Webmasters who are looking to improve the traffic of their site are embracing search engine optimization. They feel that by making their web site search engine optimized, they will increase search engine rankings and thus traffic. This line of thinking is correct, but the reality is, most webmasters who think they know search engine optimization really don’t. Not knowing SEO really hurts their web sites. A bad SEO technique is as bad as not having any SEO done at all. As a SEO savvy webmaster, this is something you never want to do. To avoid this, you’ll need to know the mistakes that webmasters make. We’ll tell you about those in this lesson.

Mistake #1: Bad Navigation

In the hopes of attracting search engine spiders, many webmasters neglect the simplest and perhaps most important part of a web site: the design. Webmasters fail to remember that not just spiders will be on this site, but also human people. These people don’t want to go to a site with a bad design and horrible navigation. If they come across such a site, they are inclined to never visit it again. Webmasters should never forget to think about their visitors and what they’d like to see. If they do, they’ll end up making a bad impression and losing potential visitors.

Mistake #2: Too Many Keywords

When SEO first came along, some webmasters began to find ways of getting an advantage above others. One such popular tactic was that of keyword stuffing. If you don’t already know, keyword stuffing is the process of placing a lot of keywords in a piece of content in order to attract more search engine spiders and boost their traffic. However, search engine web sites caught on to this and began to program spiders to ignore sites with larger than allowed numbers of keywords. Nowadays, web sites are ignored for having too many keywords. Don’t make this same mistake—stick to a keyword density of 3-5% and you’ll be fine.

Mistake #3: Not Enough Keywords

While some people stuff their pages with keywords, others don’t use enough keywords. Don’t think that using a keyword 5 times in a 1000 word piece of content is enough. It’s not. It barely makes a dent from a SEO standpoint and will not do much to bring spiders to your site. That’s why you should make sure you use enough keywords in a page of content. Like we said above, 3-5% is sufficient.

Mistake #4: Incorrect Title

As you probably already know, the title tag is the first thing that visitors—and spiders—see when they come to your site. It is supposed to be a description of what your site is all about. When a title fails to be an accurate description of the site, it is considered to be an incorrect title tag. If you have an incorrect title tag on your site, you can pretty much kiss SEO good bye. It really is that important. A correct title tag would be something like “Name of site.com – Home of ‘niche’â€?. A bad title tag would be “keyword, keywordâ€?.

Mistake #5: The Same Title Tag

This is a very common mistake among those webmasters who want to create a site that is the same throughout. Having the same title tag on every single page of a site is bad because it makes the site seem unoriginal and fails to describe what each page on the site is. When making title tags for your site, make sure they are page specific.

Mistake #6: Bad Content

Many webmasters are so obsessed with title tags and keyword usage that they forget about the actual content. The content is a huge part of the SEO process. Content that features poor grammar and spelling can really harm a site’s chance to rise in search engine rankings. You have to remember that not just spiders, but actual humans will be reading your site, so you should remember that it is at least readable for them.

Mistake #7: Hidden Text

Hidden text is essentially just like keyword stuffing. It involves writing a bunch of keywords in the page and making them “invisible� to everyone else. Only spiders can see them, and the hope of this is to gain more attention from the search engine spider. However, that does not occur anymore because of the fact that spiders are smarter than that. They will not pay attention to a site with keyword stuffing or hidden text, period.

Lesson 10 Wrap-Up:

In this lesson, you learned about the top mistakes webmasters make in SEO. Hopefully by knowing about these, you won’t end up making the same mistakes they did.

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In an earlier lesson, you learned about Google page rank. Now that you know exactly what it is, you’d probably like to boost your page rank. After all, your site has a low page rank and you find that to be unacceptable, so you want to do something to increase it. Many people have begun to market tools that you can use to increase the page rank. The vast majority of these tools are useless, however, and really do not benefit you at all. What will increase Google page rank is applying some of the techniques listed below to your site. It’s a guaranteed way of boosting page rank and is completely free. Why spend the money to increase page rank when we’ll tell you how to do it for free?

