Protecting your S E Rankings

Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods."

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a "Pagerank" which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale.
These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit noverzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called "keyword stuffing." It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called "Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is "renters insurance," be sure you don't use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site's search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page's ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as "pagejacking." This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of "off page" elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Google Reveals Advertising Strategy for Youtube

You Tube, which has been bought by the Big G (a.k.a Google) in November 2006, has revealed its new online marketing strategy - small half transparent adverts are incorporated in a selection of video clips.

* How does it work?

The advert will be shown for 15 seconds after a user has started to watch the video. It will appear for 10 seconds on only 20% of the bottom screen without much disturbing the viewer. The user will have the choice during these 10 seconds to close the ad or even let it run throughout the video clip.

* Who would apply for this new marketing channel?

For the moment more than 1000 partners such as BMW or Warner Bros. have the possibility to broadcast their message through YouTube.

* Will the ads show on all YouTube videos?

This new advertising system will only appear on selected partner videos and not on the personal movies.

* How can the target group be selected?

Companies will have the possibility to target their ad through different criteria like demographic, geography or even day part.

According to Google “Less than 10% of viewers actively move to close the overlay when it appears and that there is a 5 to 10 times “click-to-play rate” compared with standard advertising format”.

This means it could be a good opportunity to diversify the way to broadcast an advert and try to get other people or new target groups never reached before. With this new way of presentation, community and sharing websites like YouTube will capture the interest of more people and as a result generate more revenues for Google and its partner companies.

Contact Tetridia on +44 (0)20 8144 6655 for more information about search engine marketing and new developments in the search industry.

SEO for Google

SEO for keywords and content is relatively easy. Choose your keyword. Write content around that keyword. Use an SEO optimizer program to make sure you have done it right.

Long gone are the days of writing unrelated content, and then typing "Britney Spears" 100 times at the end of the article. Today's search engine spiders can spot the "Black Hat" SEO techniques a mile away, and your site can be banned for life.

Here are a few tips for SEO optimization:

Be focussed in your meta keywords - 1 to 3 SEO optimized keywords is enough
Put your keyword at the beginning of you page title tag.
Make sure you title tag is the first tag in the head section
Make sure your keyword appears in the alt tag for images and in link text, but no more than 3 times
Put your keyword in bold
Put your keyword in the H1 section of your page, and H2 if you can
Have a keyword weigh in your article between 3-6% (higher is "keyword spamming")
SEO for domain names
Going back to the Nike.com example from my "SEO for Google" article. Since the keyword weight is 0%, how does nike.com get to billing when you search for them? Easy, Google gives a rank weight to domain names.

Make sure your primary domain name reflects the main purpose of your site (domain SEO). This site, for example, is all about my desire to "retire with millions". The site is subdivided in to many SEO optimized sub-domains each with a URL that denotes the sections. For example, all my SEO articles are in a sub-directory called ../seo.

Many articles have been written about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Google. Google is the largest search engine (for now) and getting your SEO right for the Googlebot can make your site top ten site getting millions of hits a day. On the other hand, poor SEO and your site may never be ranked and your campaigns for Adsence will never net you any real money. Even worse, bad SEO might mean that your cutting edge product is un-finable by your customers.

Google page rank is determined by a number of factors:

SEO keywords
SEO content
SEO domain name
Originality of content
Number of links from external sites
SEO keywords and SEO content will be dealt with in another article, lets focus on the other 2 for now.

Original Content
Having original content on your site is a no-brainer. It is the "why" that escapes many SEO web content developers. We have all seen the ads promising "150000 Adsense and SEO optimized pages". If it were this easy, all of us would be multi-millionaires by now. The reality is, Googlebot applies a penalty for non-original content, no mater how SEO you might think the page is. Think about it - why does "Nike.com" come up number 1 when you type Nike into Google? You or I could probably write a better SEO page about Nike than Nike.com. In fact, Nike.com keyword density for "Nike" is 0%!!!

Links from External Sites
Google take into account the number of links you have from external sites. Each link is like a "vote" for your site. Before you go and sign up for a link exchange program, consider this, some links do not count, in fact, being a "link spammer" can kill your ranking, no matter how good your SEO.

