Search Engine Optimization for RSS Feeds

Tips for Helping Your RSS Feed Perform! In some ways RSS is very similar to HTML, the language commonly used to create websites. Just as with HTML, webmasters using traditional search engine optimization tactics when creating an RSS feed will find that their RSS feed receives additional exposure and interest. Simple steps to optimize an RSS feed for search engines.

There Should Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions in SEO is that ranking at Google and Yahoo is all that counts in search engine optimization. Potential clients come to me with a single goal: "Get me a top-ten ranking at Google." Some will also mention MSN, and a few will rhyme off a list of search engines and want to rank well at the top 200 of them. It is time to separate fact from fiction. Yes, your SEO consultant can get you a top-ten placement at Google. But...

Improving the ROI of Web Directory Submissions

Submitting your web site to web directories is a great way to build high-quality inbound links, increase your PageRank, and improve your SERPS. The Internet now features a large number of both general purpose and specialized directories. The specialized directories focus on a specific topic or region. Unfortunately, submitting your web site to the plethora of available directories requires a significant investment of time and effort. The key to achieving a positive ROI (Return On Investment) from directory submissions is to focus on those directories which will provide you with high-quality inbound links.

Hiring a Search Engine Optimization Company?

If you’re in the market to hire a search engine optimization company, you probably feel bombarded with promises of #1 rankings and instant success. But how do you know which claims are important and which to believe, and which are classic snake oil pitches? Let’s look at ten important items that you need to think about if you’re considering hiring a professional search engine optimization firm.

Why Articles Are Not The Route To High Search Engine Rankings

If you have any interest in getting high search engine rankings for your website (and who doesn't) you've probably been sold the idea that writing and publishing your own articles will do it for you. Here's why that's not entirely true.

PageRank Mania - Is it getting out of hand?

Why do you link to sites? Is it because they're useful and informative and might be worthwhile to your site visitors? Or is it because you hope you'll get a reciprocal link, which just might boost your link popularity and/or PageRank? Perhaps it's some combination of these things, or other reasons all together.

Keyword Selection: The Dark Horse of Search Engine Optimization

Below are what I call the “10 Commandments” for Keywords. To start with select “keyword phrases” NOT keywords. This is very important. After all, the keyword itself is included in the keyword phrase.

Black Hat SEO and the Sneaky Redirect

Are shades of grey SEO really Black Hat SEO? Black hat SEO is a strategy which gets a web page or entire site banned from a search engine. A shade of grey is when you use a black hat strategy but your site has not been banned yet.

Innovative Ways to Get Links

We all know it's important to get links to our sites to increase our traffic as well as link popularity. Yet, the process is both daunting and frustrating of finding contacts, keeping track of things and skimming directory listings. Instead of only offering a link back, have you thought of enhancing your offer?

Google's Giant Sandbox

If you pay any attention to the search engine optimization community, you have probably heard about Google's sandbox. Knowing exactly what the sandbox is might be a little confusing, but it is an important concept to know if you hope to eventually be successful with Google.

The 11 Deadly Sins of Search Engine Optimization

There is so much misinformation floating through the internet regarding search engine marketing and optimization that it’s important to shed some light on a few common errors and misconceptions. The following list highlights some of the most critical issues involved in determining the success or failure of a web site’s search engine optimization and marketing strategies.

How to Increase Web Site Visitors For Relevant Terms

Completely by accident and through no effort of my own, besides the effort to get my site spidered by Yahoo's Slurp Search Engine Spider and Google's Googlebot Search Engine spider, I've seen an accidental increase in the visitors to my web site.

Press Releases New SEO Back Door to Top Rankings

Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder of SEO-PR revealed a blockbuster secret back door to top search engine ranking when he presented to a comparitively small share of attendees at WebMasterWorld.com World of Search #7 conference.

6 Ways To Attract Search Engines To Your Website More Often

Adding fresh, updated content to your website is the surest way to get search engines engines to spider your site more often. Search engines are known to index sites updated on a regular basis more frequently.

Google Can Now Index Flash

As you know, a Flash movie as the index page of a site has always been a major problem with search engine optimization. There's simply no content for the search engines to index. So when I learned that Google can index the contents of Macromedia Flash movies, I was astonished. It seemed this remarkable discovery had gone virtually unnoticed in the SEO community.

