Latest Articles by mikepham

Site Owners with SEO: DOs and DON'Ts

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0500

As a search engine optimizer, I've had a great opportunity to work with many site owners for website submission and optimization services and had some working experiences to share with you in this article. Site owners come from different categories: e-commerce sites, services or personal pages. Some of them have the expertise in Computers and Internet but most of them are the neophytes in the search engine optimization (SEO) religion. So, the purpose of this article is providing novice site owners with some useful rules of behaviors (DOs and DON'Ts) to come along with their SEO campaigns.

* SEO firms DON'T help you out. DO help yourself - Search Engine Optimization process is more and more manipulated and it is becoming the big market nowadays. Many websites are offering SEO service with different costs. They promise that customers' sites will be on top of search engines. If so, who will be kicked out of the list? No one? So if you are a site owner with a small budget and modest knowledge of SEO, lean on SEO firm as just an advisor. They cannot do all the things for you. To help you out in SEO, do it yourself. In most cases, the site owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaigns.

* DON'T submit your sites to thousands of search engines and directories - Simply, in reality, there are not even thousands of "engines" to submit to. There are, however, hundreds of search directories, hybrid search engines, free-for-all (FFA) pages and classified ad sites. They are simply a list of unorganized links to the last fifty or so URLs that were submitted to the service. The primary purpose of these sites is to gather email addresses from Web marketers so they can be sent offers for other products and services. By submitting, you are unknowingly giving your consent for them to email you. Some major search engines (e.g.: Google) are not fond of such link farms and may actively ban this type of site.

* Repetitive submissions DON'T improve your rankings in search engines - Many site owners misunderstand between search engine submission and search engine optimization. So they just dig in finding as many as possible free submission services on the Internet and hope that someday their site will be on the top. Search engine submission is just the first step to quickly notify the search engines about the nascence of your site on the Internet. How your site grows or how your site is optimized is more important to search engines to place your site at the top of the search index. So repetitive submissions don't work in these cases. Take time to pay more attention to your site's content and link building.

* DON'T try to trick the search engines in any way - The search engines today are smarter than you have ever imagined. The techniques like most times keyword repeated in a row (keyword stuffing), same color text used as the background (hidden text), doorway pages.. are obsolete and they may be against you. Search engines don't like to get fooled and they may penalize your site for that. Moreover, be careful with the services like automatic link exchange or buying text links. You can use them on your own but take precautions.

* Your websites' exposures on search engines DON'T mean top rankings and web conversions - Some SEO firms guarantee that your sites will be included in search engines. It is so easy because when your site is indexed, it is included in search engines right away and you can see it there by some simple but useless keywords. No one will find you with that keywords or syntaxes. In addition, pay attention to for which search engines the SEO firms will be optimizing your site. It will be easier to get listed on some less-reputed search engines comparing to Google or Yahoo. On the other hand, distinguish between standard and sponsor listing. You must pay for sponsor listing but get less visitors and sales. So make sure you understand clearly what SEO firms are offering. A successful SEO campaign requires the acumen of site owners as well as a tight cooperation between site owners and optimizers. Before the campaign starts, they should discuss the price, the time for the campaign, keyword selection and the specific search engines for optimization....

* DO get familiar with SEO tools such as search engines, HTML, PageRank - Some site owners lean on the webmasters on every task related to their sites (e.g.: add a text link, change page title). In most cases, the site owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaign by getting familiar with SEO tools like search engines, HTML, PageRank. Search engines and PageRank evaluation will help you search for competitors' sites, evaluate the keywords, check sites' link popularity (number of links to your sites) and link saturation (number of pages on your sites have been indexed). Besides, with HTML basic syntax, you can easily exchange links with other sites on your own and stop calling the webmasters all the time for modifying pages with links.

* DO start writing today - Site owners may be beginners in SEO but experts in their industries. And today, writing is a significant skill to do SEO. Start writing some articles about your business now and submit them with your backlinks (links to your website) to article directories to increase the popularity of your site. For instance, suppose you were a mother at home and managed an ecommerce site selling some strollers and baby accessories. That will be wonderful if your share your experiences in choosing and using the strollers with other mummies-to-be on some women forum and article directories. Not only are search engines notified but also some potential customers will be attracted to your site.

In this article, I've provided the site owners with some basic rules of behaviors to do SEO. They include but not limit to myths about Search Engines, SEO firms, importance of SEO tools and article writing skill. Learning them today to make friends with search engines and shove your competitors aside.

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Article by Mike Pham of TopTrafficWholesaler.com, a leading company in Internet Advertising. We also specialize in search engine registration and optimization as well as tools and resources useful for better ranking / positioning in search engines.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

How To Submit Articles Effectively For SEO

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Today, no one can deny the fact that article submission has become a big trend in internet marketing to improve website's popularity on the net. There are thousands of articles, books and forum entries showing that submitting your article to as many article and ezine directories (article hosting sites) is the best thing you can do to increase valuable targeted traffic to your web site, and quickly grow your site's backlinks. In this article, you can find some ways that can help you increase the effectiveness as well as facilitate the process of your article submission.

