How To Write For Search Engines and Your Audience

Writing for the web is definitely different from writing for any other medium. Search engines love relevant content and to give them what they want, you need to pay attention to the following things:

1. Keep in mind the overall objective of your website while creating the content. You must be clear about the action that you want the audience to take after entering your site.

2. Always make your web content search engine friendly by optimizing the content of your web pages so that the search engines can readily index your website and you can achieve higher rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

3. Understand the web surfers' pscyhe when they visit websites. Readers on the web generally briefly scan your writing than actually read the whole thing. Remember always that a webpage is not a book. And people are looking for information that is relevant and related to a specific topic. Give them what they want.

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Different Ways of Developing Content for Your Site

Content is the undisputed king on the web. Why? you ask. Simply because this is what people want online-Information. Visitors are looking for valuable information about your products, services, and brand and that's why they click on your site. And that is the way to make sales. Whereas we all agree upon the importance of content in websites, not all of us are comfortable about developing it. Well, it is not so nightmarish a thing to do as many may suppose. You can develop content for your site in the following ways:

1. Write articles or get them written from a professional if you are not confident of doing it yourself. Writing articles establishes you as an expert in your field so that people come back to you for making purchases. Articles also provide valuable and updated information to your prospective clients, thus helping build a strong relationship between you and your customers. There can be nothing like articles in building an effective viral marketing strategy. Not only this, every time you write an article and it is published, it helps build a linking strategy for you.

2. If you cannot write on your own due to time constraint or lack of confidence, there is an alternative. You can use public domain information that is free to be used as it is in public dome and anyone can use it. It is also possible that may be it's copyright has expired. In both the cases, you are the winner.

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How to Make Search Engines Sit Up and Take Note of Your Website

Imagine you wrote an amazing book dealing with, say, Chinese cuisine. You know the book is great containing all that a person interested in chinese food wants to know. The only problem is that people don't know you have written such a great book. Surely after writing the book, you will make it known to public through press releases or other promotional techniques. Now, think of the same situation in case of your website. Every other minute or hour, a new website gets added to the web. In such fierce competition, how do you make your website stand out from the crowd? Also you may not have the kind of money required to advertise your website. So the sanest and smartest thing to do is to make the search engines work for you.

To become a favorite of the search engines:

Give useful and relevant information to people about your site and the products and services offered by it. Remember that "Content is King" and a keyword-rich, relevant content full website will be more appreciated by search engines than a beauitful and good looking web site.

Be an expert in your topic and provide all the required information to the visitors by imagining yourself as the visitor and getting into the visitors' skin to understand what they are looking for or want from your site. Prepare the answers beforehand to all possible questions that the visitors might ask you later on.

Go through sites that are in a similar business as you and are attracting a lot of visitors to them. Concentrate on the keywords used by them and see if you can incorporate a better version of those keywords in your site. You can use Overture's wonderful keyword search services to enhance the keyword quality of your website.
Keep submitting and registering your site to different search engines if you want it to be noticed and recognized by the search engines. Don't you send invitations to guests in order to invite them to your party? So similarly you have to invite the search engines to spider and index your site.

keep your website up to date with latest information and updates on your products, services and related areas. Treat your website like a graden that requires pruning and gardening regularly to keep it blooming. Search engines don't like a stagnant and stale site that has no new or updated content in it. Now here is a tip to keep your site updated with fresh content-start writing blogs in your site as they can be easily updated.

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Understanding Search Engines

Understanding search engines, their importance in internet and how they work is as essential for any internet savvy person as it is important for a health conscious individual to understand the importance, benefits and ways of keeping fit.

Search engines are the vehicles that take the website surfing passengers to their desired website destination within seconds. Just imagine if these vehicles were not there, how would people have reached the specific websites they were looking for? It is the search engines only that help and guide the web surfers to locate almost anything on the web. With more and more people getting exposed to the internet everyday, and a new website getting added every second, minute, or hour, it would have been insanity to find out the information you are looking for, had the sophisticated search engines not been there.

Different Search engines have different features. But basically three types of search engines exist right now:

Those that are based on crawlers/spiders
Those that are powered by human submissions
Those that are a combination of the two mentioned above

The search engines that are based upon spiders send their spiders out into the cyberspace where the spiders visit different websites, reading information on them, the site's meta tags , and the links the individual sites connect to. This information is brought back and indexed in the central depository. It is not a one time visit by the spiders to the websites. In fact they keep visiting the sites to check for any change, updation or modification in the sites. Depending upon the search engine administrators' decision, the duration and number of visits to the websites are decided.

