By now, you’ve learned a lot about how keywords can help to increase your search engine ranking. This is only part of the puzzle that is search engine optimization. Another big piece of this is the topic of links. Incoming links play an integral role in search engine rankings and thus should be taken into consideration by web masters. A lot of web masters opt to “tradeâ€? links with other web sites to gain these links. This can be quite effective, provided the sites they trade with are related in some way to their site, but it’s typically not as effective as submitting sites to directories. In this lesson, you’ll learn why incoming links are so useful, how to gain more incoming links using directory submission, what the benefits of directory submission are and much more.

Why Do I Need Incoming Links?

You already know about search engine spiders and how they go on the hunt for sites with particular keywords. But did you know that they also search for links? It’s definitely true. When a search engine spider browses through a site, they look for not just keywords, but also for links. If they find a link, they go the site which the link represents. They’ll then browse through that site and go to any links found there. Each time, a log is made and is sent back to the search engine. As you already know, the more a spider visits your site, the higher the ranking you get.

Incoming links are a very important thing to search engine optimization because they can lead to higher search engine rankings, thus increasing traffic to a site. If you have a lot of sites linking to you, you’ll have search engine spiders visiting more often than not having these links. Over time, this will lead to more site traffic than you could have ever imagined before.

How to Gain More Incoming Links Using Directory Submission

Most site owners prefer to manually gather links by doing a form of link exchange with other web masters. It’s a practice that is pretty old, and not as effective as it once was. That’s because many web masters abuse the practice. They go for incoming links from just about any site. This is a bad practice because search engine spiders have been programmed to ignore links on a site that are not relevant to the site. For instance, if a piano site links to a dog site, the link to the dog site will be skipped by the spider. That’s why it’s so important to get good quality links, if you choose to do link exchange.

Getting quality links can be a bit of a challenge, which is why it’s best to go with directory submission. Directory submission allows you to quickly and easily get good incoming links to your site. These links are followed by the spider and almost never ignored. All you need to do is simply submit your website to the directory and you’re done.

Website Submitter is the easiest web semi-automated directory submitter tool. You can quickly and safely promote your web site for traffic-driving results. You can submit to your website to 4500+ directories. Website Submitter does all of the work for you. All you have to do is click and wait for the visitors to arrive!

The Benefits of Directory Submission

Here’s a brief list of the benefits of directory submission:

• - Your Site is Listed Alongside Relevant Sites: As we’ve pointed out, spiders have been programmed to ignore irrelevant site links. Directories list sites in specific categories, so if a search engine spider comes across your site link in a directory and the site is in the right category, the spider will visit your site via this link.

• - It’s Fast: It can be frustrating and quite annoying to look for sites relevant to yours and ask them to link to your site. You also have to typically link to your site. There is a lot of time invested in emailing web masters and asking them to please put the link on their site. It’s time most web masters don’t have and it can take away from the overall quality of the site. Submission to a directory generally takes less than 10 minutes.

• - It’s Effective: Some of the best search engine optimized sites have the majority of their incoming links coming from a directory. Submission to a directory can and usually does greatly increase traffic and rankings.

Directories to submit sites to

There are a lot of directory sites out there, but not all of them are good enough to submit your site to. The best directories for web site submission are dmoz.org and yahoo directory. You can find more possible directories by running Website Submitter and order by Google PR ( watch a video demo on how you can submit in directories ). The 3500+ directories contained into Website Submitter will be enough for boosting your backlinks.

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Search engine optimization is now a big part of building web sites. Webmasters everywhere have come to the realization that making sure their sites are search engine optimized is a very important part of creating successful web sites. Obviously, SEO isn’t the most up front subject in the world, so it’s a good idea for webmasters to go through some SEO lessons to ensure that they are using the correct SEO principles. In lesson 4 of our 12 lesson set on SEO, you’ll learn about a basic, yet crucial principle of SEO: Title and META tag creation.

What are META tags?

