Here are some of the most important factors that the search engines use in determining your rankings:

1. Web Site Content

Content on your site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine optimization. Your web site should provide valuable information on specific subjects relevant to your web site. Furthermore, your content should be updated regularly. It’s not enough to just put up a few content pages full of information on your site and then never add to it. This is a continuous process that will help your search engine rankings if done correctly.

It’s also important that you don’t try to trick the search engines by flooding them with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same content over and over. Doing that will not help your rankings and will eventually lead to your site getting banned from the search engines.

2. Link Popularity

Inbound links are very important for achieving high search engine rankings. Most of the search engines today regard link popularity as one of the most significant determinants of your website’s rankings.

Here are some of the best ways to get inbound links:

* Articles – Writing and submitting articles to website’s and article directories is a very good way to get inbound links.

* Content – Not only will adding quality content help in your rankings by itself, it will also help you with your link popularity. Other webmaster’s will want to link to your site because it is valuable to them and their own visitors.

* Directories – Submitting your site to online directories will help you gain inbound links.

* Blogs – Start a blog that you update frequently with information related to your website’s niche. Then, link to your site from the blog. You can also submit your blog to various blog directories to get even more inbound links.

* Link Exchanges – Simply find other quality sites related to yours and ask them to link to you in exchange for a link back to them. This is not as effective as it used to be but it is still a pretty good way to get inbound links.

When trying to increase your link popularity remember that the more inbound links you get the better, but quality is always better than quantity. Stay away from low quality sites, FFA’s, and sites unrelated to yours.

The next things that should be considered when doing Birmingham SEO for your web site are the on-site and the off-site elements. Some of the on-site elements are the title tag, Meta tags, heading tags, ALT tags and highlighting of the text using the bold tag. The Link text is an important off-site element.

On-Site Elements:

3. Title Tag and Meta Tags

Meta tags help describe the page where they are placed. Though today the Meta tags are not nearly as important as they once were and are definitely not the only things the search engines look for when indexing your site, they are still somewhat important in deciding the relevancy of the page for a keyword search.

Search engines focus on three primary tags to help them determine the relevance of a website for a particular search phrase. The Title Tag, Meta Keywords and the Meta Description…

Ideally the title tags should contain less than 64 characters with your most important keywords in them and should definitely be relevant to the content on the page. Do not stuff keywords in to the title tag!

The Meta description tag is a summary of the page and its contents. This Meta tag should be 200 characters or less and should contain keywords and phrases you hope to be found for, but it should also read like an introductory lead-in for the page and be appealing to the reader. The description you provide for your page has to convince the visitor that they have found exactly what they were looking for.

Probably the least important Meta tag to search engines is the keyword tag. However, it shouldn’t be ignored. Keyword tags should be less than 1000 characters. This tag should include important keywords and phrases consistent with the body text, title, and content of the page. Be specific and accurate with the keywords and key phrases in this tag. Again, do not stuff keywords here… they should only be those that are actually on the page and do not repeat any word more than 3 times.

4. Heading Tags

The heading tags are given more weight than the ordinary text. The higher the H tag the more weight it carries. You should make use of the heading tags to highlight the important keywords and headings of your page as well as the paragraph headers.

5. Bold Text

Bold text is given a little more weight than ordinary text but not as much as heading tags. Make sure to enclose some of your keywords in bold tags when they appear on the page.

6. Alt Text

The alt tag provides alternative text when images cannot be displayed… This might happen if the users have set the browsers only to download the text and not the graphics, or if the images are too heavy to download for the users internet connection. Only include important keywords relevant to your site and the image and do not stuff keywords in them.

Off-site elements:

7. Link Text

This is a very important factor in search engine optimization to gain higher rankings. The link text can be on pages within your site or what other web sites use to link to you. Either way, it is important. If possible the target page’s main search term should be included in the link text instead of just the URL. Do not use identical link text for every link, but do include the target page’s main keywords in the link text. Links carry more weight when the text around them is relevant to the target page’s keywords and phrases.

