Navigating the Article

A Summary of Techniques

1. Make the pages rich in keywords – Get as many in as you can without creating garbage for the reader. Put the words early in the page and to the left of the page as spiders read left to right. Put your navigation on the right and text on the left.

2. Enough Content – At least 250 words, partly to feed the spiders partly to create enough to dilute the keywords

3. Keyword-Rich Page Names - Use keywords in the page title. E.g. traffic.html

4. Site Map – Spiders love site maps particularly for big sites

5. Take care with tables, graphs and Java – Spiders don’t read them.

6. Title Tag – Use really relevant keyword phrases

7. Description Tag – The engines use this as their descriptor of your site and you need keywords in it

8. ALT Tags – ALT (‘alternative text'), go with images. Use it with appropriate keywords.

9. Dynamic Pages – Beware spiders stop looking at the site if they encounter a ? in the URL of a dynamic or interactive page. So either link them to a static page or fix it with code (too big a subject here).

10. Don’t cheat – Search engines hate cheats, such as people who set up keyword stuffed sites where the content doesn’t match the keywords. They make the search engines look bad. If they find you they will ban you.

Based on Rosalind Gartner Super-Affiliate Handbook

Links strategy basics

Think of linking to your competitors. Your customers are going to find them anyway, meanwhile they may have higher rankings than you – to your advantage

Link to your own site. Create a subdirectory with the key word in the URL. For example if you are in contact lenses: YourDomain.com/contact-lenses/contact-lenses.html. You write a paragraph on the home page and put in a link

Set up a site cluster. A set of interlinking sites that are all optimizing at once and are multiple linked to each other

Avoid: link farms. The search engines hate them

Contact complementary sites requesting a link exchange with the webmaster. If you do, then put up their link first and refer to it in your email

Form reciprocal relationships: you put a link to them, they link to you.

Create a “Resources Page” and link to that page from your home page. Links pages are better than nothing but they encourage the search engines to see them as a ploy

Always try to find people who are related to your site’s purpose. Simple lists with everyone in will turn off the search engines

When contacting Webmasters: put their link in first; take care over your mail headline or they will think your email is spam. First compliment their site, then show how yours is linked to it in content etc, then propose reciprocal links. Tell them that if you don’t hear back from them within 2 weeks, you will consider they aren’t interested and you will take their link down.

The ideal is inward links. These are links to your site without you having a matching outward link. You can get inward links by; writing and distributing free reprint articles with an “About the Author” piece at the end that includes your web address. Everybody benefits, you get an inward link, and they get an article with interesting content.

Having written your article you'll want to submit it to a bunch of ezines. Believe me this can be tedious. But there are submission engines on the web that will do it for you. Perhaps the best - linked to Yahoo Groups - is

SubmitYourArticle

Links from Traffic Swarm

On each page of HBB Review we have links for business opportunities drawn from Traffic Swarm. They are there to give subscribers a chance to browse (HBB Research gets no gain from any link), and also to build our SEO position. Go to Traffic Swarm and check it out...it's a neat idea!!

Page 1 2

Dancing with Search Engines

Search engines are the foundation of all traffic strategies, as they make sense of the huge volume of offerings in the ‘long tail’. They are the filter through which everything must pass. No matter what else you may hear, all web marketers dance to their tune. The VAST bulk of all users of the web are looking for information and without exception they use the search engines. Within the search engines – as of today – the majority of people will use Google. The bulk of the rest will use Yahoo, some other engines but Google is the name of the search game.

The problem for the web marketer is therefore simple and frustrating. How to get a high enough ranking on Google that people will see your advertisement. The traditional statement is first two pages of any search, hence the endless offerings promising to get you to #1 on Google!!

There are three solutions to the search engine problem: hire a search engine optimization firm, buy one of the ‘promises’ of endless ‘high quality traffic’ continually offered on the web or do-it-yourself. Of the three:

Search engine optimization by a firm is expensive and as slow, often, as doing it yourself (for the home-business crowd). Having said that, some firms are clearly better than others

The offers are typically scams – or we at least haven’t found one that isn’t. Those that promise to get you to #1 are often using strange keywords as their search terms, words that only odd folk use.

