What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO is a combination of techniques, tools and methods used by internet marketers to improve the rank of web pages on search engine results pages, also called SERP's. A website's rank on SERP's is based on information gathered by the engine's spider crawlers. Understanding what the crawlers look for and making web pages attractive to these crawlers will lead to successful SEO.

Although crawlers have decreased the importance of keywords over the years, they are still the foundation of effective optimization. Research keywords and choose the most appropriate for your topic or hire a keyword research service to do this for you. Include keywords in the sites URL when possible. Title tags, description tags and the first paragraph of text are good locations for keywords as well.

Links are a high priority with search engines. Internal links, those within a site, are mildly attractive to the crawlers, as are reciprocating links. Two sites that agree to link to each other do so with reciprocating links. To have any credibility with search engines, these links must be between sites with similar content.

Spider crawlers favorites are one-way, incoming links. Obtaining links from strong sites with quality content and high traffic counts will improve a pages rank on SERP's. Create links from within the text of your pages. When linking, use keywords in the anchor text.

Off-page SEO techniques are highly effective for improving search engine rank. Become a frequent contributor to blogs and forums and always include a link to your pages when doing so. There are many opportunities on the internet to write articles. Take advantage of these with topics related to your web page and, of course, link back to your site each time you do.

Social media sites where you connect to friends, groups and communities create excellent SEO opportunities. Include keywords in profiles, captions for pictures and within the text you post. Most of these sites allow you to list URL's to web pages you are involved with. Social media sites typically have powerful search engines and create avenues for you to communicate with members based on information they have provided in their profile.

There are many ways to make your website more attractive to search engines. The techniques mentioned here should be considered as basic knowledge. Internet marketing is a process of attracting visitors to your pages, informing them about your products or services and converting them from visitor to customer. Good optimization techniques will help you conquer the first step in this process.

SEO Resources

SEO Company
Web SEO Master Website Designers, Development, Web Programming, Developers and Search Engine Optimization Marketing Webmasters and World Wide Web Mastery.
Author: solveforce

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That's where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.
Social Marker runs smoothly on all major web browsers, but we recommend downloading and using Firefox.

Code for blogs and websites Available. If you want to use socialmarker button on your blog or website, there two optional code for wordpress (plugin) and other blog engine.

Using SocialMarker can help you spread a link on 49 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes!

• It helps you get a lot of backlinks.
• It helps you increase your traffic.
• Your link gets indexed by Google in a matter of minutes.
• Best of all, it's free!

Visit Socialmarker now!

SEO Tools have sprouted up from engineers, hackers, wanna-be SEO's and legimate Search Engine Optimization companies. Many are free, and very good.
But, the fact is - you don't have to be an engineer to run them. Our compiled list below is used daily by professionals and newer users alike.

Start putting these tools to use and see how they impact your own online business.

#1 - Ranking Analysis
This tool can unveil extremely valuable information on how you can break into the top 10 search engine positions. Check it out at this url webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/

#2 - Sitemaps
xml-sitemaps.com, they have created a sitemap generator that enables you to create a xml sitemap for Google and a text-based sitemap for Yahoo. In addition, the generator can also create an optional HTML sitemap for human visitors. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com for step-by-step instructions on how to get started.

http://www.highwebsiterankings.com/site-map/ is an extension to the tool above.
We also like www.sitemapdoc.com - a little buggy though. Make sure to create an account in Google and Yahoo, and get the Sitemap into those administration control systems.

#3 - Keywords Analysis
For a keyword tool that has it all, go to http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

#4 - Keyword Rankings
This tool allows you to track numerous keyword rankings like # backlinks, #pagerank and #daily, weekly and monthly changes in your rankings. Take control of your search engine rankings at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

#5 - Link Harvesting
Link Harvester is open source, so web masters are free to share it and developers are free to improve upon it. Do your own link analysis at http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/

#6 - PPC, Reports, Link Partners & More
* perform keyword mining * use Web site analysis to improve your rankings
* create link popularity reports * quickly and easily find potential link partners
* use automated, semi automated, and guided submission to search engines and directories * manage your PPC campaigns * analyze your search engine rankings.

This is the grand-daddy of all tools: webceo.com. Free SEO Tool download, desktop edition.