Following the above Birmingham SEO information will help tremendously in your search engine rankings. Remember that the search engines are advancing all the time. Don’t try to trick them because they will eventually catch on and that could mean the end of your web site. Stick to the basic techniques above and you will increase your search engine rankings without fear of being banned or dropped.

A few days after publishing, I received a ‘please help’ email from Loren, a small business owner. Her website is all about glass art (http://www.headchangearts.com ), and she wanted some clarification on some of the points I made in my previous article. Loren’s questions were good ones, and the answers important, so I thought I’d publish them.

Q: We have a site for glass art. From your article, I gather that if I create an articles page with free reprint articles (written by other people) containing ‘glass art’ type keywords, I’ll get higher search rankings for those keywords? Is that correct? If so, what page comes up in the rankings? The article itself or my Home page? Also, if the article is being used by other webmasters, won’t the search results also include their version of the article?

A: In answer to your first question, yes, having an articles page with keyword rich free reprint articles generally has the effect of increasing your ranking. Google thinks highly of sites with a lot of helpful content, but it all comes down to whether other webmasters do as well. If your site contains heaps of helpful content about glass art, other webmasters in the glass art field (be they suppliers, distributors, or competitors) will be inclined to link to you simply because that link implies (to their customers) an association with you. That association boosts their credibility because you’re obviously an authority in the field. It also may help their own search engine ranking a little as Google will then see them as part of an expert, credible community of sites (although the benefits of this for the linking site are minimal and arguable). So, in a roundabout way, I’m saying that yes, article-based content can help your ranking, but only if it increases the likelihood that other related sites will link to yours.

As to the question of which page (the article itself or your home page) displays in search results, that really depends on which page has the most links to it*. If you have an article which is just THE BEST source of info in the industry, and everyone’s linking to it, that page will display in the search results. This is good because people who click on this result are interested specifically in the content of the article. So when your website displays, they get the information they want, and they’ll be pleased. And assuming your navigation is clear and easy to use, it is likely they’ll at least visit your home page.

And finally, yes, if other sites have published the same article, they may display in the results alongside you. The same is true of the original author’s website. But it’s important to remember that, generally, the site with the highest PR will rank highest in the results, and it’s this site that most users will visit. You just need to work hard to make sure that’s you! For an example of how this works, do a search for a very specific term related to the article of mine which you’ve obviously read. Search Google worldwide for “Google’s love affair with content” (including the quotes). You’ll notice that the no.1 result is actually a page on EzineArticles.com which contains my article. The page on my site (DivineWrite.com) containing the article only ranks no.2. This is because EzineArticles.com has a higher PR than DivineWrite.com, and overall, the keywords are considered more relevant to the rest of the content on their site than they are to mine. Obviously, this means that a good article can display several times in the same search results, but that’s ok – it simply adds to the perceived authority of the article and the sites containing it.

* Above I say that the page that displays in the results will be the one with the most links to it. There are some complicating factors here. For instance, the text in a link plays a big part in how effective that link is. A link to your site that says “Click here” or “check this site out”, won’t do you as much good as a link which says “Glass Art sales” or “glass art creator”. So if lots of people are linking to the page containing the article, but the text in their links is generic, then that page may not rank as highly as a page with fewer – more keyword rich – links pointing to it. Of course, this assumes that both pages are equally well optimized for search engines and for the same keyword phrases.

I know that the above is a very specific question and the answer is full of ifs and buts, but hopefully this exchange will answer a few questions for a few people.

Happy reprinting!

Most Bristol SEO campaigns fall flat on their faces and totally fail to achieve the objectives they were set out to accomplish.

Sadly the list of failures is not just limited to individuals who attempt to carry out their own Bristol SEO campaigns. It includes companies and so-called experts who are paid to carry out an Bristol SEO campaign for a client and end up totally failing to achieve what they set out to do.

Here are the three most common reasons for failure. By studying and understanding them a webmaster can start their next Bristol SEO campaign with better odds because they already understand some of the things that commonly tend to go wrong.

a) Assuming That All Businesses And Industries Are The Same
There is a common belief that if somebody succeeds in the Bristol SEO of a certain business in a certain specific industry, they will automatically succeed in any industry and any business.

