Getting free links, search engine optimisation for dummies and article writing for high google rankings

In this article I give my experiences and results in trying a number of strategies for SEO to get high ranking for www,artspecialist.co.uk oil paintings and www.tiespecialist.com silk ties

Keywords:

Niche Web Business Search Engine Optimisation for Art Reproduction Oil Paintings and Portraits and English Woven Silk Ties Neckties Tie

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When I started my first site selling woven silk ties from the UK I signed up with a SEO company called 123rankings who guaranteed that they would get me into the top ten on Google for five search terms within six months. I paid their fees for four months without any noticeable results. Then my web developer told me that they used a piece of software called SEO Elite and had good results, he gave me an ebook by the softwares author a SEO expert called Brad Callen, you can download a pdf copy of the ebook here and go to his website here. I was shocked at how easy it was when I followed the instructions. I was also surprised at how badly the SEO company 123rankings I had been paying each month had been doing and now do it all myself. Here are the steps I went through.

First up was on-page factors, which means getting the keywords on your site right. This has only a small effect on your ranking but is important to get right. First up I found that the SEO company had changed the title page of my site and webpages to a meaningless list of keywords most of which were not the main ones that were selling my ties. Not only was this reducing my rankings on the keywords I really wanted, but if someone did dig deep enough into their google results to find me then the text that apppeared was a meaningless list"Print, theme, woven polyester, cartoon, novelty ties and cufflinks." that does not include silk ties or even tie. Instead I changed the titles back to a meaningful phrase that would look good in google and on top of my site and would have all the right keywords. The keyphrases I have been targeting are woven silk ties, silk ties, silk tie, English silk tie and UK silk tie. My title page now reads "http://www.TieSpecialist.com. Luxury English handmade woven silk ties. Satisfaction guaranteed with every tie.". This works as both a sales pitch when coming up in search results and contains all my keywords. I went through all my header tags and keywords and as this has just reminded me I have just gone through again and made quite a few changes based on what I have learnt over the last month. This needs to be a continuous process of adding new words, creating cross-links across the site (to help Google to understand your site and to get some key sub-pages on to the search engine results) and polishing up the text so that it converts well with people and looks good to the search engines. I also bolded keywords on the top page and ensured my main search phrases were sprinkled over the page with one near the top and another near the bottom for each key phrase.

The main grunt work in search engine optimisation (SEO) is getting links. Google uses links as the main factor in search results so this is the key to high rankings and therefore free clicks and customers for you. Google uses several factors including the importance of the website (Page Rank), the keywords on the page, the title of the page, the text your site is linked from (known as the anchor text), the other links from that page, whether your site is linked back to the site that links to you (reciprocal links). To assess the page rank you need the Google Toolbar that you can download here this puts a little guage in internet explorer that shows you a ranking for every page you visit. The page rank runs from 0 to 10 and if it is greyed out then the site is not on or has been banned by Google. After four months I had got up to a Page Rank of 3.

The first point of call for links should be directories, by which I mean hand-edited lists of sites not search engines. The key site to be registered on is the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org. My SEO people had registered my tie site with this, but had used the crappy list of keywords above. Once I corrected my listing I gained 30+ places on Google on some search terms. Google and most of the search engines place a high importance on the ODP and their search results are syndicated out to 100's of other sites so a listing there rapidly spreads. Submit your site there now if you havent done so already. You can also do a Google search for more directories and register on at least all the ones specialisting in your product.

The next thing to do is to type your target key phrase into Google. For me it was woven silk ties. I then picked the top ranked site which had a Page Rank of 5, next fire up SEO Elite and type in the url of the top ranked site and select analyze backlinks. The software will then show all the sites that are linked to that top ranked site. If you can get the same links then you will be on your way to the top of the list too. Th software lists them in Google Page Rank order so you then simply go to each of the websites in turn from best first and submit your site listing or submit a link exchange request or failing those options by far the most common approach is to email them with a link exchange request. You get the best response if you add a link to their site first and then send an email like mine:
"I run a website selling silk ties http://www.blogger.com/www.tiespecialist.com. I like your site and am interested in link exchanging. I have added a link to your site from: http://www.tiespecialist.com/useful-links-i-14.html I would appreciate a return link as follows: English woven silk ties. Every silk tie comes with free worldwide delivery."A few hours doing this gave me 20 or so links. I have also tried searching for tie listings in Google and getting listings on all the sites that came up. I have also searched for listing sites for markets I am interested in such as weddings. I sell a lot of ties for weddings with grooms and ushers often bulk buying and because I offer big quantity discounts I get quite a lot of these orders and want more. There are also link exchange sites. I have used used LinkMetro and this site allows you to find people to exchange links with and it helps to automate the process some what I have got 30 links for each of my sites with a few hours work on this site. It works particlularly well for my reproduction oil paintings site art specialist. I have exchanged links with lots of art sites, poster and print sites and also gifts and birthday sites were both ties and oil paintings make great links that will help my rankings on those search terms.