The search engines that fall in the second category of human submissions rely basically upon humans to submit information to be indexed and catalogued. Only submitted information is put in the index.

So when a searcher enters a query in the search box of the search engines, the spiders search for the most specific and relevant information or website matching your query through the index. You are not actually searching the web, but the huge databases of information that are created by collecting, storing and retrieving the information. This should answer your question of some search results leading to dead links. If the index is not updated since the time of a web page becoming invalid, the search engines still consider the page to be active and display the dead end link till the time the index is updated.

Search engines are looking for frequency and location of the keywords on a web page. Higher the frequency, more relevant will be the web site. The algorithms also study the way the web pages link to other pages in the web. This gives valuable information to the search engines about the website's main purpose and whether the page is important enough to increase the ranking of the site concerned.

This brings us to another important question of different search engines giving different search results. You must be wondering why? Well it is because different search engines have different indices, just like different doctors have their own unique way of attending to patients with the same ailments. The search engines may be using different algorithms to search and determine the relevance of the information in the index to what the searcher is looking for.

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The Way You Link Matters for Getting Higher Rankings

It has been accepted and agreed upon by SEO experts and webmasters that only linking to other websites relevant to your website is not enough to get good rankings. What is required more is incorporating and adding relevant anchor text in the links not only in the external links pointing to your site, but also the internal links within your website.

Anchor text is also called the link text as it is visible in a link to a webpage or can be clicked in the link. In normal built sites, the anchor text is used to point towards the subject matter of the page that it links to. The benefit of having anchor text in the links is that it makes the target page more relevant. As a result of this increase in the relevance of the page having anchor text, the target page URL benefits too as relevant keywords appear on that page. This information can be used by you to construct the relevance of each page through optimized anchor text containing important keywords that are relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site.

Search engines give special importance to the anchor text on your web pages, thus making a big difference in improving the final rankings of your site. Google uses a special operator 'allinanchor:keyword' to fetch text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. Hence it is important to properly optimize the whole site from anchor text point of view based on individual page content.

One way is to insert or locate important keywords in your page's normal text and linking it to relevant target pages of the website. Equally important are the keywords within the anchor text and to give a good kick start to your link building campaign, it is essential to write more than one options for the title and description of the link pointing to your website.

Also it is beneficial to provide your own cut and paste HTML code while dealing with external links as it is appreciated and liked by webmasters when they have a ready to paste HTML code to be used and to give a link to your website. Remember that links coming from external sites improve the chances of your site getting higher rankings by gaining relevance for keywords displayed in the anchor text. The more the number of inbound links, better will be your ranking in search results.

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Organic vs Non Organic SEO

The dictionary defines 'organic' as being close to nature. That is exactly what Organic SEO means. It is another name for Natural SEO where the web site pages are optimized using natural methods of placement and ranking in search engines.The concentration of Organic SEO is on relevant and keyword-rich content, improving meta-tags using appropriate descriptions, link exchange programs, articles, other content material to achieve and maintain good rankings.

As opposed to Organic SEO, Non Organic SEO is an artificial method of making websites get higher rankings in search engines. It can include techniques like doorway pages, re-directs, small text, hidden text loaded with keywords etc. It may employ some of the organic SEO techniques too. In short, non organic SEO is a faster means of achieving higher rankings.

The difference between these two types of SEO is the same as between organically produced food and food grown with the help of artificial means like using fertilizers, pesticides, other unnatural means to enhance and hasten the growth process of plants.

Well, both are geared towards the same end, i.e, optimizing pages for search engines. But the ways adopted by the two to reach their ends are different. Whereas non organic SEO might be able to get higher rankings for the web sites faster, but it mostly sacrifices good content for quicker results. On the other hand, Organic SEO might take a lot of time to achieve higher rankings, but will pay atention to each and every aspect of the website. Though both the types are being used by people all across the globe according to their individual needs, it is still important to guage the overall purpose of the site first before employing any one of these two SEO types.

There is no hard and fast rule regarding which SEO should be used. All depends upon the individual preferences, demands, and requirements of the webmasters. What is important is to completely and fully understand the workings and implications of both of these types before venturing to use them.

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Mistakes To Avoid While Setting Up Online Business

Anyone who is desirous of starting up an online business needs to practice patience and not make the mistakes mentioned below. Instead of discussing the do's of an online business, we will discuss the dont's as they are equally important.

1. Never ever make the mistake of starting something without a plan. If you do start any new business venture sans a plan, it's doomed to fail because you just started without setting a goal for yourself and wouldn't know what to expect from your (mis)venture.

2. Planning to establish a business and not having a website is like putting an end to your business hopes and aspirations before starting only. Having a website will not only help you manage your business in a better way but also give a professional touch to your business.