This has to be the most common reason for failure. Especially where the webmaster hires some affordable Bristol SEO expert that has had success in some other niche industry.

The truth is that one business is often very different from another and quite often the effort required to get a certain web site at the top of search engine rankings is very different from the effort required to get another different site to the same level. Different categories have different levels of competition. There are certain categories where the competition is so stiff and the number of competing web sites so numerous that it is virtually impossible to carry out any successful Bristol SEO campaign without adjusting the focus and niche target market of that particular enterprise.

The temptation is just too big to hand over your web site to some Bristol SEO expert and expect them to work some Bristol SEO magic with no input from you. You should resist that temptation because the chances of such an arrangement working are really so slim that the odds are heavily stacked against you succeeding.

b) A Failure To Decide What Particular Niche To Focus On
Many webmasters tend to forget that they are competing in the world market and that the only way they can ever hope to be successful is by carefully selecting some narrow niche that the others have ignored but which they are very well suited to covering.

There is no way that you can be all things to all people, and especially not in a fiercely competitive world market. This correct focus on a narrow niche is what will quite often make or break an Bristol SEO effort. If you opt to hire some expert, they will usually be anxious to get your business and will hardly spend any time studying your industry prior to your committing yourself to their services. And by the time you commit there is no turning back, whatever the difficulties that they encounter.

You do not expect some Bristol SEO expert to learn all the knowledge you have accumulated over many years involvement in a certain industry in just a few days. And that is precisely where the problem starts. There is no way that a successful Bristol SEO campaign can be executed without adequate information.

A webmaster who carries out their own Bristol SEO campaign is also doomed to failure if they have not decided on what niche to focus their efforts on.

c) A Failure To Closely And Constantly Monitor Keyword Popularity
There is no way of avoiding the appropriate keyword phrases for your site in any successful Bristol SEO campaign. The big mistake many webmasters or blog owners make is to do their keyword research once and then forget all about it. Keyword phrases are changing in popularity all the time with some reducing in polarity while others increase in leaps and bounds. There is no way you can possibly stay informed without constantly and regularly monitoring keyword popularity.

Even more important you will not be able to come across the new keyword phrase opportunities that emerge all the time.

If you decide to hire some Bristol SEO expert, they will start from a position of weakness if they are not aware of what has transpired over the last few months and even years concerning popular keyword phrases. How will they be able to accurately judge on the best direction to take in their campaign?

Conclusion
You will have realized that Bristol SEO campaigns are very intimate affairs that require lots of information and research over a long period of time to be highly successful. And even if you are bringing some expert onboard to carry out your Bristol SEO campaign for you, it is absolutely important that they have enough information to start with. Both from their previous experiences that you should know about and analyze and ask questions about before you reveal anything about the subject matter of your web site. You too should be gathering as much information as possible, all the time.

This article will guide you the importance of directories submissions in launching a new site, or ranking an existing one. I am going to review 6 important areas.

Directories are the brand new site best friend.
Since every new domain gets put in the Google TrustBox, since they favor links from trusted sites. This is a part of the “TrustRank” equation within the algorithm. Directories play a very important roll in getting good quality inbound links that help your site to get out. As they pass PageRank and reputation with Google, your site will greatly benefit from its inclusion in these directories, especially in the launching phase of its life cycle. So, finding solid directories to get your site listed is the key.

The viable alternative to link buying… and safer.
Directories provide one-way inbound links to your site, and drive traffic to your site through direct referrals. By doing this, they boost your link popularity and ultimately improve your search rankings. All this done naturally, and cost free in many cases.

Paid vs. free: the differences and the similarities.
Paid directories quickly list your site, were free ones may take several weeks or even months to review it. On the other hand, some paid directories charge expensive listing fees for the link they provide, and that is not cost effective. If you work on a limited budget for your site, you may want to submit to a handful of paid directories but a few hundred of free ones. Of these last ones, prioritize one-ways preferably. Whatever directories you submit to, paid or free or a combination of both types, the quality of the directory itself should be the biggest consideration in your decision.

The directory page that counts is were the link is.
When doing a directory submission, not only look at the PageRank of the homepage, but also of the subpage, where your link will be. While it may seem like a benefit to have your site listed on a PR7 directory, this is less effective when you realize that the internal page where your link is actually only a PR3, when you expected more.

