Posts filed under 'General'
Just thought that I would share the fact that our application of the approaches outlined in Lisa’s Tagging Secrets is continuing to generate increased volumes of traffic across all our Blogs.
We are seeing an average day on day increase in traffic now of 35% with some blogs seeing considerably more!
If you haven’t taken a look at Tagging Secrets then I would certainly recommend that you do if you want to generate loads of Free Website Traffic and Free Blog Traffic. You can have a look at Tagging Secrets by clicking on the link.
June 10th, 2006
First, go to the search engine where you want to check your site’s ranking, and enter the keywords you want to check. Your result pages will come up, and you will need to look through them until you find your website. SEO experts recommend that if you aren’t listed in at least the top 20 then you should continue to optimize, as most people won’t look any further than that. This is simply common sense. When you are determining if your rank is high enough simply think to yourself, “Would I look for this long for this page?”
You will want to do this with each search engine and directory until you have some idea of where you are. Check your website’s rankings regularly, because changes to algorithms can affect them drastically and quickly. Keep in mind also that thousands of new web pages are added daily, and many of them are actively trying to get ranked ahead of you. That’s right. There are thousands of other in on the same game as you so you must keep sharp. Your competitors may be reading these same articles and using these same tricks!
If you can’t find your website in a search engine’s results, you should enter “site:” your domain name in the keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere in the search engine’s index. If all you get back is a blank page, then you’re not in the search engine’s database at all – you need to wait longer. This trick of typing “site:www.yourdomain.com” also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed on each particular search engine. The more pages that are indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.
It you find that your website is miles away from the top 20, don’t be discouraged – you can change that! You may need to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good content is the best way to increase your chances of getting a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be with search engines.
Search engines are a perfect example of “the chicken or the egg.” In this case, there is an answer! Search engines attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important, not the other way around. This is why it is so important that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it.
If you want to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html.
If the search engine has indexed that particular page then it will come back with a description of it. If it hasn’t then you’ll see a message saying something like “Sorry, no information is available for that URL”.
On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page.
You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.
Top25web.com is one such search engine-ranking tool. You can find out where your website ranks in Google, Inktomi and AltaVista for free. You can also analyze the results of a particular keyword search, to create a plan for improving your site’s ranking.
URL Ranker offers instant, online reports of website rankings in 17 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, AOL Search, MSN, AllTheWeb and AltaVista, again for free. It will tell you if your site is listed in each engine, and tell you the ranking if it is.
These tools alone offer an excellent way of checking your sites rankings. Once you know where you stand, you can continue with your SEO plan, and move on to other aspects of marketing too.
June 10th, 2006
As those of you who read my blog will know I love my iPod! It was one of the reasons I started looking at the concept of Movies on iPods.
However, what I have just come across is a brilliant site for anyone with an iPod - take a look at it by clicking here.
June 8th, 2006
I don’t know about you but one of the things that is important to me in terms of running a website is getting visitors. In fact when you have put so much effort into creating a website the one thing you really want is targeted traffic to your website!
What do I mean by targeted traffic to your website then? By targeted traffic I mean visitors why are actually interested in your content. There are so many scam products around which promise you hundreds if not thousands of visitors using one means or another each and every day - for a price of course! The problem with the majority of these so called visitors is that they will have little or no interest in your content.
One of the most important things when you are trying to get visitors to your website is ensuring that you have a high ranking in the Search Engines - in that way your visitors will arrive at your site because they have been looking for content and your site will have been presented to them because of your content!
Over the past week or so I have been taking a look at Peter Hale’s 8 Videos which show you step by step how to gain great placings in the Search Engines and get at least 500 Visitors per day! At first I must admit that I was a little dubious but Peter really does know what he is talking about and we are already seeing the benefits of applying some of his techniques. I can certainly recommend his Targeted Traffic to your Website SEO eBook. You can read more about it by clicking here.
June 3rd, 2006
A ‘Page Rank’ is a number Google gives to a web page that represents how important Google thinks the page is on the web. When one page links to another, Google considers it to be effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more ‘votes’ there are for a page across the whole web, the more important that page must be. But that’s quite an assumption, isn’t it?
The importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google calculations a page’s importance comes from the votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked.
As a general rule of thumb, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work has been going. Granted, the ranking that you appear in on the results for your most important key words is the real indicator, but a strong Google Page Rank will help to boost this position substantially. The more links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. That’s a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations.
Page Rank matters because it’s one of the most influential factors that determine a page’s ranking in Google’s search results. If you want to have good Page Rank, you’d better make sure people are linking to your site.
Well, don’t jump the gun and try to get your site linked from everywhere you can, because Google doesn’t count every link. They have started filter out links from known ‘link farms’ (sites that are nothing but big lists of links), and being linked to or from these kinds of sites will get you penalized by Google. Be careful out there. They have also implemented a new relevance calculator that (true to its name) tries to determine how relevant the links into and out of your site are. The most important factor here is that Google considers long lasting links as more meaningful than a recently published link.
The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complementary content (that is, content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it). These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank, but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.
How is PageRank Calculated?
Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site. When a page ‘votes’ for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.
This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. It’s not just the Page Rank of the page that’s important, but also the number of links it has.
The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.
Each time you add a link, or a page that links to you adds a link, you run the risk of lowering your PageRank. Make sure that you have as few links as possible, and so do any sites that are associated with you.
Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one site’s PageRank is entirely relative to the others’. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because they’re the only ones with access to the whole index.
May 26th, 2006
Evening All
Great News this evening! Our regular weekly ezine now has it’s own Domain Name! If you want to check out the bumper first edition you need to go to The Online Magazine.
Don’t forget to check out the special offers!
Take care
Paul
April 23rd, 2006
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