Do-it-yourself is the lowest cash outlay, but NO MATTER WHAT ELSE YOU ARE TOLD it is slow and requires persistence over long periods.

The sad truth is, there is no easy solution to generating traffic from the engines, without buying it in some form. That said, there are strategies that are smarter than others and there is no shortage of people willing to help you.

Throughout this note we are going to advise you to look at Brad Callen with his products SEO Elite and LinkMetro. This is because our research says he is the most open-handed with his education and his products do reduce to a minimum the grunt-work in SEO. We would recommend you go to his product site (SEO Elite) at some point and sign up for his email course and various giveaway products.

The Basics: How Search Engines Work

Internet search engines are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. They all perform three basic tasks:

They search the Internet -- or parts of the Internet – based on key words.

They record the words they find, and where they find them.

They allow users to look for words or combinations of words based on what they have found and recorded.

Modern search engines index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Spiders

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, they must first find it and record its location. This is done by bits of code called ‘spiders’.

These software robots list the words found on websites. The process is called crawling. Crawling is not a random activity. Typically, the spider starts with heavily used servers and very popular pages. Starting with a popular site, it will index the words on its pages and follow every link found within the site and from the site to other sites.

The Keyword: ‘Dance’

Clearly, the spiders will come across billions and billions of words and pages. If the engine is going to be useful, pathways have to be created between the query a searcher types in and the ‘specific’ words and pages that will answer your query. This is the indexing/ranking problem and it a wonderful dance between you and the search engine.

Regardless of how the dance originally started, this is how it goes now:

The search engine knows the words and phrases people use in their queries.
It stuctures its crawling to look for those patterns of words and phrases so it can create a ‘relevancy score’ for any site, for any search term that the search engine uses. If the engine is not looking for the keywords you have selected then it will come up with nothing for your site.
It looks for them in certain places on web pages that the search engine designers have deemed important. For example: how near the top of the document the word appears, or whether is appears in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. It may also simply count the number of times that the word appears on a page at all. (Note: Meta tags are added to the front of your document and annotate and describe the document. Most search engines ignore them today.)
You now know where and how the spider looks. You also can find out the phrases people use and in what proportions they use them.
You now write your web pages to reflect the phrases and the locations etc. that the spiders will look for!! Incestuous isn’t it? But it works.

Clearly the writing of web pages is an art. Making sure that its makes ‘bestseller’ reading for the spiders. Indeed, some web pages are written solely for the spiders!! Something that the search engines don't like.

Each commercial search engine has a slightly different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. So a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders. Your problem is building a site that maximizes your site to the most popular search engines or the ones you have specifically chosen.

Of course, once everyone knows how the engine works the dance loses some of its value! If everyone can ‘optimize’, then keyword ranking would lose some of its usefulness. And this is exactly what happened. So the search engines started looking for a different way of ranking sites. Enter links.

Finding Keywords

Competitors: By far the lowest cost way of finding keywords. The browser and search engine. Pull up your competitors. Click “View” then “Source”. That will show the code used to build that page, plus the keywords Do several sites and you will have a good list..

Pay-Per-Clicks: as part of the marketing of their sites, Pay-per-click sites tell you how popular a keyword is. Perhaps the best source is Overture at www.inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

Specialized Tools: WordTracker.com is costly but effective. GoogleFight.com is free and compares two keywords showing the more popular

The Links: A Dance for the Like-Minded

A link (or ‘hyperlink’) is a route through the web from one location to another. Typically it takes you from one web page or site to another web page or site. With keywords less effective links have taken up the ranking problem.