Pagerank is not the only factor of directory quality.
A low PR directory is not necessarily a bad one. New directories fall in this category. These directories do review and list sites quicker. Also, when they become more popular, so will your listing. Again, base your decision based on the quality of the directory. And keep in mind whether or not the directory is search engine friendly. When checking the structure of the link to your site, make sure it is not dynamic.

Directories links shouldnt be more than 10%.
You shouldnt have more than this percentage in your overall inbound links count. Dont rely on directories alone as your link source. Diversify them for your benefit.
Please refer to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics – Part 2 for more sources.

By Dedicated SEO Consultant Jose Nunez

* Content for people first, not for search engines – Some webmasters make a common mistake that they optimize everything for search engines but forget about web visitors. The goal of our website is not only to get high search rankings, but also to sell our service. So you should give your website visitors what they are really looking for. Make sure your content flows naturally and you're not just trying to stuff more keywords in the interest of search engines. If users don't find your content convincing they won't buy from you.

* Studying popular search terms – High search engine ranking is meaningless if your website only ranks high on terms nobody searches for. You need to ask your colleagues, vendors, competitors, clients, … or use online tools (e.g.: wordtracker.com) to identify what keywords which potential customers would use to search your web site, then try to use them often, in titles, and throughout the body.

* Building article directory – How can you optimize the content if your web site only offers a simple service? It means there are just several pages in your whole website. So, to increase the content in quality you should write some articles, reviews which are related to your service. A site with more web pages means there are more chances of different terms that will become findable in search engines. You may consider adding free articles to your article directory. On the Internet today, one can find a lot of websites which provide articles free for republishing. Of course you must accept the policy of these web sites and authors before using these articles.

* Making a clear website organization – Build a site which is simple to navigate with a well linking structure. Every page should be accessible from at least one text link. It's better to be sparing with image links, Flash, JavaScript drop-down menus, or other codes that are not HTML based… because the search engine crawlers cannot recognize text contained in these kinds of display. In case using them is required, then make sure a text based menu or a sitemap is also included in the Web site. Last but not least, you should use meaningful words in your URLs, use as simple a web page layout and design as possible.

In conclusion, it is undeniable that content is king in the kingdom of search engines. The quality of your content is the main factor which decides the success in Internet marketing. So improving your content is very necessary.

The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.

One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.

Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as mesothelioma or home insurance loan to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your web site and most likely not return. If you create a web site where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines.

Also, rather than spending hours building links for Liverpool SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.

In conclusion, although spending lot of time on Liverpool SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your Liverpool SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful web site is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.

The truth is that the search engines are like our childhood game of King Of The Hill. Only one person can be at the top of the hill and the top of the search results. Only ten websites can be on page one of the search results. When a new website moves into the top ten, another must be removed.

For any given search term at any given time, there are only ten web pages on page one of the search results, and there are millions of web pages that did not make page one, who may or may not catch a few stragglers from the search engines.

How Can A Website Break Into The Top Ten?

Search Engine Optimization (Birmingham SEO) is an industry that has sprung up around the concept of helping their clients improve their rankings in the search engine results.

When you talk to Birmingham SEO professionals, they generally point to a two-pronged approach to search ranking optimization. A website owner needs to optimize their on-site real estate for the search engines, and they need to build inbound links to their website.

On-Site Search Optimization Challenges

The trick with on-site search optimization is that you must cater to multiple audiences on your website.

* You must provide simple navigation and an attractive interface to the human visitor;

* You must provide good sales copy to your human visitors, for the purpose of converting them from shoppers to buyers;

* You must provide text copy for the search engines to read; and

* You must optimize your content to help the search engines know what topics and keywords they should pay attention, so that they can give their users the right web page for the right search terms.

A web page that draws good search rankings is useless if the web page cannot convert the human visitor to a buyer. Many website owners get caught up in the process of optimizing a web page to get it to the top of the search results, and they forget that the human visitor knows where the Back Button is in his or her browser. Once your visitor has hit the Back Button, they will go to someone else’s website and buy from them, instead of you.

