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If you run a website or an online business, you know that traffic is very important to your website. You need traffic to grow your website and generate online revenue. Search engine optimization (SEO) can send you quality targeted traffic that you need to make money online. So, it is traffic-generation you should consider using.SEO involves optimizing your website for the main keywords you want to rank for and building as many relevant backlink as possible so that your website can reach top ten in search engines.

When optimizing your website, the important elements you need to pay attention are the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, keyword density in your content and… You got to make sure your primary keywords are included into these elements so that the search engines know what keywords you want to rank for. Website optimization wouldn’t take you much time. You can complete it within 1 to 2 days.The harder task is building relevant backlinks to your website. You must be willing to learn most of the link building methods and put them into action to increase your backlinks. Some of the free methods you can use immediately to grow your backlinks are article marketing, social media marketing, directory submission and writing guest posts.

You are going to need to work hard to get enough backlinks that will push your website to the top in search engines.

Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the ranking of you site in search engine listings. The most important factors to consider to achieve a high ranking are: the keywords you use, your title, your description, the text of your site, and the links others provide to your site.
To begin selecting keywords, consider what words and phrases the people you are trying to reach will be searching on. When placing keywords in your keyword tag, it is best to use phases rather than single words. Almost all single words are in very widespread use, thus will not tend to produce high rankings. Keyword phrases can be better tailored to your business. Also, since phrase searches produce fewer results, people are more likely to search on them. It is also a good idea to produce a list of keyword phrases for every page of your site. If you must include difficult to spell words, it is a good idea to include some common misspellings of these words as well.
The title is just as important, if not more important, than your keywords. Most search engines place the highest level of importance on the words found in the title when calculating the ranking. You should place your most important keyword phrases first in your title, as some search engines limit the number of characters you can use. Make your title a readable sentence, as this is the first text that will appear for your listing on the results page. One thing you should avoid doing is simply listing keywords. This could be regarded by the search engine as keyword spamming, and may lower your search ranking, or even get your listing removed from the site. As with keywords, it is a good idea to give each page a unique title.
In your description you should once again make use of your best keyword phrases. In this case, you can use more of them, since search engines will give you typically around 1024 characters for the description, while they will give you only around 50 to 80 for the title. Again, place your keywords as close to the beginning of your description as makes sense.
In the text of your site you should make use of, yes, you’ve guessed it, your keyword phrases. Also include any text you have used in other tags, such as meta tags, alt tags, and headings. Having a lot of content helps as well. A minimum of 200 words per page is recommended. Having many pages of content also increases your rankings.
Having many other sites link to you is another good way to increase your search rankings. Both the links themselves and the increase traffic which results will help. Also, having bloggers link to your site is a good idea.
Although these practices will boost your rankings, there are certain design elements that can interfere with your search rankings. These include frames, dynamic URLs, Flash, using image maps for navigation, and using javascripts for navigation. Also, there are certain practices that search engines regard as spamming, and these practices will get you permanently removed from the site. These include using keywords in your meta tags that do not relate to the content of your page, using multiple instances of the same tag, and listing keywords in the text of your site.
This is just the briefest introduction to search engine optimization. One book available on this topic is Search Engine Visibility, by Shari Thurow. Software packages that can assist you with SEO tasks include Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSET and Web CEO’s Web CEO. If you prefer to have someone else do your SEO for you, Marinerblue is ready to help you for free with your .ws domain.

Author : Matt Canham

Today, no one can deny the importance of backlinks in Search Engine Optimization, especially in Google Optimization. In this article, you can find some solutions for the goal of 50 backlinks with PageRank greater than 2 for new websites. When this goal is archived, I’m totally sure that the pagerank of your website will be boosted to at least 3 in the next update of Google.
There are two main solutions for this goal:
- Finding links on our own, not spending money.
- Buying text links (backlinks).
1. Finding links on our own, not spending money

*Methods in this solution include:
- Find relevant, quality websites and request for link exchanges.
- Submit to quality directories.
- Submit testimonials on websites where you have purchased any services or products.
- Write articles or posts to submit to other websites, blogs, press and forums.
*Pros in this solution:
- No money.
- Robust, stationary links.
- Accepted by search engines.
*Cons in this solution:
- More time and efforts.
- Two-way links (reciprocal links).
- Difficult to determine the time to achieve goal.

*References for this solution:
- Link Exchange programs: linkalizer.com, linkmarket.net, freelinkcentral.com
- Automatic link exchange programs: belinked.info, onewaytextlinks.com, build-reciprocal-links.com, linkdash.com
- Quality Directories: businesspages.org, a2z-free.com, alphabiz.org
- Article Directories: goarticles.com, articlealley.com, article99.com, ezinearticles.com

*Tips:
- You can find more sites for link exchange from studying your competitors’ link popularity. Use search engines to perform this check, the keyword in many cases is: link:your_competitor_url.
- When visiting some directories, pay attention to Directory category. You may find the others directories there. For example, in Directory category of businesspages.org, you can find some other good Australian directories.