It is worth pointing out that pretty much any link exchange is worth having although those from high ranking sites count a lot higher. It makes sense, if your site is linked to from the front page of the BBC website (which has a page rank of 9) then it is clearly a very important site. The only links you do not want are those that are greyed out on Page Rank these could be banned sites. Google bans sites for trying to manipulate rankings in ways that it finds unacceptable. If you are linked to a bad site this will drag your ranking down. The SEO Elite tool also allows you to view how your website apppears to Google by analzying your backlinks, showing you the keyword ratings this generates and the number and rank of each site linked to yours and listed on a search engine. I am currently up to 73 links showing in this way. Which is now enough to have catapulted me to top ten on Google, MSN and Yahoo for "english woven silk ties" and "UK woven silk ties" and top fifty for "UK silk ties". Now I am targeting shorter search phrases. To break into the top for very competitive phrases you can need hundreds of phrases for example a guy at one of the internet marketing companies said they had over 17,000 links. But now I was adding links at the rate of 30 a month to each of my sites but I am after more.

My next step which brought hundreds of top quality links was article writing for search engine rankings. When I started my search engine optimisation I was targeting relatively easy phrases to get going such as "English silk ties" and "uk woven silk ties". Initially I focused my attention on my MSN ranking as they do not use site age or link age as a ranking factor unlike the others, particularly Google which puts a high importance on link age, the so called "sand box" that you are in for the first six to eight months. I got into the habit of actively getting link exchanges, both by using SEO Elite to find good link partners and by using Link Metro.

After less than a month I had fifty links for my tie website and was starting to get top twenties for my easy phrases on MSN for example I was ranking 14th for "English silk ties" and 8th for "UK Woven Silk Ties" whilst for better phrases I was not yet on the first page with "woven silk ties" (35th) and "Silk Ties" (245th).

The next boost up the rankings was to come from article writing. I discovered that there are lots of websites out there that publish articles. The search engines rate these sites highly as they offer lots of content with text heavy pages and are human edited. Most article sites let you have hyperlinks in your story and all of them allow a resource box at the bottom with links to your site(s). So if you write some articles related to the product you sell and then post the articles on many sites, you get lots of high quality links to your site.

First job is to come up with a topic. It is best to write articles related to your product, how to buy it, choose it, use it, reviews etc. This means your text and title will have lots of related keywords and you may even get some customers from people reading it. It shouldnt be too hard to come up with a few thousand word articles for almost any site. For ties for example, I have articles on a history of ties, tie tying and tie cleaning. These are on my web site and I publish them to article sites. For art, I am starting to write articles on buying art to use for this purpose. You can get ideas and content from searching the internet and using sites like wikipedia for facts. You can also use the article sites for free content to add to your site. Most of them allow re-printing of an article as long as the links and attribution are left in.

The process is pretty easy. Search in Google for "submit articles" and your topic and then register with each site and submit an article. It can take a couple of weeks for each article to get reviewed and published. Sometimes I get emails saying article rejected and the reason. The reason is usually something to do with links or overly commercial content, but I simply make edits to address their point and then re-submit. If you submit a number of articles spaced out by a month between each one across 100's of article sites then you can build up a lot of links that will do wonders for your ranking.

After I had done this about ten timesI wondered if there was tool that might help, and found Article Submitter Pro this is a pretty cool tool that semi-automates the process. It has more than 700 article sites in it's directory and using a window in the tool you can sort the sites by Page Rank and starting with the best sites register with each one and record the log in info in the tool. Then when you want to submit an article you enter it into the program and it takes you one by one to each of the sites and auto-fills in all the boxes with your login and then the article, biography and resource text. It keeps track of which articles you have submitted to which sites and helps to keep it all organised. Using Article Submitter Pro I can submit to a 100+ sites in a few hours which I do as a once a week task. After three weeks of article submission I am up to top fives for my easy phrases on MSN for example I am ranking 1st for "English silk ties" and 3rd for "UK Woven Silk Ties" whilst for better phrases I am now on the first page with "woven silk tie" (3rd) and "silk tie" (4th) and "silk ties" (25th). The results are really good so I am going to keep on publishing articles.