Most website owners have the alternate problem. They consistently convert a significant number of visitors to buyers, but they have to rely on various forms of paid advertising to get visitors to their websites, since they do not rank in the search engines.

I recently spoke with an individual who spends ,000 per month on pay-per-click advertising to get targeted traffic to his website. He said he consistently earns back his money, but he was still looking for a better way to get ranked in the search engines, so he joined my client list.

On-Site Search Engine Optimization Basics

According to the search engine companies, there are more than one thousand calculations that determine how well a website will rank in their search engine result pages (SERPs).

The Google engineers are fond of saying that if you build your website for human beings instead of search engines, then your website should rank well in their algorithms. To a certain degree, this is a good strategy.

Think about how magazines are constructed:

The Table Of Contents shows story titles, brief descriptions, and page numbers telling you where you can find a story.

On the story page, the title will be in big, bold font. Sometimes, the magazine will include a brief blurb about the story, in italics or font that is a bit bigger than the story font.

Pictures support the story with captions that further develop the story, by describing the picture.

Major subsections of the story have their own subheadings. And, the primary body of the story is in regular plain text, with only an occasional bolded or italicized word or phrase.

By analyzing the title and other large text on the page, a person who is flipping through the pages of a magazine can quickly assess the story content and make the decision as to whether they want to read the full story.

In the most simplistic way, this is how the search engines analyze a websites’ content to decide which web page will best serve their users’ needs.

Off-Site Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Basics

Since the inception of Google, and with Yahoo and MSN recently, the number and quality of links pointing to a website play a significant role in determining how well a web page will rank in the search results.

I have heard people suggest that as much as 75% of the value given to a web page in the search results is based solely on the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. I tend to believe a more conservative number (50.1%) will apply.

Inbound Links Are More Important Than Page Content

To prove this point, type “click here” without the quotes into Google, Yahoo and MSN and check the Adobe pages that come up in the search results: #1 in Google, #2 in Yahoo, and #1 in MSN. When you pull up those pages, search the page to find the individual words “click” or “here” in the text of those pages. They are not there. This has happened because millions of people have linked to these Adobe pages with the embedded anchor text, “click here”.

Next, let’s analyze those specific web pages from the perspective of each of the search engines:

* Google’s #1 result – (Google PageRank 8). Links to this web page: according to Google (31); according to Yahoo (nearly 12 million); according to MSN (6,400).

* Yahoo’s #2 result – (Google PageRank 10). Links to this web page: Google (15,200); Yahoo (700 thousand); MSN (32).

* MSN’s #1 result – (Google PageRank 8). Links to this web page: Google (0); Yahoo (2.9 million); MSN (778).

On Google’s top result, they show 31 inbound links total for that web page. But, Yahoo claims that there are more than 12 million links to this page. That is a huge difference.

On Yahoo’s #2 result, MSN gives 32 links, Google gives 15,000 links, and Yahoo claims it has 700 thousand links! That is another huge difference between the link counts from the search engines.

On MSN’s #1 result, MSN shows a strong link count, but still nowhere near Yahoo’s 2.9 million links. But, how does a web page with zero links in Google get a PageRank 8?

What Do These Numbers Mean?

Google has always said that they will never show us all of the links that we have pointing to our websites, because anything we can see in the public search results, our competitors can see also. So, for me it really is no surprise that we cannot see all of the links that point to Adobe pages, or to the links we have created that point to our clients and ourselves, by querying the search engines.

Also, the sheer numbers of inbound links do not rule the roost. Google’s #1 result (PR8) is actually shown in Google, before Yahoo’s #2 (PR10) result.

The Proof For Link Building Is In The Search Engine Rankings

Recently, a fellow who works as a Birmingham SEO “professional” told me that be believed my link building system was a sham.

I showed him that on the top 51 keyword phrases we use to market our original commercial website, we had 11 number one results, 31 top five results, 34 top ten results, 47 top thirty results, and 51 top 100 results within the Google search results. Additionally, it was shown that only three of those results competed with fewer than one million search results according to Google, with the remaining 48 pages competing with one million to 533 million pages.