*Estimated time: 2 months

2. Buying text links

*Methods in this solution include:
- Buy text links (backlinks) directly from sites (in case they don’t accept link exchanges)
- Buy text links from text link brokers.
- Buy text links from link auction sites.
- Pay fee to be included in big, quality directories (Yahoo, Overture, LookSmart…)

*Pros in this solution:
- Less time and efforts to get links.
- One-way links (better than reciprocal links)

*Cons in this solution
- Money. We must pay fee every month (or year) for some links.
- Buying text links (many in the same time) from text link brokers isn’t encouraged by search engines. They can penalize us.
- Some links are volatile (not permanent).

*References for this solution:
- Advertising on sites: iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker (PR5 - $10.00 per month)
- Text link brokers: textlinkbrokers.com (5 Permanent Links PR0 – PR4: $175 /month), textlinkpopularity.com (10 Links from PR 3 Pages: $150 - Pay only once for permanent links - no recurring charges)
- Link auction sites: linkadage.com
- Big, quality directories: Yahoo! Directory (1 link - $299/year - your site will be reviewed first)

*Tips:
- When buying links from brokers, be sure that you can preview the pages in which your link will be included. Besides the PageRank, there are other factors to take into consideration such as: relevant links in this page, how many links in that page, whether your link is static, …

*Estimated time: 1 week (some directories need more time to review our request)
3. Conclusion:
It seems that the goal of 50 backlinks with PageRank greater than 2 for new websites is not an easy one. Improving link popularity is a long, patient but obligatory process. It’s up to you to decide which solution is better or the combination of these two ones.

Author: Mike Pham

SAN FRANCISCO — Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages.

Blogrunner: Reactions From Around the WebOn Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.

Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.

The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images.

Google is not the first into the visual product search category. Riya, a Silicon Valley start-up, introduced Like.com in 2006. The service, which refers users to shopping sites, makes it possible for a Web shopper to select a particular visual attribute, such as a certain style of brown shoes or a style of buckle, and then be presented with similar products available from competing Web merchants.

Rather than relying on a text query, the service focuses on the ability to match shapes or objects that might be hard to describe in writing, said Munjal Shah, the chief executive of Riya.

“I think what they’re trying to accomplish is largely impossible,” he said. “Our belief is, there is not large-scale solutions.”

Mr. Shah said there had been a number of technology demonstrations by Google Labs researchers, such as a project in 2005 that used machine learning techniques to recognize the gender of a person in an image. However, the company has been slow to deploy its research, he said.

Author: JOHN MARKOFF

This week I’ve noticed a number of interesting changes in the way Google ranks web pages. The following article is based on my observations and theory rather than fact. Please comment if you have noticed similar issues.

Quite a number of the queries we track have altered recently and websites that previously ranked have dropped down by a number of places. This doesn’t appear to be a penalty - just an alteration in the algorithm.

The common characteristic all the sites have is that their rankings were based very heavily on anchor text rather than on-site optimisation. The changes don’t seem to have affected major commercial queries yet but they are visible when you search for particular peoples names.

For example a search for “patrick” used to bring blogstorm.co.uk in 5th place, this week it dropped down to 35th place. The sites above all have better on-site optimisation for that keyword but previously a few good anchor text links was enough for Blogstorm to rank.

Last December I did a study to see how a few SEO bloggers ranked for their own name which gives a good barometer to see how the algorithm has changed since then. Some blogs have moved up and some have moved down but in general the trend is downwards depending on whether you use google.co.uk or .com (there are geographical fluctuations going on as well which affects the results).

Why would Google do this?
Anchor text is the biggest flaw in the Google algorithm. Google wants to show the most relevant and trusted websites at the top of the search results but anchor text has no relation to trust for most queries.

Just because a site has 5 million links with the anchor text “loans” doesn’t mean its a good search result for the query “loans”. Currently there are two types of sites ranking for commercial queries - ones that rank due to the TrustRank of their incoming links (links from newspaper websites and quality blogs) and ones that rank because they have thousands of paid links with keywords in the anchor text.

If I worked at Google then I would discount any links with really competitive keywords in the anchor text - nobody naturally links to a commercial site with “loans” or “car insurance” in the anchor text - they use the sites name instead.

If your site name is mega-cheap-car-insurance.com and all your anchor text is “Mega Cheap Car Insurance” does that mean you should rank higher than somebody like confused.com when a searcher is looking for “cheap car insurance”? I think trust (something which can’t be gamed) should play a much bigger factor than anchor text which until now was by far the biggest loophole in the algorithm.

Author:  Patrick Altoft

There are many ways in which you can improve your Google listing, and some work better than others depending on the type of website you have or on your niche. Here are ways in which you can get a higher Google ranking, or even a better search engine ranking in general.

Author : Peter Nisbet

According to Webmasters World Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are returning fewer results for specific queries, pointing to possible Google SERPs update. The speculations for such changes are that, it may be due to the quality control practices employed by Google, or it can also be a human-error.

Another concern is cache related, where the cache date is current but the cache pages are about one to three months old. In some cases, cache pages aren’t being displayed at all. Such as in case of google.co.uk, users are experiencing ranking changes (increased ranks), that is being attributed to the quantity of links rather than quality of links. Some reports suggest that a lot of irrelevant information is being displayed in the first page of Google SERP, information that is in no way related to search query.