If you want to make pdf's of your articles for your other sites then try here at PDF Converter the PDF Forum there offers information for people looking to learn more about using PDF.

The next step for me is to pull together ebooks for each of my sites including one for http://www.artspecialist.co.uk which I can use articles I have written for some of the source text and to harvest email addresses on my sites, by offering a free copy to people.

First Impressions Count – Even To A Search Engine

Before you think about submitting your site to a search engine, you need to be prepared.

Keywords:

search, engine, opimization, seo, google, indexed

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Before you think about submitting your site to a search engine, you need to be prepared. Don’t think that because you have your domain name registered and a ‘under construction’ page up that you are ready.

Don’t even think about submitting your site to a single search engine until you are ready to receive guests or visitors. The worst thing in the world (I think so anyway) – is to follow a link to a website and only find a ‘under construction’ message or a front page with lots of links with ‘coming soon’ as a reward for my click.

Why did I come to your site? I want to either find out something interesting, look at something, download something or buy something – not to be told to come back later when you are ready – to tell the truth, I don’t think I would bother coming back. Even when you tell me to come back because I’ll remember and think “been there before, it was a waste of time, full of coming soon stuff”.

If you have a blog – don’t leave the messages saying ‘Just testing’ or ‘congratulations and welcome to your new blog’. Don’t even think about writing ‘Welcome to my blog, over the next coming few days I will be…’ Just remember, the internet has no concept of time, but humans do. If I come to your site and find a ‘Welcome to my blog…’ post with lots of promises, but you don’t deliver, why should I trust you with my time? My money? My business? The truth of the matter is, I won’t.

I’m not going to go through a whole list of things that tend to put visitors off staying on a site – but here are a few of them:

Broken links (always check your links before you upload to a site)

Awful color schemes (Yellow and Red? – Try pastel colors)

Tiny fonts – I like to be able to read without pushing my nose to the monitor.

Difficult navigation – I want consistency and clearly labelled links

That should give you a bit to think about...

Generation Y’s At Work San Diego’s Search Engine Entrepreneurs

October 2, 2007. It’s a typical day at SEOhaus in the largest office located within the company’s 1400sqft. space, employees sit in a semi-circle around a cordless speaker phone.

Keywords:

Business, Internet

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October 2, 2007. It’s a typical day at SEOhaus in the largest office located within the company’s 1400sqft. space, employees sit in a semi-circle around a cordless speaker phone.

"We need to really focus on improving our PR," a client says, his voice on speaker phone audible throughout the room.

"We can do that," one of the employees says, glancing down at the yellow legal pad on her lap. "Let’s come up with a solution."

Ten minutes later, when the meeting ends, the employees disperse to their respective offices, and the company’s owners, William Senn, 26, and William Canu, 25, take a short break from their hectic work schedules to share what it’s like being an entrepreneur under 30.

"We’re growing so fast," Canu says, leaning back in his office chair and glancing over his shoulder at the busy traffic below on Kettner Blvd. "It’s amazing."

The two Williams, who started SEOhaus from the proceeds of their last business venture's mail-order DVD rental service, have seen their company grow from a single room with two employees (themselves) to a small business with approximately ten full-time employees and growing. Next week, the company will move to a much larger office suite down the hall.

"We’re excited," says Senn, a former Google employee." The walls of the new office are being painted right now, and it (the move) is starting to feel official."

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is all about the art of achieving increased traffic, presence, and page rankings (i.e. higher search results) for a website, and this is achieved by a variety of different methods, including, but not limited to: building links, writing and marketing SEO content articles, social bookmarking, and web design.

"SEOhaus is a boutique firm," Senn explains, "We specialize in customized services, and our employees are very good at what they do."

SEOhaus and it’s twenty-something owners, represent a growing trend in American business: young entrepreneurs making an impact in their respective industries and developing successful businesses before their 30th birthday.

Their generation, known as Generation Y (1981-1995) is a generation of young entrepreneurs. The online publication Inc.com recently released the list of the "thirty coolest entrepreneurs under thirty," profiling individuals who began their own companies---some while still living in their parent’s houses, and have seen them grow exponentially in only a few short years.