#7 - Page Strength
Relative importance of pagestrength http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php

#8 - Link Popularity
We like www.urltrends.com for beginners.

#9 - Alexa Rank
seochat.com and make sure you download the alexa toolbar.

#10 - Keywords Density Analysis
webconfs.com

#11 (bonus) - SEO tool or not?
Not. But, it is very useful in determining the geographic location of an IP address using a bit of AJAX and Google Maps. http://www.seomoz.org/ip2loc/ip2loc.php



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About the author
Jon Rognerud is a recognized authority on the subject of SEO and Internet Marketing, and has spent over 10 years developing websites and marketing solutions for companies like Overture and Yahoo. His site, http://www.microsaw.com, provides a wealth of informative search marketing articles and more..
Article Source: Free Article Directory

Great SEO Tools take advantage of your normal working methods to give you an added edge. They're non-intrusive but great in terms of improving your search engine rankings. One such tool is the blog.

You can look at a blog from several perspectives. For most people, it is just a simple self-expression method, others see it as a discussion forum. However, if you look at a blog not only as all of the above but also as a SEO tool, your handling of the blog will change. How you write your posts will change. How you think about your blog will change. You'll then be able to derive great business value from your blog.

The Many Methods of SEO

Search engine optimization, in a nutshell, involves anything that improves your ratings in the popular search engines, like Google, MSN & Yahoo. The higher your ranking, the greater the chance that a new customer will see your site in the first page of search engine outputs. While you can improve the structure and linking of your site by practicing techniques of on-line and off-line optimization, such as adding meta-tags and sitemaps, you need other methods to increase the popularity of your site.

Blogging is one such method. Blogs traditionally have a large number of posts on them that relate to a specific subject. Readers who are interested will come to the blog, read what is on offer, agree / disagree and leave feedback and comments. If you promote your blog actively, you will also visit the blogs of your readers, and leave comments on their sites along with a link back to your blog. Can you see how the blog is beginning to behave like a SEO tool?

Two things happen if you handle this well – your blog gets lots of keyword rich content and it gets a lot of links to itself from other sites. Either way, your business gains.

Search Engines Love Blogs

Search engines love keyword rich content and inbound links. While traditional SEO tools do this by making you manage links to other sites and increase or optimize keyword usage, your blog is doing this in the most natural way and gives you a great big, ready-made user base!

Of course, before your blog does become your SEO tool of choice, there is a lot of work to be done. You will not be able to build the niche you are looking for if you do not focus completely on the quality of your blog. This means that your content has to be great and the better than average informed reader still has to find something worth reading on your blog.

While keeping a blog can be a great satisfaction in itself, there are many business related benefits to keeping one. A good blog is a natural SEO tool that attracts traffic to your site in the most natural way.


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About the author
Deborah Carraro is a succcessful online entrepreneur who got her start in the Inner Circle with many top Online Entrepreneurs and is now sharing their business blueprints & online secrets with you. You can get a free subscription to her “Partner for Profits” ezine at http://www.myvirtualpartner.com Article Source: Free Article Directory - http://www.articleManiac.com Search And Submit Articles

If you're akin to certain thing we were when we first commenced online, you've perhaps made a new website. Then put forwarded it to some search engines and hoped that visitors would curiously show up their interest at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling.

After first three or four weeks move by and only a few stray visitors show up their likeness at your website, you make a decision to try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword with an anticipation that you just might achieve a good rank in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of month a pass by and still there is no luck.
At this moment you almost certainly give up and decide to either build another website around a district market objective or just become hopeless and quit.
Whatever may be, news flash, as you've probably worked out by now, this is not the perfect way to approach about doing things. In our case, let's create a SEO correlated website. Before we launch setting up and gathering content for the website, we have to do a slight keyword research. It is VERY significant and should not be jumped up.

