As more and more websites appear on the Internet, Google is forced to continually modify the way it determines search ranking. That means that you as an internet business owner has to be willing to continually modify your website to that it reach its full search engine optimization capacity. Right now that means that you have to concentrate on link building.

The Importance of the Perfect Link 

People’s thoughts on link building have evolved over the years. We use to think that there was no such thing as a bad link, inbound or outbound, but a couple of scandals later and we have learned that we have to be very careful about what links we have on our websites and where links back to our website are located. The wrong link can actually prove detrimental. 

Inbound vs. Outbound 

The first thing you need to understand about using links to improve your search ranking. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any outbound links, just that you should concentrate on increasing the number of inbound links to your website. The types of links that you shouldn’t worry about are reciprocal links, which have very little influence on Google’s WebCrawler’s.  Full Story »

Unless you have taken a computer class about website design, chances are pretty good that you have never hard of a meta description tag, much less have any idea of how to use it to maximize your search engine optimization.

What is a Meta Description Tag? 

First things first, the meta description tag is the first part of your URL address, the part that follows the www. Most web based businesses use their company name for their meta tag. For years no one really thought much about the effect of the Meta tag had on their search rank, but right now the Meta tag is making a comeback.

In addition to being a part of your home web address, when search engines like Google and Yahoo are putting together a brief summary of the website they use the meta tag. This description is why it is so important that you have a Meta tag that accurately describes you internet based company. The only other thing that the search engines use to describe your website is the series of keywords that you provided.  Full Story »

Keywording is the single most important thing that you can learn to do to increase page views.  Creating content to push page views for your website, or even a great affiliate product, is only effective if you properly keyword the content.  To ensure that your content will be found in Google and other major search engines, you must learn to use the right number of keywords and in the right places.  Fortunately, keywording is a skill that can be mastered with practice and perseverance.  Full Story »

When it comes to running a website, truly one of the most time consuming and at times labor intensive parts of the job is marketing and promoting. No matter how good a website is either in its design, content, or frequency of being updated, without proper marketing and promotion it is doomed to fail. There are a number of great marketing opportunities out there for owners of either a website or blog to take advantage of. Dedicating valuable time to only the best methods though is one of the ways that a website owner can come out way ahead.

One of the best marketing strategies to use when promoting either a blog or a standard website is article marketing. When an author writes articles that link back to their site and submits them to well used article directories, they are increasing the chances that their website will be a success. Article marketing does not just benefit a website in one or two ways though, there are many ways in which a site can benefit from this tried and true promotion strategy. Full Story »

No blog owner is one hundred percent satisfied with the level of success that their blog has achieved. They all want more traffic and with increased traffic usually comes increased income. But how to go about getting that traffic is the question.

One of the most popular terms thrown around in web development right now is linkbaiting. Linkbaiting is the process of posting something to a blog or other website that is an attraction for other people to come and see, use, or link to. Linkbaiting usually involves something that may be a bit outlandish or shocking, and is also usually something that cannot be found on another website.

Here are some proven linkbaiting techniques that have worked at different times for other blogs:

Controversy

Making controversial comments or even just posting about a controversial subject is a great way to attract people to your blog. In doing so, you don’t have to be offensive or rude, you just have to say something outlandish about a topic that many people already find controversial. Full Story »

Today I got this crazy urge to change up the way posts display on the index page of my blog.  I thought that if they showed excerpts of posts rather than the entire post it could help my readers and I in a couple ways.

I understand the index page of my blog used to get a little long and all that scrolling can get those fingers fatigued.  By using an excerpt of the post on the index page I can decrease that scrolling and keep your fingers happy.

Plus having just an excerpt show is a great way to decrease your bounce rate and increase your page views, because visitor’s have to click on an extra link to read the rest of the post.  See >>> Full Story »

Having a directory and reviewing the number of sites that I do give’s a whole different perspective on websites and quality.  One of the trends I notice is that there are certain niches of sites where reciprocal linking is fairly common place.

But just how does Google feel about that reciprocal link love?

One of those niches you see an abundance of link exchange practices going on is real estate. Something that you should be aware of is those links that get exchanged in real estate blogrolls and sites just may draw penalties from Mama G.  I found a Rand Fishkin Article over at SEOmoz while I was further researching this topic.  It was about a Realtors site that got under Google’s bumper and was mowed down in a reciprocal linking penalty.

I can’t help but feel bad for these site owners.  Most of them are small businesses trying to survive.  They realize that the traffic search engines bring can make their business but don’t understand that reciprocal linking can get sites penalized.

Just in case you don’t know what a reciprocal link is, it is a mutual link between two objects, in this case two websites for mutual traffic benefits.

To take just a step back, I don’t think that all reciprocal linking is bad.  It seems from the research I have done that there are thresholds of risk.  Of course the safest bet is to just not engage in reciprocal linking.  If the reciprocal linking is twenty or less associates you know in the industry it might still be safe.  However if the numbers are higher you may start to draw the attention of search engines.  Especially if the content on any of those linking sites is not relevant to the content of yours.  Full Story »

This post will just be a quick tutorial on how to detect fake page rank.  It is a question that is frequently asked which receives a variety of answers. 

The reason it is so important to be able to check this is time and time again you see people who don’t know this simple trick being taken advantage of when they purchase websites based upon fake page rank.

So the first thing that you need to do is go open a browser to Google.  The first thing you need to type into the search window is info followed directly by a colon.  Immidiately following the colon by typing in the domain name that you want to check.  So the entire query should look like:

info:www.thedomain.com

While substituting the domain you want to check into the query.  Lets check the Authority Directory just as an example.

info:www.authoritydirectory.com  <— Go ahead and click.

In the last line of the search results it tells you the domain returned just prior to the link to - Note this. Full Story »

When asked, nearly every website owner would like to see countless visitors to their site in the form of traffic.  What they sometimes neglect to take into account is the quality of that traffic.  Is it targeted to attract the type of traffic that results in conversions?

Luckily there are website statistics and analytics you can use to help you evaluate the quality of your traffic.  Knowing what your visitors are doing on your site can help you understand what it takes to keep them there longer and returning frequently.

Some of the statistics that you should know are:

Bounce Rate  Bounce rate tells you how many visitors leave your site immediately after arriving.  It is expressed as a percentage which tells you how many people out of every one hundred visitors exit your site directly from the page they landed on.  A high bounce rate tells you that your visitors are not finding content that compels them to stay.  Obviously your goal should be to have the lowest bounce rate possible.

Full Story »

A little know tool offered by MSN has made its way onto the scene.  I know, I know you think I am making a typo on this, but seriously it is MSN.

The MSN Webmaster Tools is a place you can register your site to see its performance in the MSN search engine.  The performance factors which MSN provides you with include sitemaps, statistics and indexing which all affect the search results of your website.

You will need to register for an account if you don’t already have one.  Once you do that you will need to enter some site information and upload a meta tag to confirm your ownership much like Google. 

Taking the time to do this is well worth it because it will give you some insight to making your website more visible in the MSN Search Results. Full Story »