META tags are essentially tags which describe your web site to the search engine spiders. These tags previously factored into the ranking aspect of search engines, but this is no longer the case. META tags now are responsible for telling the spiders what your site is about. What your META tag says may determine what kind of description your site has on search engine results. However, like we’ve said, these tags do NOT factor into ranking. So no matter how many keywords you use in the META tag, you will not get any higher of a ranking.

What are Title tags?

Title tags, on the other hand, are a factor in the search engine rankings. If you look to the top left of this page, you’ll see the name of this site and probably a brief description of what this site is about. This is the title tag. A title tag will typically come in this form: “Name of the site - brief description of site”. The title tag is particularly important because it is the first thing people and spiders will see when looking at your site. For instance, when a person sees your site in a search engine, the title tag will be the title for your site’s listing. Thus, it is important that, when creating title tags, you make sure that they are SEO and people friendly.

Using a keyword in the title is a good idea, but only if it fits in the title. By this we mean that it should not feel out of place. If you have a site on guitars, a good title tag might be “guitars.com - Home of Electric Guitars”. It’s a relevant title and includes a good keyword (electric guitar). A bad title for this same site would be “guitars.com - Home of Pianos, Guitars, Drums”, as you have used two unnecessary keywords (drums and pianos). Always make sure that the titles are readable for your visitors and do not excessively use keywords.

What is the HTML Coding for META Tags?

Even if you use Dreamweaver or another What You See Is What You Get editor, you’ll want to know the coding for META tags. It’s pretty simple, so you could be able to memorize it.

The Keywords META tag isn’t as useful as it once was and is now just a way for web masters to keep track of the keywords they use on their sites. The keywords within this tag will be ignored now by most of the search engine spiders and they will not factor into rankings.

The Robots META tag is pretty useful in that it tells search engine spiders what to do with the site. You can customize each of these three tags to fit your web site and the SEO principles you use. Alternative you can use the robots.txt settings.
What is the HTML Coding for Title Tags?

There is just one title tag in an HTML document and it is located within the tags Title. The title tag usually appears right below the tag Head.
This is very easy to remember and quite basic. You’ll use the title tag in every single web page you create. If you do not have a title tag, you’ll not only have incorrect HTML coding, but also a site that goes unranked.

Lesson 4 Wrap-Up:

In this lesson you learned about META and Title tag creation. You’ve learned the two quite in depth, so you should be able to apply what you’ve learned to your own web sites. Good luck!

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Keywords, keywords, keywords. If you’re beginning the process of making your web site search engine optimized, then you’ve probably heard a lot about keywords and how important they are to the SEO process. You might even think that keywords are overrated and not as essential to SEO as many make them out to be. That’s not the case, though. Keywords ARE every bit as important as they’ve been made out to be, and if you do not know the correct usage of keywords, you will not be able to have a correctly SEO’d site, period. You’ll learn all about keywords in this lesson, as well as researching keywords so that you get the best rankings possible.

What are Keywords?

Keywords are words which are very important in the eyes of search engine spiders. These are words which make search engine spiders pay attention to the content of a site. You can think of it this way: you’re reading an article about NBA basketball players. Every time you see the key phrase (which is a set of keywords strung together) “NBA basketball players”, it reminds you of what the article is about and makes you take notice. That’s the same effect seen on search engine spiders with keywords. When they spot a keyword or key phrase, it reminds them of what the purpose of the site is and catches their eyes. The more you catch the attention of a spider, the more the spider reports your site back to the search engine. The more “reports” the search engine gets, the higher your page is ranked. That’s pretty much how it all works.

Why Do I Need Keywords?

You should already know why you need keywords for your site: they allow your site to get ranked higher. Keywords are the very fundamental part of search engine optimization. Without them, there really is no search engine optimization going on in a site. If you wish to create a site that is search engine optimized, you must incorporate keywords.

How Do I Select Keywords?

Selecting keywords is not as complex as you might think. It’s actually very easy, provided you know the process for doing it. We’ll go over that right now.

The first step of the process is to determine what exactly your site is about. What is the purpose of your site? Who do you want to attract to the site? The answers to these questions will tell you what to do next.