CRM: Strategic Engine or Just Another Tool?

CRM…strategic engine or just another technology tool? How would you answer this question about your company's CRM initiative? It depends on how honest you are in answering some other questions, including:

Keywords:

marketing strategy CRM marketing implementation marketing success marketing your business business marketing marketing resources marketing consulting marketing education stategic marketing

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Do you have the right people with the right knowledge and skills?

Are you including people across the board, not just in your customer service and call centers?

The bottom line is that people skill sets need to be similar to the technology they are using -- information sharing needs to be fast, focused, integrated.

Let’s Start With the Leaders

For CRM to become the strategic engine, not just a tool that people opt to use when they choose, managers and leaders need to demonstrate the new vision through their day-to-day actions. Leadership is about making a vision happen. If you want your CRM strategy to be the engine that drives growth and profitability, take a look at what your leaders are doing and how they are behaving.

The heart of strategic change is when the leadership makes the conscious choice to focus on actions that matter. When an organization undergoes significant and fundamental transition, leaders must be teachers and role models of the new actions and behaviors. Leaders who successfully transition to new operating values and practices are those who recognize they are on a steep learning curve and adopt a personal learning ethic that others can model.

What About Everyone Else?

Just as any change needs good leaders, making CRM the strategic engine requires good followers. People need to have the knowledge and skill sets that will translate the vision to a seamless customer experience. Having the skill to build personal and professional networks of information and knowledge will allow managers and employees to think and act in less linear ways. There is a need to learn to behave as integrated teams, not individual contributors or functions.

Teaming, problem-solving behaviors across job boundaries, knowledge-discovery skills, personal networking outside the department, and building relationships to share knowledge and information are rarely seen metrics on employee performance evaluation forms. Yet these are the skills required to drive the CRM strategic engine. Those skills need to be valued, encouraged, and rewarded by the organization.

Don’t Take New Roles For Granted

To move CRM deeper into the ethos of the company culture, clear and unambiguous roles for leaders and employees need to be communicated. When people have a role beyond that of being an individual contributor, accountability, involvement, and interest in making CRM the strategic engine all increase.

The key is communicating what new roles leaders and employees are expected to fill. As social scientists and consultants, it has been our experience that there is always a portion of leaders and employees who can't or won't adopt the new vision. This is why there are always tough people decisions involved in a large system change initiative.

Copyright 2002 Dailey & O'Brien, Inc.

Google To Remove All Search Engine Queries After Two Year Period

In the wake of growing concerns about Internet security, Google announced recently that they will be implementing a new policy of data retention, which will involve the deletion of all search engine queries after a period of 18 to 24 months.

Keywords:

Business, Internet

Article Body:

In the wake of growing concerns about Internet security, Google announced recently that they will be implementing a new policy of data retention, which will involve the deletion of all search engine queries after a period of 18 to 24 months.

Google is the first major search engine to set such a time limit for information retention, and has pledged to begin this process before the end of 2007. Search Engine query information can reveal much about an individual user, based on the number of queries about certain topics, which has recently sparked criticism of Googles previous policy of keeping these logs of information for an indefinite period.

In a statement released by the leading search engine, spokespersons for Google responded to this radical new policy change by explaining that it is in response to feedback form both privacy groups and government agencies, and that the new policy will provide better privacy protection for it’s users. The amount of time that queries will be kept before deletion, they explain, is the time period required by many foreign laws which state that user information must be kept for up to two years in the event that it is needed for any legal and or court proceedings.

Per this new policy of the deletion of search engine queries, Google will erase eight of the bits that form a user’s Internet Protocol, or IP address, which is identifies the computer used in a search engine query. Google also has plans to make cookies, the small files that track user visits to certain websites, anonymous under the new policy. This amount of information kept, says the company, will help to improve services and aid in the detection of fraud, and will be used for no other purposes.

Retention of these search engine query records has been a much discussed and debated issue since the demand of the Justice Department that several websites turn over their query data. Yahoo Inc, AOL Time Warner, and Microsoft Corp complied with this demand, turning over the information, to the dismay of many Privacy Advocacy groups. Google however fought this request in court and was allowed to provide a reduced amount of this user information.

Under this new policy, the disclosure of such information to any party becomes a non issue, since, in the words of Kurt Opsahl, attorney for the digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation you can’t disclose what you don’t have.