* Well preparation before your submission: Prepare a short abstract and a list of keywords for your article. Not all article directories will ask for them, but when they need, make this abstract and the list of keywords ready to copy and paste. Besides, you may also prepare several different versions of your articles to prevent duplicate content recognition from search engines. Just replace some words by synonyms then you will have an identical article with readers but different one with search engines. Next, gather all the information which is required by most submission sites including: title, author name, pen name, word count... for author account creation. And last but not least, make sure you have reread and corrected all misspelled words or grammar errors before submitting your article because you will lose credibility with a lot of mistakes in your work.

* Making your resource box effective: This is the first reason of writing the article because it's the resource box which is going to bring targeted traffic and backlinks to your own website. Keep it short, concise and include the most important information - your name, a few attractive sentences about what your site offers and the most prominent link (URL) to your website. If an article directory supports HTML code (or Rich Text Editor support), don't type your URL in its entirety. Use it with the anchor text (keyword) that you want to build backlinks for. With different directories, you should vary this anchor text which points to different pages in your website. Of course you must accept the policy of article directories, do not overuse or abuse with your resource box.

* Using clear format for your article when submitting: Write an article as simple as possible with a clear structure. It's better to avoid complex HTML tags, images, affiliate links and special characters. Make certain to well check the guidelines of different article directories and follow the minimum or maximum article length, general layout and style. If you are allowed to use HTML (or Rich Text Editor), you should use some basic tags such as (bold), (italic),
(break line),
(paragraph), (link) to make your article more attractive. Besides, pay attention to your headline since it is the most efficient thing you can do to get your article read. In the headline, you should highlight a problem or state a solution that your readers are looking for.

* More is better: There are thousands of article directory on the Internet. So the more directories you submit your article to, the more backlinks you can get. It's better if you have prepared a list of all article directories appropriate to your article. With the keywords "article submissions", "articles directory" or "free articles", you can find on search engines thousands of article directories welcoming you to submit your own articles. On the Internet, besides of big articles directories, there are a lot of small directories which you cannot find out with the above popular keywords. Most of them are based on the same software such as Article Dashboard, Article Beach,... so with the keyword "Powered by Article Dashboard" you can get a list of all article directories which use Dashboard System.

* Checking your article's exposure and maintaining your list of article directories for the next submission: Almost all article directories are based on human editors. They need time to read and approve (or reject) your submitted articles. So, the appropriate time to check your article's exposure is about 2-3 weeks after submissions. You can check by either using search tools (if exists) on article directory or using quick indexing and updating search engines such as MSN. This step is very important to make sure your article's format is correct and the resource box is included. In addition, this is also the step to evaluate the article directories: are they still managed or abandoned? Are your articles suitable for these sites? The collected information from these checks will help you maintain a reasonable and useful list of article directories for the next submission.

In this article, I've provided you with some basic but effective tips to come along your article marketing campaigns. Article writing and submission bring benefits to all authors so it should not be underrated. If your articles are not written, and submitted effectively, plenty of efforts can be wasted.
Happy writing and submitting articles!

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Article by Mike Pham of Top Traffic Wholesaler.com, your choice for the best targeted traffic web site. We offer quality europe targeted traffic delivered directly to your web site at the most reasonable prices.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Effective SEO Tools For Site Owners

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0500
First of all, I want to insist that this article is aimed at site owners since sometimes site owners and webmasters are different.
Suppose a realtor has a real estate website. But, she is just a newbie on the Internet and she leans on the webmaster (from hosting provider, for example) in her website's SEO campaign. In fact, that webmaster couldn't understand real estate industry deeply like her and he has many other sites to manage. So the SEO campaign wouldn't get the expected result. In most cases, the site owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaign. However, HTML language, search engines, link popularity, PageRank seem so strange to them at first. Thus, the purpose of this article is providing the amateur site owners with some basic but effective tools and knowledge in Search Engine Optimization. This will help site owners collaborate better with webmasters or SEO firms to boost their websites' position in Search Engines.

1. Search Engines -You are a site owner and you yourself should be familiar with search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search to search for your competitors' sites to see how they are promoting themselves in the marketplace, evaluate the keywords, check your sites' link popularity (the number of links to your website from other sites) and link saturation (number of pages on your sites have been indexed by search engine). These search engine syntaxes aren't academic as you've imagined and you don't need to care about the complicated algorithms behind them. For example, to check whether your sites are indexed, just type site:your_site_domain in search engines. Remember that your_site_url and your_site_domain are not the same. Site domain does not include http:// while site URL must have (ex: http://your_site_domain/your_page.htm is a URL of your site).