3. Don't put your feet in too many things at one time. In other words, be focused and indulge in one program at a time, the most effective ones first and stick to them. As they say, "slow and steady wins the race", practice caution and deal with programs according to priority and importance.

4. Don't spend too much money in advertising because more advertising doesn't mean more sales or better profits. If this were to be true, many companies that are spending lots of money on their advertising would reach the top and reap benefits. It is better to concentrate on proper execution of your business plan than spending mindlessly on advertising.

5. If you don't want your business to close down and then making efforts to start it again, then never ever SPAM. It is always better to build your email list with only verified addresses, preferably double opt-in email addresses. Because these are actually the people or clients who want to buy or hear from you.

These are some of the mistakes that many business starters or beginners like you made while setting up their online businesses and it is better that you learn from these bitter experiences of others to avoid making any mistakes yourselves.

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Ethical Search Engine Optimization: Topping the ranking race the right way!

Ethics play an important role in SEO

The Dictionary defines ethics to be a set of principles of right conduct. And even SEO must follow some ethical techniques and strategies to increase a site's ranking in search engines. Unethical practices may bring more visitors to your site, but the damage done is paramount and life long. Because you might succeed in attract more people to your site, but when they don't get what they want, you have lost their trust, and confidence forever.

To be ethical means to produce maximum good and minimum harm or no harm at all. It also means acting and behaving as responsible citizens of societyand fostering goodwill even through business, so what if it is business or marketing online. In SEO, being ethical refers to promoting the common good of all concerned-whether it is the search engines, searchers, site owners, or the world wide web.

For the searchers, every web marketing or SEO strategy, that does not provide them the information, sevice, or product they are looking for, is unethical.Search engines are operating unethically, if they are not able to bring more searchers for the kind of information they want. Ultimately, the search engines lose the confidence, trustand respect of the searchers for not giving them objective, fair, and right information that the searchers wanted.

And web site owners act unethically when they try to deceive and dodge the search engines by providing wrong information in order to get higherrankings.As a result, these web site owners not only harm the brand integrity and online visibility of their products and services, but also lose prospective customers for life. The damage done to your online presence could be fatal and your competitors' will get a great opportunity to laugh at you and exxaggerate your deceptive practices for their own gain.

In a nutshell, it is always better to win the high ranking game in a slow and steady manner. Abide by the laws, don't try to dupe people, focus on the target audience and accordingly create, submit the web sites. in other words, give people what they want, don't waste their time as well as your resourcesin showing soething else and providing something entirely different.

Be truthful, honest, fair, objective and last but not the least, ETHICAL to win life long customers (if you are a web site owner), or visitors (search engines).

A user-friendly site is a profit-making site

Design your site for the user, not for yourself

When we go to a supermarket with or without the intention of buying something, the first thing that attracts our attention is the organization of products on the shelves, the quickness of the billing procedure, any extra benefits or free goodies offered, the services of the workers, and last but not the least, a feeling of warmth and personal touch oozing out of the whole place. As a supermarket owner does everything possible to make the customers feel at home in his store, so should you to make every single visitor who coms to your site.

Must Have Features of a user-friendly web site

1. Fast loading-Do not make the visitor wait for more than 30 seconds to reach your site. Remeber that the people who surf the net are very busy and are looking for some specific information. If you test their patience for too long, they will leave your site and move ahead. Make them remember your name, logo, and message on the home page only. Faster loading also makes you the favorites of search engines to be ranked higher.

2. Relevant and Simple information-The main purpose of a website is to provide information that is relevant and focused to what you provide or offer. And if this information is provided in simple plain English, you have hit the Jackpot!!!! There is no need to show off your knowledge of vocabulary or language mechanics on the website, just give the readers what they want in short and simple manner. Product and Contact information link should come on the home page only, and within three clicks, the visitor should get what he wants.

3. An easily navigable site map- Don't make the navigation tree a complicated puzzle for the visitors that they have to solve. Respect their time and effort using logical headings and link descriptions. Cookie crumbs can be a great help to inform the visitors of the category and page they are browsing. It is just like guiding visitors who have come to your house for the first time, by showing them the path. Your Site map should link to every page so that the vistors don't have to go to the home page everytime to link to different pages in your site.

4. Subscription options-If you are offering the visitors some subscription offers for, may be, newsletters in order to retain them, do ensure all the email forms work properly.

5. The right colors-Use colors that complement your products and services. Maintain a balance and consistency in the use of colors. Do not confuse the visitors with the use of very jarring/bold or totally dull colors. Keep in mind your target audience, and use the colors accordingly.