Ole boy tore up Google trying to track how it was possible for me to have accomplished what I claimed. He finally concluded that since Google would not show HIM how I was able to rank so well in their search engine results, then I must have been lying.

According to Yahoo, we have over 12,000 links from third-party websites. According to our site statistics, we received traffic from more than 16,000 unique web pages during 2006. And Google still swears that we only have 42 inbound links to our website!

Magic Fairy Dust

My nemesis concluded that since HE could not prove through Google how I was successful in getting good search rankings, then I could not have accomplished such results by the methods I claimed.

Okay, I admit it.

I used the exact same method that Adobe used to get to the top of Google’s search engine rankings. I have a pocket full of magic fairy dust. Whenever, I do not like how my websites rank in the search engines, I sprinkle my magic fairy dust on my modem.

If you don’t like where you are ranked in the search engines, then I suggest you forego the search engine optimization companies altogether and instead run over to the corner store to get your own magic fairy dust. You might have to shop around a bit, but it is out there.

In this article I will review the similarities and differences between the ranking algorithms of Google, Yahoo and Msn. Google and Yahoo are considerably reasonably close in terms of off-page factors weighting compared to Msn, which is more on the on-page side. Like Google, Yahoo and MSN will discount obviously identical and unnatural looking anchor link text. Since these algos are frequently updated, I will only concentrate on those factors that do not. Otherwise, mayor updates should take place for them to be replaced by other/better methods.

The Google Factors.
It is a known fact that Google is focused on links. Therefore, it ranks them by quality and relevancy factors. With that said, on-page factors such as title keywords, content keyword density and relevance also influence the ranking of a given page. Google also looks into the “neighborhood” of your site analyzing outbound links. If you link to related quality sites with relevant content, search engines will associate your site with these neighbor sites.

The Yahoo Factors.
Yahoo tends to be the most active of the three when it comes to crawling. Not a general rule though. But in addition to its nature, having RSS on your site will get it more aggressive and frequently crawled. Similar to Google, Yahoo gives a lot of importance to inbound links, looking into factors like relevancy and anchor text, and heavily at volume of links. Their TrustRank is a form of PageRank, but with a special teleportation to a subset of high-quality pages. Yahoo search rankings appear to place extra importance on your site being listed in their directory, especially for highly competitive terms. Keyword density in title and content relevance also count.

The Msn Factors.
Maybe a substantial different from the other two, Msn normally gives more weight to the title text. Also, CSS optimization plays an important role at getting better rankings here. Msn is second to Yahoo on links volume, but the link analysis is reversed, analyzing inbound links for quality, anchor text keywords, and relevancy. Inclusion in the MSN endorsed directories would boost your site high in the SERPs. This fact still holds true, but its advantage has lessened with the new Live version. Content freshness is still very important, boosting rank of frequently updated pages.

Optimizing for all.
Yes, it is possible. Did someone said: wikipedia? Regardless of the algo differences of the mayor search engines, a site with great content that attracts users, and generates lots of natural occurring inbound links having great anchor text, has a great chance of replicating similar success. Of the off-page factors, quality of inbound links is the most important. Of the on-page factors the keyword density in the title. A good balance between conservative keyword density and other elements like RSS and CSS need to exist when used, since they all get particular boots or penalties with the search engines.

By Utah Liverpool SEO Jose Nunez

So, how will searchers find your website? What types of search engines could they use?

Search engines fall into two categories. The first is referred to as natural, organic or standard. The second is called pay-per-click, paid inclusion or paid placement.

Natural, organic and standard are interchangeable terms describing a search engine that bases its search rankings on a ranking algorithm. The algorithms involve a number of criteria and parameters, all relating to the content of the website, the websites size, the number of incoming links to the website, and the contents relevancy. You will hear terms such as keyword relevancy and keyword density to describe various components of the algorithms.

For the standard search engines, you, your webmaster or hired search engine optimization specialist could spend considerable time optimizing your website to achieve top rankings. The goal is for your website to appear on the first or second page of the search engines results when your target user searches keywords or keyword phrases.