When you’ve decided what your site is about, you can now determine what keywords to use. If you are running a site on digital cameras, you’ll want to choose keywords that are relevant to this niche. For instance, you might use key phrases such as “canon digital cameras”, “kodak digital camera”, “nikon digital cameras” etc. The point is to try to take your niche and create keywords based off of this. That way you’ll have legitimate keywords that are relevant and not “cheap”. You might want to check out Google and see what keywords are used the most and which aren’t used as much.

Next, you should create a list of 5-10 keywords based off your research. You should then pick a keyword for each page of content. This keyword or key phrase will be used throughout the content of a page. If you use different key phrases or keywords for different pages, this will make your site diversified and will prevent keyword stuffing, which is a bad SEO practice. It will also help your SEO rankings because you are using various keywords.

Writing the Content

When it comes time to write the content of your site and use the keywords you’ve selected, you have two options. The first is to hire someone to do it. The second is to write the content yourself. The former is a very easy way of getting the content for your site as you can go to any freelance site and hire a SEO writer. The latter is a more time invasive, yet often more effective way of getting the content. By writing the content yourself, you ensure that it lives up to your standards and uses the keywords enough.

If you choose to write the content yourself, you’ll want to make sure that you have a good keyword density for each page. As you learned in Lesson 1, keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the total number of words. So if you use the keyword 5 times in a 500 word piece of content, you have a keyword density of 1%, which is a pretty low density. You’ll want a keyword density of 3%-5%. To achieve this density, all you need to do is sprinkle in the keywords into the content in a natural manner. That’s it.

Lesson 3 Wrap Up:

In lesson 3, you’ve learned practically everything there is to know about keywords and can now apply this fundamental SEO principle to your site.

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When you get past the beginning level of SEO ( see our Lesson 1: Introduction to SEO techniques ) , you’ll begin hearing about a lot of terms that are unfamiliar to you. Among these are Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank. These are topics of concern for web masters who want to ensure that their sites are doing good in search engine rankings. While both Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank are important in SEO and measure much of the same thing ” the popularity of a website” they are also different in some ways. These differences make it important to understand the very basics of both Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank, which will be covered in this lesson.

What is Google Page Rank?

Google Page Rank, as the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin put it, is a tool developed to rank websites that are listed in the Google search engine. The page rank is given in a scale of 0-10. 0 is the lowest possible score for a site, while 10 is the highest. The higher the page ranking of your site, the greater the amount of traffic it receives.

Now you know what the Google Page Rank is. But how, exactly, is it determined? Well, Google uses a really complicated mathematical formula to determine the ranking of a page. We could literally spend this entire lesson going over this formula, which really would be a waste of time. Instead, we’ll just talk about it in a non-in depth, but still useful way.

When Google is ranking a web site, there are several factors involved. The first is the overall layout of the site and how “complete” it is. Google dislikes incomplete site maps being sent to the search engine, which is why you should only submit the site map when the site is actually finished. The second major factor is the usage of keywords. Google likes a site with good usage of keywords. They like a keyword density of 3-5%. Another major factor is that of external links. Google likes it when your site is getting linked to by other sites. That way Google can find your site more often. The last major factor is how updated the site is. Google hates outdated sites, so make sure yours is updated often. All of these factors make up the basis of the Google Page Rank.

You can determine your Google Page Rank, Alexa Page Rank, inbound links, indexed pages, important directories and site listing, press and media mentions and another 30 ranking parameters for your website using the last version of Website Popularity SEO ranking software.

What is the Alexa Rank?

The Alexa Rank is much like the Google Rank, with one main difference: it is exclusively based on page views, number of users and three months of historical data. It is not based on SEO principles like the Google Page Rank is, although having a good SEO’d site will help the cause.

An Alexa Rank may range from 1 to a billion, depending on the number of web sites. Every web site in the world is included in the Alexa Rank, so you’re up against all of them. The goal is to have a high ranking (generally considered to be in the 1-1,000,000 range). Presently, the highest ranked site in the Alexa Rank is Yahoo.com, although Google.com poses a threat to this. You can find out your Alexa Page Rank by going to Alexa.com directly or checking using the Website Popularity.

