Poor Configuration of Firewall Kills Search Engine Rankings

Many of you might have gone through the horrifying experience of finding your websites being removed from the search engines one fine morning. This must have left you with a question mark on your faces as to why it happened when you had done nothing to offend or displease the search engine spiders. This is exactly what happened with some webmasters whose websites were hosted by a compay that used SonicWALL Inc.'s special firewall software.

As a result of using this software, search engine spiders couldn't access their websites because the Firewall software didn't allow them to do so. The standard security settings of this software state that:

"An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver using this interface.The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise and control of the web server." (reference)

In simple and un-technical terms, it means that the search engines will not spider your website if this software is used without customizing it. In case the firewall has these settings, the connection to anyone asking for the robots.txt file will not be given so that it appears as if the site is offline.

The bad news is that this is not good from SEO point of view because the robots.txt file is the one which all search engines request and ask for before they index your website. So, the bottom line is that if you too are finding your site being removed from the search engines, regardless of good incoming links and well optimized web pages , you need to talk to your web host whether their firewall is the culprit, blocking search engines to request for robots.txt file. Chances are that your web host is not aware of this problem.

How to ensure your press release drives traffic to your website

Press Release is the most advantageous way to increase your sales, expose your business and increase traffic to your website particularly when your business is running short of enough money. A well-written press release has the potential to get picked up on various sites and channels and increases the traffic to a site providing enhanced rankings overall. Publishing a Press Release in several News Search Engines attracts hundreds of back links from high-ranking web sites, as News Channels tend to be highly ranked sites. The main objective in writing an effective press release is to write something noteworthy of your products/services and get it published. So they must be written in a crisp, clear and colloquial style. Since the main characteristic of the press releases is to present an updated fresh content, it regularly earns your webpage the editor’s attention. Properly optimized keyword rich press release drive traffic to your site and helps building/retaining market exposure for the services/products offered by you. But you might be mulling over how to ensure that this condensed journalistic articles provide the kind of publicity and traffic you look for.

For substantial SERP, you need to consider following points:

The relevance of your information: consider if your recent release of press release is informative or not. It should strictly adhere to the ‘5 Ws’ of your organization, your agendas, product/services and providing suitable answers to who, what, where, when and why.

A strong appealing introduction: The heading of the press release should be such that it immediately captures the interest of media, journalist or editor. The title of the press release should be short and emphatic.

Remember your aim is to reach your target audience: Your press release must target a specific audience. Emphasize or highlight the information that is projected for them and tell them why they should follow it enquiringly. Your press release will be more effective if you attract focused and targeted audience.

Be honest: There is no fun of making castles in the air and providing the facts that are not true to the best of your knowledge. Provide only the facts about your information. Avoid exaggeration and feathery language.

Careful interpretation of words: Avoid using superfluous adjectives, adverb, flowery language, or unnecessary expressions that simply makes you narcissistic of your products/services. Let each powerful used convey your agenda.

Provide some real life examples: Providing some real life examples or testimonials always works out for an organization. It is a wonderful way to increase the credibility of your services.

Select the opportune time to release your Press Release: It is more than important to publish your press release timely, and recount it to a news-worthy event. It would be advisable to link your news to current events or social issues, to make sure that your release has an informative element.

Press releases are not meant to narrate all the elements of your business. They are meant to convey the cores of what's going in your business.

Do not ever forget to provide your contact information with your contact name, address, web site address and e-mail address.

Before releasing, fix on where and how to send your press release.

Make a chronological list of the media in the range you want to cover.

Easy methods than SEO to promote a website

Webmasters have always endeavored to direct traffic to their websites. Now when Internet is cluttered with all sorts of SEO techniques to increase traffic to your website and are touted as reliable ones, you can increase the "organic" or "frëe" traffic by following some simple ways that are equally reliable. After building a good content-rich site the following methods will definitely yield profitable results

Buy Other Web Sites: Every day thousands domains are forfeited by their owners who fall short of funds to renew or pay for the registration fees on their expired domains. These sites are eventually deleted and are sent back to the "pool" of unregistered names. Cashing in on high profile domain names already rank high on your keywords. These expired domains beseech a lot of marketers’ attention. Ensure Google page rank, Alexa rank and the number of back links for any expired domain before taking the ownership of any site.