Google's Secret

I've got a piece of ground-shaking news about Google that trumps even knowing their algorithm. It's so classified even GoogleGuy doesn't know it. It hasn't even been made known on any forum or SEO news site, let alone Google's Webmaster Guidelines. So what do I know that everyone else doesn't?

Double Listings at Google

Have you ever searched for something on Google and noticed that a website has a double listing - a main listing and a second listing indented - and wondered "Why?" And then wondered, "How?"

Content is King

Constant Content is all about giving webmasters the content they need to make their sites great while at the same time giving authors the exposure and income they need to keep doing what they are great at. At it's core, it's about allowing people to play to everyone's strengths.

Latest in Search Engine Algorithms - User Popularity

For years, the search engines have continued to introduce new factors into their algorithms to make their search results more relevant and to keep savvy search engine marketers from "cracking the system."

Google Friendly Solutions to Graphic-Intense Sites

We all know that the search engines can't "see" or "read" the graphics on our pages. We also know that we need to provide text on a page, so the spiders will have something to crawl and index.

10 Basic Rules for Where to Place Your Keywords

Here are the simple rules for where to place your keywords and keyword phrases. Most people follow only a few of these rules. Follow all of them and you will be way ahead of the pack.

Rank #1 on Google for the most important keyword in your industry

Links Are Good for Business. Read the advice on SEO boards and tutorials these days and you will find a lot of information about linking. There are debates and "facts" on whom you should link to and whether reciprocal links are good or bad. The reality is that the Web is made up of links and you should link to sites that your users will find helpful.

Sneaky (But Legal) Places To Insert Keywords For Higher Rankings

The battle for high search engine rankings rages on! The engines themselves continually make changes which makes our jobs, as Web site owners, much more difficult. But, one thing has always remained the same... Keywords.

Google vs. Yahoo - How to rank high on each one

In a nutshell, Google looks at off-page factors more and Yahoo looks at on-page factors.
Google likes incoming links, especially links from high-ranking, on-topic pages that include keywords in the link text. Google doesn't like over-optimized, high keyword densities and over use of keywords in headings, etc. like they use to.

Try to fool Mother Google and end up in the penalty box

I have several test sites that I use to test the limits of what Google and other search engines will penalize you for and what they will reward you for. In other words, I want to know where the real limits are.

Rank #1 after the new Google Austin Update Dance

What did the recent Google Austin Update Dance do to your site and to your competitors' sites? . . . Here's an easy way to find out. Use the Google toolbar to seach Google for your main keyword phrase and see where your site and where your competitors' sites are on the list.

The Weight of Google PageRank in Ranking

As Google continues to reign as the top search engine referral source, we all continue to check our PageRank (Download the Google Toolbar to view a web page's PageRank score). SEOs and webmasters scramble to increase their PageRank to a respectable score, anything above a 5, as we continue to analyze the workings of Google's PageRank calculation and its weight within the ranking algorithm.

How to avoid the 3 biggest title tag mistakes with Search Engines

Your title tag is the most important 3 to 12 words on your Web page. It accounts for up to 80% of your rankings on search engines. Here's why: Search Engines look for "searched for" words first in title tags. The title tag is one of the main places search engines look to get a description of your site when posting the results of a keyword search. Most people destroy any chance of success by making one or more of the following 3 mistakes in their title tags.

Does Having Your Keyword In Your Domain Rank Higher?

This is one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine. This article conclusively answers that question for the leading search engine.

What Size Web Pages Rank Highest?

This is another one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine. While popular belief seems to be that pages should be very short (less than 10K) to rank well with the leading search engine, this article conclusively answers that question... with a completely different answer.

Which Ranks Higher: .html, .shtml, .php or ???

A few days ago, I read a post on one of those SEO boards asking about how to hide that you are using SSI by using a .htaccess file. The poster was convinced that .shtml files would rank lower than .html files, so they wanted to create .html files, but still have them parsed for SSI.

Does Having Dashes In Your Domain Rank Higher?

This question is debated hotly in many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums. The answer, like so many others can be easily obtained by performing a statistical analysis of the actual results from the leading search engine. This article presents the results of such an analysis.

Does Keyword Count Affect Ranking?