Let us see what the Webmasters at the ‘Webmaster World’ have to say about this possible update:

I’ve wondered too as to why some search terms are affected more than others and some result pages are changing around while other barely move.

Has anyone seen any relationship between how popular a search the term is and how much movement is going on?

As to when it will end I don’t think we can predict as not
hing quite like this has gone on before

I dont know if anybody has reported this or they could be doing some major testing in my areas.

Im seeing some dramatic across the board cuts for returned results for many keywords in my areas. Many keywords that once returned 850-950 results are now showing only 600-725 returned results. First page though is showing about the same amount of returned results as before which is somewhat deceptive. I had a feeling this was right around the corner. Theyre applying more and more of the quality control features of Adwords to the natural results.

I see this pattern too. It might be the result of the “human editorial army” as well as the automated quality measures.

Has anybody seen where cache dates may be 1-3 months old but the page showing in the cache is current? This is taking into account that the new cache date could show up shortly but doesn’t.

I’m noticing the rapid rise of a few sites in the google.co.uk serps. On investigation using Yahoo site-explorer it looks like shear volume of backlinks of any quality trumps a lower number of quality links. Whoever has been playing with the UK geo filter recently seems to have turned off the “high quality” bit of the algorithm. Thus creating a field day for webmasters who exploit the low pay rates of 3rd World SEOs.

Since it is generally agreed that being linked to (except in certain extreme situations) cannot harm your site should we all be paying someone $200 to get 400 links from dodgy directories?

Well, these unexpected changes definitely have unmistakable similarities with SERP updates. However, as of now, it would be wise to just wait for Google’s response.

Author : Navneet Kaushal

UK and European marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketing (SEM) specialists and rookies, including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, attend SES London each year to network with their peers and learn the SEM tips, tactics and strategies that aren’t covered online. Approximately 1,500 search and digital enthusiasts are expected once again at SES London. Your customers, colleagues and competition will be in attendance — will you?

Event Overview:

• Organized and Hosted by world-renowned search authorities
• Real-time actionable information you need to grow your business through search engine marketing
• Ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top search experts and the search engines themselves
• A unique setting to network with fellow marketers and search engine industry professionals to discuss the trends in search engine marketing
• Access to the world’s most comprehensive gathering of search engine marketing & optimization-related solutions providers and potential partners & affiliates.

What You Will Learn:

• How search engines list web sites for free and through paid placements
• How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors
• How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results
• How to calculate the ROI of your search marketing efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy-and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t
• How to build links that generate traffic to your web site, and how to avoid the penalties of “spamming” the search engines
• What’s coming next in the constantly evolving world of web search, and how you can profit from those changes.

Article by : http://www.searchenginestrategies.com

There is none out there who can describe the sophesticated page rank technology owns by Google than Google itself . the below is inormation by Google regarding the page rank .

Technology Overview

We stand alone in our focus on developing the “perfect search engine,” defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” To that end, we have persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, we developed our serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.

From the beginning, our developers recognized that providing the fastest, most accurate results required a new kind of server setup. Whereas most search engines ran off a handful of large servers that often slowed under peak loads, ours employed linked PCs to quickly find each query’s answer. The innovation paid off in faster response times, greater scalability and lower costs. It’s an idea that others have since copied, while we have continued to refine our back-end technology to make it even more efficient.

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

• PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
• Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.



 resultsPageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

Our innovations don’t stop at the desktop. To give people access to the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it, we continue to develop new mobile applications and services that are more accessible and customizable. And we’re partnering with industry-leading carriers and device manufacturers to deliver these innovative services globally. We’re working with many of these industry leaders through the Open Handset Alliance to develop Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform, which will offer people a less expensive and better mobile experience.

Over at Yahoo’s Search Marketing blog, Marketing Communications Manager Roger Park is offering up tips on converting your search ads. He breaks down a bunch of best practices principles to three main steps: Optimize, Navigate and Track.

Optimize

Optimizing your landing pages is crucial to a profitable search marketing campaign. Park advises:

Have a “deep link” to a product on your site
Offer several contact methods
Online shopping carts should be secure and easily visible
Remove broken links
Have good server availability
Navigate

Park encourages site owners and developers to put themselves in the shoes of their web site visitors. I personally have found that many of my clients have a difficult time being able to do this. They’re just too close to their business. So, it was nice that Park also served up some tangible tips:

Create an obvious pathway to the product that the visitor searched for
Don’t have too many layers between the landing page and the end goal - no more than 2 clicks
If the end goal is sale, move non-commercial content below the fold
Track

Successful marketing campaigns are built on solid data. Consistently evaluate your data and tweak your paid search campaigns accordingly. Yahoo’s conversion-only analytics tool can help you do that. The tool can help you analyze keywords, tweak landing pages, and improve under-performing ads.

What do you think of Park’s advice? Anything else you would add to the mix? Share your ideas in the comments!

Posted by Nathania Johnson