To execute our keyword research we have to pop in a few websites. The foremost target of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com/. They have a very decently designed keyword tool, and best of all it's free! Once we've downloaded this software, we can write down the most general keyword for our website into the keyword tool. In our case, our keyword would be "Seo Company in india". You'll make out that in the display below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "count" column will then display us how many times the particular keyword has been searched for the last month within the Overture.com search engine. In general, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to reckon the number of times that keyword has been looked for within Google for the preceding month. You'll remark that “Seo Company in india” was hunted 6,650,000 times through out the previous month. Do NOT commence right away by optimizing for the keyword "seo company in india”. Why, you may ask? If a keyword is looked for that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the opposition you will have to outrank will be tremendously severe. This is not something you should attempt to carry out straightaway. For a untouched website, or one you're just launching to optimize, it's superior to choose more definite keyword phrases. We'll confer about this after some times. Let's take a quick look over at Google so we can illustrate you accurately how many websites are contesting for this keyword. If you were to rank high your website for this definite keyword, you'd be struggling to compete against over 66 million other websites (web pages)! We aren't familiar with you, but that's a terribly towering objective to start with.


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Author:
links@auroin.com
http://www.auroin.com
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An article highlighting some of the do’s and don’ts of good SEO. It shows that a fast result using black hat techniques might not always be the most ethical and best way to get traffic to a website. Search engine optimisation, or SEO is a brilliant way of ensuring that a website gets a lot of traffic going to it, and this is very important if your website is your living.

However, just by creating a website you are not creating good SEO. There are so many different ways of getting traffic to a website, which are both good and bad.
Here is a list of do’s and don’ts for making sure that your website is ranking highly in search engines and is getting the kind of traffic to be proud of.

Do:
Make sure that the content on your website is original and easy to read. There are several tools available on the Internet to check that the content on any website has not been plagiarised. Some of these are free and some you need to pay for, although the cost is minimal for offline content, and is usually free for content that has been published online. Using this kind of software will make sure that all content is 100% original.
Don’t:
Don’t be tempted to cut and paste from other websites! This is one of the worst things that you can do and at best your site will be removed from search engines, at worst you could wind up in court with breech of copyright charges.

Do
Use the services of someone who is experienced with SEO. This can either be in house or you can opt to use a freelancer. Either way is just as good and you can make sure that the content of your site is top quality and attractive to people surfing the ‘net.
Don’t
Don't have content that is keyword stuffed. This is seen in a very dim light be search engines and will once again result in a website being banned for poor quality content which makes little or no sense. After all a paragraph which has the same word or words repeated over and over is not easy to read, and is not seen as natural by the spiders that crawl websites looking to rank them.

Do
Some research on the use of SEO. If you don’t know how to maximise the use of a website’s content then you won’t be able to provide any quality SEO text that will draw traffic to the site. Don’t
Don't use ‘black hat’ techniques to attract visitors to a website. These kind of techniques include things such as link farming, by which many links are laced on your site and other sites, often that have little or no relevance to the subject being searched. These will then lead visitors to your site fraudulently.
Doing this shortens the life of a website as it will soon be removed. Another black hat technique is having words on the screen that are indexed but are the same colour as the background so they are invisible to the human eye. Websites that use black hat techniques have a very limited lifetime as search engines will soon recognise the deception contained on them.

By following these few do’s and don’t of SEO you will soon have a website that is ranking highly and is following the rules of fair Internet usage. It may seem a good idea to employ less than ethical techniques in order to get some high traffic quickly.
However, in the long run this is not a good idea as eventually the site will get banned and a new site will need to be created. These simple rules are a good place to start if you are looking for good website content.



Author
Adrian McLean is responsible for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), at the leading SEO Company in the UK, to learn more about SEO, please visit www.searchengineoptimising.com. Free Article Directory - http://www.articleManiac.com Search And Submit Articles

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for a site. It helps to achieve good ranking in Search Engines.
RankQuest provides two important tools like Keyword Finder and Meta Tag Analyzer for SEO. Keyword Finder lists the keywords in the meta keyword tag of a site.
Meta Tag Analyzer examines the meta information of a site and makes you know, if the content is Search Engine friendly or not.
Many search engines uses the details in the meta tag for ranking purpose, so this tag must be effectively analysed for improvement in ranking.

Visit the download page from download3k.com

By Mel Strocen (c) 2007

In Part 1 of this article , some of the better, freeware keyword, sitemap and ranking tools available to webmasters were listed. Part 2 covers meta tag generators, link popularity apps, link checkers and general SEO tools. Again, all of these tools can be found in the SiteProNews Webmaster Tools Directory along with new additions as we find them.