Increasing Page Rank

As we said, there are several techniques to increase a web site’s Google page rank. Even if you only follow one of the techniques below, you can expect to see a positive difference in your site’s page rank.

Technique #1: Content

Despite the fact that SEO experts constantly talk about the importance of content, most web masters ignore their advice to make sure their sites have quality content. It’s really crazy, particularly when you consider the fact that Google looks at content when determining page rank. Thus, one of the greatest techniques toward improving page rank is to simply make sure your site has quality content. This content should ALWAYS be relevant to the topic of the site. The content should not be too long (greater than 2500 words a page) or too short, should be informative and should include the right amount of keywords (a keyword density of 2-5%). If your content has all of this, you should be in very good condition to increase your page rank.

Technique #2: Back links

The major determining factor in Google’s page rank is back links. These are incoming links from one site to your site. What these links tell Google is that your site must have good content on it, or else other sites would not be linking to it. Now you might think that all that matters is the links, right? Not exactly. Google has gotten very smart and accurate with page rank, and so they can tell bad links (i.e. Links from link farms, irrelevant sites etc.) from the good links (links in articles, links from relevant sites etc.). The most effective technique in increasing page rank is to gather good back links. The next two techniques on our list deal with this.

Technique #3: Forums and Blogs

Google is known for quickly indexing forums and blogs. Literally the fastest way to gain a good back link is to simply post a link to your site on a forum or a blog. Most forums consider outright linking to be spam, so you’ll have to make sure you do this in the right way. Try joining forums relevant to your site’s topic and put a link to your site in your signature, if it’s allowed. Also, put a link to your site in your profile. Then post 1-10 times. Your posts should contribute something to the forum so that they are not edited or, worse, removed.

As for using blogs to gain more links, you can try to create a blog of your own and casually put a link to your site on it. You can also try commenting on other relevant blogs and including a link to your site in these comments. Once again, you need to be cautious in how you do this—you don’t want to make comments that are outright promoting your site.

Technique #4: Articles

An increasingly more popular way of gaining a better Google page rank is to write articles. These articles are based off of your site. For instance, if you run a photography site, you may write an article on digital photography. At the end of the article, you might include something like “for more on digital photography, visit insert site.com�. Article back links are very effective because they are considered credible by Google. One thing to remember is to not mention your site too many times; one or two mentions per article is fine. You can submit your articles to AssociatedContent.com and Ezines or you can use article submission services or Article Submitter software.

Lesson 9 Wrap-Up

You don’t have to spend money to increase page rank. All you need to do is just practice some of the techniques we’ve outlined here and you’ll be well on your way to a better Google page rank.

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You created a web site over a month ago and expected Google to index it pretty quickly. Much to your dismay, however, the site hasn’t been indexed yet. When you type the name of your site into the Google search engine, nothing comes up. This is quite frustrating to you because it means that your site cannot be found by internet users. Your site is, essentially, missing. What if, however, you could get indexed by Google not in a week, not in a few days, but in 24 hrs? Seem unlikely? Well, it might be to some, but to others, it’s something that is expected and achieved regularly.

What Can I Do to Get Indexed Quickly?

A lot of people suggest to submit your site to Google by using the add link form. However, this never results in a quick listing. The reason is because the submission isn’t review for weeks and weeks due to how busy Google is. So you might as well forget about link submission because it’s not going to do any good.

What, then, can you do to get indexed by Google quickly? There are actually a few things you can do, each of which are pretty effective and can lead to getting your site listed in as little as 24 hours. Try all of them and see the positive results it brings.

Method #1: A link on an existing site

In some of our other lessons, we touched on the fact that incoming links are of great importance to being listed in Google. They can increase the likelihood of a spider going to your site, thereby getting your site listed and ranked in the search engine. When you’re first starting out, it can be difficult to get such links because your site is unestablished. Thus, you must try other ways of doing this.

One of the easiest ways is to join a forum for a relevant site and to begin posting. You don’t have to make a lot of posts, just a few quality ones will do. Put a link to your site in your signature. Search engine spiders will pick up on this quickly.