Link strategists at the search engines reason that people will only put links on their site to locations that are useful to their visitors. So if my site is linked to by a lot of other sites then they must think what my site says is important. So the more ‘inbound’ links my site has the better. But they also go a couple of steps further:

Not all sites are created equal. So, say, a Government site may as a matter of policy not link with others. If it were to break that policy and create a link to my site, I must be very important. The search engine therefore weights some givers higher than others.

Even if it is not a government site, some sites are more highly respected than others. Either because of the institutions they represent or the traffic they themselves have already created. So if you could get Yahoo! The world’s busiest site to link to you, the search engines would apply some of Yahoo’s importance to you!

Quality of the giving site is therefore important. But so is volume. Lots of links WILL help you.

The search engines are going another step and looking at the amount of traffic down any one link. Lots of traffic is better than none!

Finally, the location of links can be important. If a link is a natural part of the content of a site you can assume it is going to outscore a link placed on a special page used for the purpose of cataloguing links.

Our discussion has focused on inbound links. That’s because they reflect the importance others give to your site, But, inbound links means outbound links. So you need to think about how you manage your giving as well as your receiving. If you are an important site already you need a clear policy about what links you are going to accept and where you are going to put them. If you are a not-so-important site and a petitioner for links then links carefully located inside the structure of your content may be more attractive than ones locked into a ‘Links Page.’

What you have here is a social structure, where the web players (site owners and searchers) themselves determine the ranking. Neat!

However, just like ‘keywords’, though the detailed algorithms may be secret the principles are known. So site owners can seek to optimize their site. This leads to ‘traffic farms’, ‘Link Exchanges’, and ‘exchanging links’.

Traffic farms are sites set up to create thousands of links. The search engines hate them and they will penalize you if they think you have joined a farm

Link exchanges are sites that broker links between sites. They avoid the traffic farm problem and are a legitimate way of creating links.

Exchanging links is a do-it-yourself link exchange, You approach other sites and try to persuade them to create a link with you. Clearly, the higher your sites existing status the easier this is. Two measures of your site’s traffic status/importance are its Alexa number and its Yahoo Page Number.

Link farms - DON'T!!

"Link Farms were developed by search engine optimizers in 1999 to take advantage of the Inktomi search engine's dependence upon link popularity. Although link popularity is used by some search engines to help establish a ranking order for search results, the Inktomi engine at the time maintained two indexes. Search results were produced from the primary index which was limited to approximately 100,000,000 listings. Pages with few inbound links continually fell out of the Inktomi index on a monthly basis.

Inktomi was targeted for manipulation through link farms because it was then used by several independent but popular search engines, such as HotBot. Yahoo!, then the most popular search service, also used Inktomi results to supplement its directory search feature. The link farms helped stabilize listings for (normally) online business Web sites that had few natural links from larger, more stable sites in the Inktomi index.

Link farm exchanges were at first handled on an informal basis, but several service companies were founded to provide automated registration, categorization, and link page updates to member Web sites.

When the Google search engine became popular, search engine optimizers learned that Google's ranking algorithm depended in part on a link weighting scheme called PageRank. Rather than simply count all inbound links equally, the PageRank algorithm determines that some links may be more valuable than others, and therefore assigns them more weight than others. Link farming was adapted to help increase the PageRank of member pages.

However, even the link farms became susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous Webmasters who joined the services, received inbound linkage, and then found ways to hide their outbound links or to avoid posting any links on their sites at all. Link farm managers had to implement quality controls and monitor member compliance with their rules to ensure fairness.

Alternative link farm products emerged, particularly link-finding software that identified potential reciprocal link partners, sent them template-based emails offering to exchange links, and create directory-like link pages for Web sites hoping to build their link popularity and PageRank.

Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire domains were removed from the search engine indexes in order to prevent them from influencing search results.

The expression "link farm" is now considered to be pejorative and derogatory."

(Source Wikipedia - edited)

For a safe alternative look at

Link Machine

You now know the basics of Search Engine Optimization: the keyword ‘dance’ and the ‘links game’.

(Continue to The Top search Engines)

Page 1 2

Every now and then something turns up that takes the web marketing community by storm.