Most SEO professionals will tell you that the number of times a keyword is repeated on a page (keyword count) and the ratio of how often that keyword is used in relation to other text (keyword density) are minor search engine ranking factors.

Does Keyword Density Affect Ranking?

Once upon a time, it was thought that keyword density was the most important factor that search engines used for ranking. Perhaps it was. We weren't performing these studies prior to a couple of years ago so we just don't know. In any case, it seemed that it would be a simple study to statistically reverse engineer the leading search engine for this particular factor.

Does Keyword Count In The Title Affect Ranking?

Almost all SEO's agree that having your keywords in the "title" tag is important for ranking. Is it? We decided to answer this extremely simple question for the two leading search engines using a simple statistical analysis. We also decide to find out if repeating your keyword more than once was a factor in ranking.

Do Frames Affect Ranking?

Almost all SEO's agree that using frames will have devasting results on your search engine rankings. Is it true? We decided to answer this extremely simple question for the two leading search engines using a simple statistical analysis.

Does URL Length Affect Ranking?

I was recently perusing results on the leading search engines, I seemed to notice that long URLs weren't very popular on the first couple pages for several keywords. That intrigued me, so I performed a true statistical analysis to see if my observation was merely a coincidence or a true correlation.

Does The Number Of Links On A Page Affect Ranking?

Lots of research has focused on inbound links to a site, but little has focused on the number of links actually on a page (outbound or to other parts of a site). Many SEO gurus have recently been talking about something they call "PR Leak" which seems to be a theory that the more outbound links you have, the more your page rank on Google "leaks" away.

What Size Of Body Section Ranks Highest?

This is another one of the controversial questions in many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet it is very easy to answer for any particular search engine. While popular belief seems to be that pages should be very short (less than 10K) to rank well with the leading search engine, this article conclusively answers that question~ with a completely different answer.

Do Popups Affect Ranking?

Someone from our membership site recently asked "Do Popups Affect Ranking?" My gut instinct was "How could they?" and "Why would a search engine care whether your site used popups or not?"

Do Static IP Sites Rank Higher?

This is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim that sites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine... that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting.

Does Keyword Location On Page Affect Ranking?

One of our members asked for a study of keyword location on a page. Is it more effective to have your keyword mentioned in the top third, middle third or bottom third of a page?

Do Commas In Your Keywords Metatag Affect Ranking?

One of our members recently reported that Yahoo was recommending separating the keywords in your meta-tag using commas. As we know from experience, the official representatives of the search engines don't always give us the best advice as it pertains to ranking.

Does A Question Mark In Your URL Affect Ranking?

Long ago, it was the SEO consensus that dynamic URLs (those with a question mark in them) weren't indexed by the major search engines. Later, the SEO consensus was that Google indexed some URLs with question marks, but ranked them lower.

Search engine friendly content management system?

Maybe you have read my previous article on this series "Google Pagerank 7 in 1.5 months". We talked about PHP-Nuke there, that Google loves it etc. I saw dozen sites run by this article's advice. Good :)

Google Pagerank 7: In 1.5 months

Here's how I done it:1. I've used PHP-Nuke http://phpnuke.org/. It's dynamic content managament system. Google loves it and gives listing for Nuke-generated pages in a few weeks. I've got it, two weeks.

The Future of WebSite Ranking

The recent shakeup in Google's search results, which set the SEO (search engine optimization) community buzzing and saw tens of thousands of webmasters watch their site ranking plummet, was in many ways inevitable. Almost all SEO companies and most savvy webmasters had a fairly good handle on what Google considered important. And since SEO, by definition, is the art of manipulating website ranking (not always with the best interests of searchers in mind), it was only a matter of time until Google decided to make some changes.

Search Engine Spam: Useful Knowledge for the Web Site Promoter

Before getting started on using gateway pages and other HTML techniques to improve your search engine ranking, you need to know a little about spam and spamdexing. Spamming the search engines (or spamdexing) is the practice of using unethical or unprofessional techniques to try to improve search engine rankings.

SEO Copywriting Makeover – Turning Not Into Hot - 1

I recently took on a project for a Web site that sells gas logs that I thought would make an interesting case study. As many people ask me what goes through my mind when I write search engine optimized copy, I took this opportunity to make notes as I wrote. I’ll now share that information with you so you can make the necessary changes to your own copy.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

When optimizing your website for the search engines there are certain things you want to avoid, and certain things you want to accomplish.