• Affiliate Marketing: hire affiliates and offer commission to them for selling your product. Each affiliate's link to your salës letter conversion page will bring you traffïc and a better search engine rank too.
• Know your visitor value and have a tested and proven sales page that converts your visitor into an enduring customer.
• E-marketing Strategy: E-marketing strategy helps the companies to build a solid customer acquisition. The strategy involves a thorough identification of the best target market segments and developing the right online marketing programs to attract and retain profitable customers.
• Present your Testimonials in other sites: Let other sites publish your testimonials on their web site. This can provide you a one-way link from a site that would probably otherwise not give it to you.
• Develop a powerful link strategy: buy links from other sites from text link brokers. Make sure you get links from pages with a Google Page Rank higher than "0". A webpage can get a “0” PR because it might have violated the rules of ethical Search Engine Optimization. If you link to it you can also get “0” PR.
• Blogs with RSS feed: The blogs are often updated several times a day with each voice-over conveying a story of its own. It is an effective strategy that increases the exposure of weblogs on the Internet and generates targeted traffic to your blog for free. To strengthen the effects distribute your news, views and reviews through RSS feed. Once the RSS text file is set up and registered at the various aggregators, it will generate plenty of traffic.
• Press Release is another market exposure that generates traffic. An electronic press release is the most cost-effective marketing tool that not only brings credibility but also drive targeted web site traffic. If properly optimized it adds significant profits to your new product/services. Every Press Release published should be around 300-500 words including a link back to your site. this way you can get hundreds of links back to your site.
• Also market your product/service in Ezi
• Place ads in someone else's email newsletters that reach your target market. Make your article free for other sites as long as they keep the link back to you at the end of each article.
• Nothing can be compared to pay per click advertising because you pay only when someone actually visits your site. You can bid for rankings and choose the description and title you want, which in turns generates the traffic for a website. It is also an easy way to be in the #1 rankings, and that too after paying the minimum amount per click-thru.

Buy other web sites: An easy way than SEO to get Web Site Traffic

Every day hundreds of thousands domains are forfeited by their owners who fall short of funds to renew or pay for the registration fees on their expired domains. These sites are eventually deleted and are sent back to the "pool" of unregistered names. Expired domains implore a lot of marketers’ attention because these domains form a new supply of domain names returning to the market. Cashing in on high profile domain names can considerably boost any business on the internet. It initially started as a way to own a good domain name but contemporarily has turned out to be among the most recent ways to propel website's traffic. Every day more than 30,000 domains are registered and 2000 domains expire. Once a domain name expires and is send back to the inventory of unregistered names, it becomes available to be re-registered by anyone. It is more or less like a cat and dog race; the moment it is discarded the battle begins for its monopoly. Contrary to the belief, the domains do not terminate with a great ease. After its stipulated period of expiration, it goes into “expired” status for at least 40 days where its services are called off, but the domain owner may still renew the domain after paying the renewal fee, which is free of any penalty. But if in case the owner does not turns up to claim his domain it is shifted to “redemption period,” where the site is deprived of all Who Is information. Here the renewal charges are subjective to penalty. Subsequent to the redemption period the domain’s status is “locked” and enters the deletion phase. The tenure of the deletion phase is 5 days long, and on the last day the name is officially drop from the ICANN database and is made available for registration by anybody. Whether you want a domain name for your new website, find web sites that already rank high on your keywords and verify the traffic to them to better market your existing site. While new unregistered domain names are tedious to search, the expired domain lists are a better option. You can visit http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml to get registration information on millions of domain names with many different extensions, irrespective of where they are registered

RSS: A Boon for Ezine Publishers

Online publishing is on a rise these days. Every other publisher seems to be on the bus to online publishing destination. With the coming of RSS (Rich Site Syndication), the publisher's task has become all too easy and efficient. Now the publishers can syndicate or distribute their content to the interested subscribers through the distribution of lists of hyperlinks. Besides the syndication of content, there are numerous other benefits of RSS that need to be highlighted to the users.

First of all, RSS helps your site to rank better as search engines have a weakness for themed and subject related websites. In other words, when sites are optimized around some niches, or specific subjects, they rank much better in the search engines. RSS feeds also correspond to a particular topic or niche or theme. So by using the highly targeted RSS feeds from the blogs or news feeds, you can improve and update your site's content without writing a single word.

Search engines crave for theme based content that they get from the RSS feeds. So when you subscribe to an RSS feed related to your products or services, you also stand a chance of adding several keywords to your pages that are contained in that RSS feed and that you want to rank for.

Not only this, you also get highly updated and relevant content without having to write anything on your own. Simply because the RSS feeds are regularly updated by the publishers. These changes can be seen on your pages also, thus giving you an added benefit of having an updated site every few hours of the day without your doing anything.

Using RSS feeds also gets your site indexed and spidered more frequently and regularly than otherwise. Yes this is true because the search engines consider the sites with RSS feeds to be as good as having new, fresh, and updated content everyday. So they don't mind visiting theses sites even on a daily basis.

Now, think like a savvy marketer. With an RSS feed, you stand to have a win win situation only as your web pages will be indexed regularly and frequently as compared to your competitors who does not have an RSS feed subscription and hence no spidering or indexing by the spiders as frequently as that of your site.

So adding RSS feeds should be a very important part of your online marketing strategy and you should take it seriously if you dream to rank topmost in the search engines.