The good news is rankings on standard search engines are free. The downside is the tremendous amount of time and effort required to achieve exceptional search engine rankings. Lets confess to each other that top rankings on standard search engines can be tough and timely to achieve!

The interchangeable terms pay-per-click, paid inclusion or paid placement describe a search engine that bases its search rankings on a bid for position basis. Simply stated, you bid a price to be in a specific position of the search rankings for a particular search keyword or keyword phrase. For example, the #1 position on the search phrase pay per click recently required a bid of $3.55 per click, whereas the 15th position required only a bid of 55 cents. As a result, your differential website advertising costs between position #1 and #15 can be considerable.

With pay-per-click search engines, your ability to bid high can dramatically impact your websites search engine ranking when the search results display website domain names or URLs for the search keyword or keyword phrase. The benefit is your website gains visibility with the searcher, but you are not charged the pay-per-click bid until a searcher actually clicks on your website domain name or URL displayed in the search engine results. The selection of your website in the search engine results is called a click-through.

In general, click-through rates range from 1% to 5% of the number of impressions. What is all of this? A click is when a searcher selects or clicks your pay-per-click ad. An impression is one display of your pay-per-click ad on the search engine results. So, the click-through rate is a measure of the total number of ad clicks versus the total number of impressions in a period of time:

Click-Through Rate % = Total Number of Ad Clicks / Total Number of Ad Impressions * 100

Lets do the math for our #1 position bid of $3.55 per click. In September, 2004 there were 21,535 searches for pay per click. First, lets assume a 1% click-through rate. The top bidder spent $764.49 (21,535 * 1% * $3.55). Now, at a 5% click-through rate the top bidder spent $3,822.45 (21,535 * 5% * $3.55). Budgeting and controlling marketing expenses with such a broad range of potential costs could be tough. Plus, such costs could be the tip of the iceberg. We still must consider derivatives of the keyword or keyword phrase. So, was being #1 worthwhile? That depends on your websites cost per visitor, conversion rate and profit margin of your product or service.

From what weve covered so far, you should realize you can achieve a top or high ranking through the pay-per-click search engine. But, a high ranking will cost money and these costs can be volatile. Meanwhile, the standard search engine remains free.

However, pay-per-click offers one significant advantage. It enables you to achieve website visibility with a high ranking instantaneously or overnight. If you want to draw traffic to your website fast for any reason, pay-per-click can make that happen. Remember, maximizing the standard search engine process takes time!

Lets summarize the pros and cons of pay-per-click marketing:

Pros

* Improves your websites ranking and traffic quickly.
* Tests the marketability of your product or service swiftly.
* Determines the ability of your web site to convert visitors to a call to action or make a purchase promptly.
* Identifies which keyword phrases will provide the best conversion rate rapidly.
* Provides complete control of the search engine campaign, both position and cost.

Cons

* Cost

Many individuals criticize pay-per-click because of the costs involved. But, have you really thought about the cost issue? Unless you or someone in your organization has expertise in search engine optimization, youll probably pay several thousand dollars in fees to a search engine optimization specialist to improve and optimize your website to achieve higher rankings in the standard search engines. So, my question to you is. Are the standard search engine rankings really free?

At the end of the standard versus pay-per-click search engine debate, its like the old saying, There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or, its like the old commercial, You can pay me now or you can pay me later. The reality of the debate is you must evaluate your specific website situation and utilize the search engine approach that maximizes your website promotion goals and investment.

About the author:
Chet Childers is a successful Internet marketer utilizing both pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimization to increase website traffic. His clients websites promote products such as window treatments, furniture, medical uniforms, swimming pool tiles, capital equipment, computer software and much more.

Read More at http://ewebsources.com/web-articles/website-traffic/what-should-you-know-about-search-engines-and-pay-per-click.html

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For a new site with no or few inbound links, buying text links on more established related sites could provide a boost to your link popularity. But this strategy could prove prohibitively expensive, especially in a highly competitive market where you’d have to buy lots of links to catch up with the competition.

Web directory listing represents a viable alternative to link buying. Apart from driving traffic to your site through direct referrals, web directories provide one-way inbound links to your site, boosting your link popularity and ultimately improving your search rankings.