BUTTERFLY MARKETING
by Mike Filsaime

IF YOU HAVEN'T CHECKED IT OUT, YOU SHOULD!!!

Warning!

If you arrived at this site through a search engine, you need to know where you are. You have landed on a subscriber page for HBB Research's Insights Letter or of the HBB Review.

HBB Research is one of the first research programs into web home business linked to a business school.

The Insights Letter and the HBB Review are FREE newsletters that provide ideas and insights to mostly new web entrepreneurs

Subscribe to "The Insights Letter" Now!!

Sign up for HBB Research's FREE "Insights Letter" and receive a long series of FREE insights into the coming boom on web home-based business plus your FREE subscription to HBB Review. No obligation

Enter Your Name:

Enter your Email:

Top Clickbank Sellers on Traffic

Type the word Search Engines into the search box below and find the best selling books and tools on SEO sold through Clickbank

For those of you who are not aware, Clickbank is the web's leading supplier of digital products and is an enormously powerful affiliate engine. If you join nothing else, seriously consider becoming an affiliate of Clickbank.

To find out more

CLICK HERE

If you have a digital product, CLICKBANK is the place to sell it with over 100,000 affiliates and a strong administrative system to deal with returns.

CLICK HERE

High-Grade Free Books on SEO and Link strategy

Axandra is a German software firm that has one of the most sophisticated SEO tools in existence. Called IBP and recently completely revised, it is heavily used by pofessional webmasters and will lead you to more visitors, better ranks and inevitably better profits.

Axandra offers to absolutely excellent ebooks one on SEO the other on links that are seriously worthowning.

Get access to them here by clicking the images

Leading light!

Brad Callen is arguably the leading light in theSEO world (if not the remining game in town). His various products have been massive sellers for years - because they work.

For the beginner, the starting place is Brad's core product SEOElite. This will teach you all there ia to know about search engine optimization.

To find out more go to

SEOElite

SEO as a business has moved beyond 'know-how' books and into practcal tools. These incluse link farms (to be avoided like the plague) and more legitimate approaches such a LinkMetro - again by Brad Callen.

SEO Consulting

The other active SEO area is SEO consulting. Here you pay - not inconsiderable - sums to people who claim to be able to generate lots of traffic through high search engine ratings.

Take great care there are lots of scams or poor providers out there. As with any professional service you should check them out and check out their testimonials before you buy.

Writing for SEO

The key to successful SEO is content.

People come to the web - overwhelmingly - for information. They are researching something. They are looking for snapshots that will give them buidance and indepth pieces that will give them the extra knowledge needed to be successful.

Get lots of content and the spiders will be VERY happy. But where does all this content come from?

Clearly you can write it yourself - this is the absolute best solution. Done effectively this can turn you into an "authority" site and other people wnt to link to authority sites. This leaves you with lots of one-way links telling the spiders that you are indeed an authority. This beneficial spiral steadily elevates you in the rankings. Content here is both on-site and using articles and viral books to create your own links.

If you can't write - hire someone. If you can't write and you don't know enough create a content compilation from other people's work - getting hold of articles, so-called viral-ebooks etc.

This second-hand solution is not nearly as beloved of the spiders, but if it is where you are then go with it.

The blunt reality is that nothing but nothing works as well over the long term as building your own unique content. This is not to say that pay-per-click etc are not valuable tools, they clearly are. But wriitten materials on-site and disseminated to a range of other inbound links has longevity. Remember articles written in ezines are often archived and sit on the web for years and years attracting spiders.

The moral of this piece.

There are all kinds of ebooks and offers out there that talk to their ability to get you links without pain. Some may even work. But on the web contributing to the social network by adding value to the community of potential readers/customers is a better long term strategy.

My recommendation. Get your thinking cap on, research your subject and contribute to the body of communal knowledge. Not as sexy as "instant" solutions, but over the long haul likely to be much more effective.

Michael Kay

Welcome to HBB Review

Navigating the Article