There are ways to generate quality back links:

Create a blog on blogspot.com (a Google Site) and write about your web page - include properly formatted links
Join blogs on respected sites and comment on articles, putting your URL in your signature
Write "press releases" when you update your site and post them on the free press release sites around the web
Take out classified ads in respected on-line newspapers
Make small donations to charity sites that keep a "Thank You" page and include your web site with your name
These are just some tips to compliment your SEO work to get a good Google ranking.

Google Page Rank Is It Relevant To Your Websites Placement?

What is Google Page Rank and how does it affect me you ask. Google Page Rank is a website score that represents how important a websites relevance is in the category of business they represent. Google gets this score from measuring the amount of quality links pointing to your site from other websites with the same relevance. If you have a link to your website from another website with a Google Page Rank of 5 and is relevant to the subject matter your company represents, then Google sees that as a quality link. If you can get your link on a homepage of a high ranking website that is relevant to yours, then you will get a higher score than putting it on a sub page of the site which will usually get a lower Page Rank.

Google usually makes a major Page Rank update every three to four months. Its servers around the globe have to compare there information and the Page Rank is not complete until all of Googles servers have been updated with the new Page Rank scores.

The Page Rank is measured from 1 to ten one being the lowest score and ten being the highest you can have. New sites and sites that have not had any search engine optimization applied to them will have a score of 0. If you use Mozilla Firefox for browsing you can install a new add called SEO Quake. This tool will allow you to see how many links you have in Google and Yahoo. It will show you the sites page rank and when the site was registered. You can do a search in Google for new music for example. The free results will show up with all the link info and page rank score below the text listing. You can compare all the sites for yourself and can make a partial determination that the Google Page Rank is still a large factor is determining your placement for targeted keywords in the free listings.

I currently manage the SEO campaigns for 27 successful websites and have noticed my Google placement on all staying consistent in their positions as Yahoo and MSN positions continue to rise. Google has made several updates on my back link quality and count on each site but I see little movement in the sites placement since April when the last PR update was performed. The page rank is more than just a number and if it is that irrelevant than Google has not made many other major updates on its server since April either.

Just remember, optimize your site for your customers first and for the search engines second. You can get plenty of traffic using the wrong keywords but visitors will see your site is not what they were looking for when they get there. A few quality back links are more relevant than a bunch of non relevant back links. Use common sense and consider what your customers are looking for and what they expect to see when they get to your website.

Search Engine Optimization For WordPress Users

For bloggers using WordPress, optimizing for search engines can be an interesting undertaking. There really are two parts to the process, and that fact tends to complicate the issue somewhat. Learning both elements can be a very crucial step in the development of a successful WordPress blogger.

Writing With SEO In Mind

A successful WordPress blogger needs to first learn how to write with search engine optimization in mind. The title of each post is crucial for achieving good rankings. Adding keywords to the title can make the post rank a lot better for those keywords, and making the title catchy can help it to get linked to a lot more. Creating a good title can be the difference between being successful with search engine rankings and not getting ranked at all.

Once a catchy title that include keywords has been written, the blogger will move on to the post itself. Headings should be used within the post, and variations of the desired keyword should be used in the headings. The section beneath the heading should accurately describe what the heading is about. This serves a few purposes. First, the description will likely contain additional words that will be searched for, and also people will be more likely to link to the post if it is helpful.

In order to achieve good rankings, the post must be long enough to be helpful. A 50 word post may be difficult to get ranked, while a 500 word post will rank in a much better location. Whether the post is long or short, it will get ranked in a better position if there are enough inbound links pointing to it.

Optimizing Your Theme

The second main aspect of search engine optimization for WordPress is optimizing the theme itself. WordPress blogs tend to have a few critical errors that hurt their search engine rankings. Most of the time, the heading tags are used in the wrong places. Make sure that there aren't any heading tags being used in the sidebar of your theme. Headings should only by used within your posts to describe a specific section. Using excess headings all over will dilute the effectiveness of your real headings.

You should also make sure that the 'heading 1' tag is being used around your most important keyword, and that your most important keyword appears in your HTML title. This will help you to rank better for that keyword. Many bloggers keep the default settings, and this will surely hurt your traffic in the long run. Using these techniques, you should really be able to increase your search engine rankings.