How can I improve my Google Page Rank?

The good thing about the Google Page Rank is that it can be improved pretty easily. Follow these suggestions to improve yours:

1. Create a site that is search engine optimized. Your site should be full of quality content that doesn’t fall short in terms of keywords and keyword density. Strive for a keyword density of 3-5% and make sure that all keywords and content are relative to your site’s purpose.
2. Use META and title tags correctly. One of the biggest factors in search engine optimizing a site is that of the META and title tags. When using these, you should make sure that the title tag is accurate and that the META tag describes your site well. For tips on META and title tags, check out Lesson 4: Title and META tag creation.
3. Submit all pages to the Google site map. Do so only when the site is completed.
4. Build targeted traffic to your website.

How can I improve my Alexa Rank?

To improve the Alexa Rank, all you need to do is improve your traffic to your site. Following the tips in the above section and in the next lessons should help you to increase traffic, which will, in turn, increase your Alexa Rank. There are tools out there which claim to improve the Alexa Rank, however, these are usually not very effective and may do more harm than good to your site’s ranking. Do not go for submission to 300,000 search engines, this is the worst thing you can do.

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Search Engine Optimization. If you’re a web master, you’ve probably heard this phrase mentioned often. If you’re someone who has been doing web master work for years, you might not be very familiar with what search engine optimization (SEO) is. That’s OK, as it’s not something that many people have learned about. While it’s not as common knowledge as it should be, SEO isn’t a very difficult subject to learn thoroughly enough. In fact, learning the techniques of SEO can actually be very easy. We’ll teach you all about SEO in this lesson ( Just kidding, we will need more lessons for this job ).

What is SEO?

SEO is search engine optimization. What does this mean? Well, it essentially means you are creating a site that is search engine friendly. Search engines, as you probably know, are responsible for a lot of your web site’s traffic. The more search engine friendly a site is, the greater the chance people using a search engine will find the site. Basically, by making your site SEO, you are increasing your traffic. That’s why SEO is a very important part of current web master work.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Now that you know what SEO is, you’ll want to know how to apply it to your web site so that you, too, can reap the benefits. There are several SEO techniques to learn, and we’ll cover three very important ones that you can apply immediately to your site.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #1: Keywords and Key phrases

The most basic SEO technique is that of the use of keywords and key phrases. Keywords are basically words that a search engine spider ( basically a program which scans web sites and reports its findings back to the search engine database ) is trained to find. If these words are found, the site is more likely to catch the attention of the spider and get listed. Key phrases are just like keywords, except they are basically two or more words strung together. For instance, a common key phrase might be “cool web sites”. Using such a key phrase or key word enough can really help a site to become SEO friendly.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #2: Correct Titles

If you look at the top left of your web browser, you’ll notice a piece of text that states what site you are on and perhaps also gives a brief description of what the site is. This piece of text is known as the “Title” of a web page. The title is one of the first things a search engine spider will notice when visiting a site. Thus, it is important to make sure your web site has a meaningful title. The title should not include excessive amounts of keywords, and whatever keywords you do use should be relevant to the site at hand. Spiders have been trained to spot sites with excessive amounts of keywords and they will ignore such sites. So don’t ever overuse keywords. If you have a site dedicated to PRS electric guitars, an appropriate SEO title might be something like “PRS Electric Guitars.com - “ Your source for PRS guitars”.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #3: Keyword Density

There is such a thing as overusing keywords, and it can be worse than using no keywords at all in terms of getting ranked highly on a search engine. Keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the number of total words in a page. So if you have 500 total words and 10 keywords, you’d have 2% keyword density. An appropriate keyword density is anywhere between 2% and 7%.Anything more than this is considered keyword stuffing; anything less than this is considered too little to make an impact.

Lesson 1 in Review

In this first lesson on SEO, we’ve covered a lot of ground. You’ve learned the basic principals behind SEO and should now be able to apply those to your site. If you are interested in get a quote for your website optimization take a look at our Search engine optimization offer.

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