can change very quickly, in some cases as often as weekly or even daily. One day your website’s in a good position, then the next you’re wondering what happened to it.

Staying on top of this situation is a must for any SEO professional, you need to become a search engine ninja. If that’s what you want to do, then you need to keep these things in mind at all times:

1. Good SEO Requires Frequent Updates and Ranking Checks

You might have a good spot today, but all it takes is for a few new sites to open, and before you know it you’re back down at the bottom. If you pay attention to your rankings, then you have a shot at fixing things that go wrong before your rankings fall too far.

2. Check All Your Links Weekly To Make Sure They Work

Maintain high-quality, relevant reciprocal links and check them weekly to make sure they’re working. Remove any dead links, as search engine crawlers may mark you down if they find them on your site.

3. Tweak and Assess Your Website On A Daily Basis

You need to continually assess and tweak your listing to keep your site in it's proper place that is, at the top. This ensures that your site is in the best position possible, and helps you keep your competitive edge.

4. Maintain The Content On Your Website

Update your content weekly at the very least, to make sure that search engine crawlers come back frequently. Even the smallest changes will be picked up on by the search engines and will help to maintain your ranking. If you can’t write, find someone who can.

5. Keep Up-To-Date With The Latest Developments In SEO

If you can’t decide what you should be doing or you don’t want to keep up with SEO on your own, you could consider hiring a specialist. Consulting with an SEO specialist will still allow you to make your own changes to your website and learn which things work best, but you’ll have someone to answer your questions if you need them.

You should review your SEO techniques at least every few months, to see how the algorithms have changed and to devise new plans and strategies for increasing your rankings based on those changes.

Any SEO ninja will tell you that there are only really two major search engines that you need to worry about: Google and Yahoo. You can do well even if you only have the time or energy to focus on these two engines. Being an SEO ninja is hard work, but it can be very rewarding if you’ve got the dedication for it.

Optimizing your site is centered around targeting the right keyword phrases, knowing where and what your competition is doing, creating content, promoting your site and knowing where you rank in the search engines.

My favorite tool that accomplishes all of these features and much more is Market Samurai. Right now you can get a 12 day trial and free keyword tools.