Let's start with a look at meta tag generators. Since meta tags lost their SEO relevance several years ago, most of the freeware programs in this category are either no longer supported or haven't been updated for several years. But, then again, not much has really changed in meta tag usage so the apps listed below should still be useful.

Meta Tag Generators

1. BHead 4.1.1 (1.0 MB) is an advanced meta tag generator that can create your entire HEAD section, including CSS style sheets. Generates the code for all popular meta tags and also has an option for custom tags. Keywords and description can be imported from files. Comes with a basic Style Sheet editor that includes a color picker. Other features include spell chëck, search replace, syntax highlighting, etc. For Windows 9x/NT/ME/2K/.

2. Metty Meta Tag Maker 1.31 (2.5 MB) is a meta tag creator with support for 33 meta tags that ensure search engines properly index your website. Easy to use and requires no knowledge of meta tags. For Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.

3. Search Engine Buddy 1.0 (2.7 MB) analyzes web page meta tags and web page content on or offline to help you create the best possible meta tag combinations and web page content based on the requirements and algorithms of the major search engines. For Windows 9x/2000/NT.

4. MetaWizard 1.2a (617 KB) is a simple, bare bones meta tag generator that guides you through the process of creating basic tags for your web site pages.

Link Checkers

Where oh where did all the good freeware link checkers go? Well, apparently they went offline with the cos. or individuals that developed them or they went the shareware route. Of the three listed below, CheckWeb is probably the best.

1. CheckWeb 1.23 (74 KB) is a small, powerful links analyzer that can scan online/ offline HTML pages and generate a report on link, error and page size information. For Windows 95 and above.

2. Mihov Link Checker 0.5 (250 KB) can chëck multiple links on a web site or a local web page. It reports the state of each link as valid, missing, forbidden or otherwise not accessible. Links can be stored in a text file or extracted automatically from a local or internet page. For Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.

3. SiteLinkChecker 1.0 (480 KB) is an easy-to-use link checker tool that checks websites for broken links. Easily locates broken links and links containing syntactic errors and reports the status of each link. For Windows 2000/XP/2003.

Link Popularity Tools

Another category of programs that has suffered attrition in the last few years. At least half a dozen are no longer available, no longer supported or no longer freeware. The first two are the best of the three listed.

1. Indexa 2.0 (115 KB) is a java website popularity program that reports Google Pagerank, the number of backlinks recorded on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and AlltheWeb and the number of pages indexed. Limitations: Analyses 4 urls and 2 search engines. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000/2003/Unix/Linux/MacOS X.

2. Link Popularity Chëck 3.0.3 (941 KB) checks how many sites link to yours and your competitors in 5 major search engines. For Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95.

3. BackLinks Master 1.5 (1.3 MB) helps you find who is linking to you, whether links are direct and what keywords are in the anchor text. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000.

General SEO Tools

Last, but not least, are tools that don't fall into any specific category, but that are multi-featured and definitely worth a look.

1. SEO Surf 0.7 (2.6 MB) is a powerful program for SEO enthusiasts. It offers numerous features, including keyword analysis, SEO page analysis, backlink management and search engine analysis. For Windows 98 to XP and I.E. 6.0+.

2. Keyword Crawler 1.1 (424 KB) is a keyword tool that can analyze your website and provide web page reports for the top keywords used, word density, Google pagerank, internal and external backlinks and broken links. In addition, the program can also generate a sitemap file in XML format. For Windows 98/ME/NT4/2Kx/XP.

3. SEO SpyGlass v.2.0.4 (7.8 MB) is a research tool designed to show how your competitors got top search engine rankings. It reveals backlink numbers, the URL, PageRank, Alexa Rank, and IP address of each backlink, website age, link value, backlink origin, keyword density, etc. Detailed reports can be generated but not saved in the freeware version. Requires JRE and email registration. For Windows 98+ and Unix/Linux/MacOS X. The current version is generally available from the SpyGlass site, but the site was experiencing problems at the time of this writing.

About The Author
Mel Strocen is CEO of the Jayde Online Network of websites and founder of the Independent Search Engine & Directory Network.