There are thousands of web directories on the net, with dozens sprouting up every day. Some are general directories; others cater to specific niches. Some are free; others charge inclusion fees. Some are free only if you provide a reciprocal link in return. Many feature both free and paid listings.

The main advantage of a paid listing is the luxury of having your site listed quickly above everyone else’s. Free submissions may take several weeks or months for review. If you work on a limited budget, you may want to submit to a handful of paid directories and a few hundred free ones.

Some directories charge inclusion fees that are too high for the listing to be cost effective. When considering a paid listing, look at not only the Google PageRank of the homepage of directory, but also that of the subpage where your link will actually reside. While it may seem like a good deal to have your site listed on a PR5 directory for $15, the offer becomes far less attractive when you find out that the internal page where your link is placed is only PR2.

If you’ve ever submitted to web directories before, I don’t have to convince you that the process is extremely tedious and time-consuming, especially when you submit to a large number of them. Unlike search engines that send out robots to index web pages, web directories rely on more detailed submission forms to gather information about your site. Since each submitted site must be reviewed by a real person, most directories require that submissions are also performed by a real person, as opposed to an automatic script. Many directories use a visual code verification process to prevent automated submissions. Apart from complying with the directory’s guidelines, manual submission is the only way to ensure that your site is submitted to the proper category.

Because of the time involved in manually submitting your site and the sheer number of directories on the web, it’s important that you know which directories to submit to. Obviously, you’d want to submit to only the high-PR directories and avoid the low-PR ones, right? Not really. Just because a directory has a low PR does not mean that it’s not worth submitting to. The directory may be brand new and has not been around long enough to be ranked by Google. In contrast to the more established directories that continually experience a back-log of submissions, newer directories tend to review and list sites more quickly. As the directory becomes more popular, so will your link. So, don’t judge a directory solely by its PageRank; rather, base your decision on the overall quality of the directory.

Another important thing to look at is whether or not the directory you submit to is search engine friendly. Search engines like static web pages whose contents stay the same regardless of who visits the page, or when they visit, not dynamic pages that are created on-the-fly. Browse to a couple of categories and look at URL in the navigation bar. If the URL looks like, http://www.godirectory.org/links.php?ax=list&sub=42&cat_id=245, it’s probably not search engine friendly. An example of a static, search engine friendly URL is http://www.godirectory.org/dir/713/index.html (notice the “.html” suffix).

Another question to ask is: How easy it is to submit to the directory? How many hoops do you have to jump through to get to the submission form? When you finally get to the form, how many fields does the form have? A directory should ask for pertinent information like your name, email, URL, link title, link description, and keywords, but it should not look like a job application. With the exception of a handful of major directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, you should not have to spend more than 3 to 4 minutes to submit your site.

Another consideration is whether or not the directory has a category specific enough for your site. For optimal Birmingham SEO benefits from your listing, your link should grouped under a specific category containing sites whose contents are related to yours. Such a grouping makes your listing more relevant in the eyes of the search engines, as well as providing an easier way for visitors to the directory to find your site.

Simply having your site listed on a directory is not enough. Your choice of the link title can determine how much impact your listing will have on your search engine rankings. Ideally, your link title (or “anchor text”) should contain the keywords that you want others to search for to get to your site. Since most web directories require a unique link title, however, it may not be possible to select a common phrase like “Free Web Directory” as your link title. This title is likely already taken by another web directory. Simply prefixing the phrase with your domain name, e.g. “GoDirectory.org Free Web Directory”, would make the title unique.

Oftentimes, a directory would have several related categories that are suitable for your site. How do you decide which one to submit to? Ideally, you’d want to submit to the category that has the highest PageRank. However, this may not turn out to be the wisest choice as your link may be buried among a zillion other listings. Going with a lower-PR category with fewer competing links may prove to be more beneficial. When choosing from multiple related categories, choose one with a good balance of relevancy, Pagerank, number of competing listings.

In sum, submitting to web directories is a highly effective link building strategy that should be an integral part of any search engine optimization campaign. Manually submitting to a large number of directories is both laborious and time-consuming. Just keep the above points in mind to make the most of your time.