Another easy way of doing this is to go to a relevant blog and post a comment there. Now, when doing this, you should be careful to not make your comment seem as though it is spam. Write an intelligent comment and sign your name as “name here of www.mywebsite.comâ€?. This lets blog owners know you’re not a bot, just a regular person who cares about the subject at hand.

Method #2: Create an External Blog

Blogs are well liked by Google. So well liked, in fact, that they are very quickly listed. A blog posting might be up in Google within 24 hours. You can go to any free site like blogspot.com and create a blog on there. You can then write a few posts and casually slip in a link to your site. With some luck, you site will be listed in the Google search engine quite quickly.

Method #3: Add a Blog to Your Site.

Adding a blog to your site can be a lot more effective than creating an external blog or even posting on forums. Free software like Wordpress allows you to quickly and easily add a blog section to your site. You can then add a couple quality postings (be sure to use some keywords) to the blog. Because Google loves blogs and indexes them quickly, you can expect them to take notice of your blog—and your site—very quickly. This is the most effective way of getting indexed quickly so do not ignore it.

Why Do These Methods Work?

In the case of the first and second methods, you are getting inbound links to your site. That means that when Google visits the site and sees a link to your site on it, they’ll go to yours and then list it. Links, as you know, practically always increase rankings in search engines because there are more chances for the spiders to visit your site. So don’t ignore links and how they play a role in getting listed quickly.

With the third method, you are taking advantage of the fact that Google lists blogs quicker than normal sites. By adding a blog to your site, you are opening your site up to Google listing much quicker than they normally would. This is perhaps the most important method, so be sure you use it.

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With the advent of the internet, selling software online became a pretty big business. Companies began to market their products online and sell them to interested consumers. However, since most people wanted to try the product before they bought it, the companies began to offer evaluation or trial versions of their products on free download sites. One such free download site, download.com, offers million of software downloads. If you’ve created your own piece of software and want to let the world know about it, you’ll want to read this lesson on how to make your software known with software submission.

A Great Product

You’ve just come up with a great program and know that people would buy it if they knew about it. The problem is that they don’t know about it. Your product stands right alongside millions of other programs on millions of other websites. Still, you try to sell it and you find that the sales are lackluster—if there are any at all. Some may say this is because the product itself is not good, but that’s not really true. In most cases, this occurs simply because the program is not being promoted.

Software Submission: The Ultimate Product Promotion

If you watch TV, you see a lot of commercials for a lot of different products. TV is an extremely popular form of advertisement because it allows the products to reach the people. When you think about it, the internet is really no different. Since there are literally hundreds of millions of people who browse the web everyday, companies have begun to advertise their products online. This is done in the form of ads on popular sites like Yahoo.

Software submission is just like advertisements, albeit done in a different way. Instead of paying for ad space, you’re instead giving download sites the right to make your product available to visitors. Whenever a visitor goes to a download site and types in a keyword relevant to your software, they’ll see your software on the page and may download it.

What are the Advantages to Software Submission?

There are a lot of benefits to submitting your software to download sites. The first is that you are exposing your product to many people. Anyone who visits the site (and a lot of people go in search of free downloads) will perhaps get the chance to see your product. If it’s a product that they find useful, they’ll be inclined to download it. If they enjoy the trial version, they’ll consider going to your web site and purchasing the full version. Therefore, you can think of the download sites as being a way of garnering potential sales.

Another benefit is that you are reaching people who may not otherwise hear about your product. The internet is a big place and it can be hard to separate your product from all the others. Software submitted to download sites will be grouped in its own category, making it easier for people to see your product and read what it can do for them.

What are the Disadvantages?

Just like anything else, there are some disadvantages to software submission. If, for instance, you offer a trial version that is easy to crack, people may download the trial version from the download site and then crack it rather than buying it from you. That’s why it is important to make sure your trial versions are virtually un-crackable.

Also, if you choose to stop offering the trial version, you might not be able to get it pulled from the download site(s) right away. It can take several weeks, if not months, for a download site to add or remove programs.

How Do I Submit Programs?