Suppose the SEO firm, in their optimization report, would ask the site owners to exchange links with other relevant sites to improve the link popularity. The problem is: where can I find the other sites? Don't worry, search engines can assist you. Site owners can learn from their competitors about which sites they've exchanged links with by checking their link popularity.

In short, if you want search engines to help carry in business, you should make friends with them first. Search engines are always useful friends (although not easy to control!).

2. HTML basic syntax and HTML editor - Site owners don't have to master HTML language to re-design their pages. That is not their job. But basic syntaxes are always necessary.
For example, they should know to locate where the block in an html page is to insert new auto-generated Meta-tags. I've mentioned auto-generated Meta-tags because site owners don't need to code the Meta-tags either. With "Meta-tags Generator" keyword, they can find that on search engines thousands of websites are welcoming them to use their tool. Besides, the html link syntax is also worthy to remember: Look at this simple code your descriptive text which you send to other site owners for link exchange. Your website has many pages for exchanging links so it's significant to understand this link code to change your_site_url_1 to other pages and your descriptive text respectively. In addition, with the knowledge of html syntax, you can open your web pages and add the links on your own and stop calling your webmasters all the time for modifying pages with links. Today, html editors such as FrontPage, DreamWeaver can highly simplify this task in the similar way as you are working in MS Word. Just select the position in Design view (in FrontPage) and paste the link code in the Code view at the cursor.

3. Google toolbar - Google Toolbar is a useful tool for web surfers and even more useful to site owners to check PageRank. PageRank is a Google's grade (from 0 to 10) to measure the page's popularity on the net. With high pageranks, they don't guarantee a high position in Google's search results but they can tell us many things. PageRank encourages site owners in the long process of SEO. The little green color on this bar looks like fruits in the tree of our efforts and we are motivated to dig more in SEO. In addition, PageRank helps site owners to find appropriate sites to exchange links with. Search for the sites with the same level (pagerank) to foresee the success of your link exchange requests. To install Google toolbar to your browsers (Internet Explorer or Firefox), just start by typing Google toolbar in search engines and follow the first result.

In this article, I've provided the site owners with some basic but effective tools to come along their SEO campaigns. They include but not limit to search engines, HTML editor, and Google toolbar. Besides, there are others such as FTP tool, Google sitemap, Link Directory software... The important thing to amateur site owners is forgetting your main career and get your hands wet with these tools. Webmaster and SEO firm cannot do everything for you. Learning SEO tools today will never be too late and wasted.

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Article by Mike Pham of TopTrafficWholesaler.com. We are an Internet marketing services and search engine submission company offering search engine marketing and internet advertising SEO services.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Solutions for 50 Backlinks with PageRank greater than 2

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0600
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.

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Article by Mike Pham of http://www.TopTrafficWholesaler.com , a complete service search engines submission agency. Buy targeted website traffic and increase sales.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

How to improve your king content

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0600

There are thousands of articles, books and forum posts which showed that content is king in search engine optimization (SEO). In this article, you can find some ways that can help you improve this king content for your web site.
* Content for people first, not for search engines - Some webmasters make a common mistake that they optimize everything for search engines but forget about web visitors. The goal of our website is not only to get high search rankings, but also to sell our service. So you should give your website visitors what they are really looking for. Make sure your content flows naturally and you're not just trying to stuff more keywords in the interest of search engines. If users don't find your content convincing they won't buy from you.
* Studying popular search terms - High search engine ranking is meaningless if your website only ranks high on terms nobody searches for. You need to ask your colleagues, vendors, competitors, clients, ... or use online tools (e.g.: wordtracker.com) to identify what keywords which potential customers would use to search your web site, then try to use them often, in titles, and throughout the body.
* Building article directory - How can you optimize the content if your web site only offers a simple service? It means there are just several pages in your whole website. So, to increase the content in quality you should write some articles, reviews which are related to your service. A site with more web pages means there are more chances of different terms that will become findable in search engines. You may consider adding free articles to your article directory. On the Internet today, one can find a lot of websites which provide articles free for republishing. Of course you must accept the policy of these web sites and authors before using these articles.
* Making a clear website organization - Build a site which is simple to navigate with a well linking structure. Every page should be accessible from at least one text link. It's better to be sparing with image links, Flash, JavaScript drop-down menus, or other codes that are not HTML based... because the search engine crawlers cannot recognize text contained in these kinds of display. In case using them is required, then make sure a text based menu or a sitemap is also included in the Web site. Last but not least, you should use meaningful words in your URLs, use as simple a web page layout and design as possible. In conclusion, it is undeniable that content is king in the kingdom of search engines. The quality of your content is the main factor which decides the success in Internet marketing. So improving your content is very necessary.

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Article by Mike Pham of http://www.TopTrafficWholesaler.com, a full service targeted traffic website. We offer easy and fast submission to top 200+ Search Engines And Directories, Free Search Engine Submission, Free Meta Tag Generator, Free Link Popularity Tool and Optimization tips for higher ranking.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com