SEO Copywriting Makeover – Turning Not Into Hot -2

In part one of this article series, I outlined a recent project I undertook for a Web site that sells gas logs. The site had a lot of potential, but in its current state the sales orientation of the index (home) page and the keyword saturation were causing less-than-stellar results for the client. My job was to rewrite the index page (from scratch) in order to boost SE rankings and response.

Mike Grehan interviews Google's Daniel Dulitz

Well, that's what we threatened. However, it turns out that, Daniel Dulitz, software engineer with Google and developer of the "snippet", was more than happy to talk. So no rough stuff necessary. It's the webmaster dream interview: Crawling, linking, cloaking, spamming, dynamic... er... deliverying... We covered the lot!

Linking is Queen

If content is king, then linking is the queen that shares his throne. We have all heard about adding content to your site to give the search engines fodder to consume. But the secret to luring the search engines is the links to your site.

How to Use Anchor Text in Backlinks

What's the best way to use anchor text to gain the best possible rankings from your link popularity campaign? Read on for tips and insight from the "SEO Guy" Morgan Carey into questions such as how Google views your vote for a site when you link to it and how they determine the value of your vote.

Why Linking To Your Competitors Makes Sense

Most webmasters know that reciprocal links are a great way to increase search engine rankings and boost targeted traffic to their websites. Many of them also believe that linking to a competitor's website is a mistake. I couldn't disagree more. Why? Let me explain...

Keyword Phrases In Linking Text

Often simple things really matter. And the use of keywords in linking text is one of those simple things that turn out to be hugely important. Linking text, sometimes called anchor text is the clickable text that takes people to another page or resource. You need to choose that text carefully.

Use the Ugly Duckling technique to get high ranking on Google

To get the most sales on the Internet you need to have a high PageRank on Google. One of the common techniques everyone uses (or tries to use) to get a high ranking on Google is to convince other websites with a high Google PageRank (PR) to link to them. Here's what's wrong with trying to get 500-pound gorilla websites to link to you.

Incoming links are more important than ever after the Google Florida and Austin updates

Having a large number of on-topic, incoming links is like building an earthquake proof building. With a lot of incoming links to your website you can withstand whatever Google throws at you and still hold onto your hard-earned high PageRank.

Tips To Follow For Link Building - 1

Acquiring links that point to your website can be one of the more complicated aspects of optimizing a website for search engine placement. The majority of the search engines on the market, big and small, value a site that has a number of quality links pointing to it. In fact, link building can be considered one of the most important portions of SEO.

Tips To Follow For Link Building - 2

A couple of days ago, we featured an article that discussed some tips and hints for conducting a successful link building campaign. The first article featured some excellent information from Greg Boser. With part 2, I am going to discuss some of the tips that were offered by Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves and Matt Cutts from Google.

Building Link Popularity with Topical Articles

How do I increase link popularity? Building link popularity is hard work. You've searched endlessly. You've sent every reciprocal link email you can think of. What else can you do? Surprisingly, writing articles on your topic can lead you to a wealth of link popularity.

One Way Link Building Secures Long Term Ranking Results

One-way link building is a great way to improve your link popularity and ranking in the search engines. One-way links are more difficult to obtain than traditional reciprocal links, but pay off in securing solid long-term search engine ranking results.

Reciprocal Links: Quality is as important as Quantity

Link popularity, the number of incoming links to your website, plays an important part in determining your site's ranking in a search engine. But, before you rush off to try and get any and all sites to link to you there are a few things to consider, and one of them is that the quality of the links is as important as the quantity.

Is it OK to buy links? Is it safe to do it?

The subject of buying one-way links is a controversial subject at best. A lot has been said about it in the past, especially now after Google’s Florida and Austin updates. Depending to whom you talk to, you are likely to get opinions that range from “don’t do it” to “it’s now OK to do it”. So what’s the average site owner or small business to do?

Little Known Guerilla Tactics for Finding Link Partners

Are you using these three little known ways to find link partners? If not you should be. Since decent link popularity is a must if you want to rank well and get more traffic.