If you go to the various download sites, you’ll see that most, if not all of them offer the chance to manually submit programs. These programs are then checked by the staff of the site to ensure they are free of spyware and viruses. This process can take weeks, so many instead opt for a submission service. A very popular service is upload.com. For $79 a year, you can have your program listed on CNET.com and Download.com, among other sites. It’s a very quick way of getting your site out there, which is why you should consider it.

There are other web sites that offer software submission services. To find out about these, you may want to consider asking around on a SEO or software submission forum

Lesson 7 Wrap-Up:

Software submission is a highly effective way of getting more people to try and buy your products. In this lesson, you’ve learned why it’s beneficial, as well as how to submit your products.

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In lesson 5: Gather more incoming links using directory submission, I spoke of gathering more incoming links by way of directory submission. This a fundamental concept in search engine optimization and most SEO savvy webmasters use it often. However, there is yet another way of acquiring more incoming links, and it’s something that is actually underused, at least at the moment. This is the method of gathering more incoming links using article submission. It’s highly effective and can increase your ranking quickly. You probably don’t quite understand how this works, and that’s OK, as it isn’t as popular of a SEO topic as it should be. We’ll tell you all about it in this lesson.

What is Article Submission?

Article submission is the act of writing an article and then submitting it to article directories or services. These directories then publish the article or submit it to various web sites and it is on the web. People, as well as search engine spiders, are then able to read the article and see any links contained in it.

Article Submitter submits your article to 640+ article directories quickly and easily. You get accurate article placement using a semi-automatic submission tool to the most current list of directories and focus on writing content, not submitting it.

But What Does It Have to Do With Gathering More Links?

You might be thinking “what is this crazy person talking about? How is article submission and gathering more incoming links related?â€? Well, you’ll soon find out what I mean and why it’s such a big part of gaining more incoming links.

I spoke in the previous section about links being contained in articles. This is the connection between gaining incoming links and article submission. The whole purpose of submitting an article for SEO reasons is to get the links necessary to increase a site’s ranking. That’s the reason for doing article submission.

OK….But How Does It Work?

There is really a step by step process to article submission for SEO purposes. It’s best to follow the process so that you ensure the best benefits for your site. The step by step is listed below.

Step #1: What is Your Site?

You probably already know that internet spiders have been programmed to ignore irrelevant content and keywords. This applies not just to content on the site, but also to content outside of the site that happens to link to the site. You don’t want people reading an article and then having it be completely different from what your site is about. This is considered a black hat SEO tactic and will do your site no good.

Before writing the article, you should determine what your site is all about. Once you decide on that, you can go to the next step.

Step #2: Article Titles

Now that you know what your site is about, you can begin the process of article creation. If you have a site that is all about rock music, you could have articles written about the history of rock music, influences in rock music, top 10 greatest rock bands of all time etc. The point is to choose topics that are relevant to your site. Do this and you should be fine.

Step #3: Keywords

For every topic, you should come up with a keyword or perhaps two. These should be used in the article enough to make a difference. Usually a keyword density between 3-5% is considered excellent. You wouldn’t think that keyword usage in an article designed to gain traffic to your site is important, but it is. That’s because you want people (and spiders) to see the article, and the more keywords in the article, the better the chance is of them seeing it.

Step #4: Who’s Going to Write It?

If you’re on a budget, you might decide to write the article yourself. However, many webmasters instead opt for hiring someone else to do it. You might want to check a site like RentaCoder.com or ScriptLance.com and see if there are any writers there that you’d like to have write your article(s). You might also consider article writing and submission services. Whatever you decide on, make sure all the steps are followed.

Step #5: Write the Article

Now it’s time to actually write the article. When doing it, make sure it is enjoyable to read, informative and contains just the right amount of keywords. Also, try to incorporate links to your site into the article as often as it looks right. Don’t overuse the links, though, as it will distract readers—and spiders—from the main purpose of the article. One-three links is considered a good number.

Step #6: Submit the Article

It’s time to submit the article to the article directories. A popular choice is ezinearticles.com, though there are many other article directories to choose from. A list of 630 article directories based on Article Dashboard and another one based on Article friendly script is available in blog.

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