Rob Emmerson’s SEO Blog

Getting traffic to your website can be hard. No one just randomly types in “makelotsofmoneyonlinequicklyandfromhome.com” and with this market slowly being filled in, it is hard to get a good rank on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and all the other major search engines. Although paying for advertising is effective and gets targeted results, RSS feeds are the way to go for free, cheap, and somewhat easy advertising.

First off, if you don’t want to write articles yourself, no problem. The web is a great resource for finding articles written by respected authors who are willing to give you their article for free (as long as you include their signature at the bottom of the article). It is very easy to take these articles, publish them on your website, and then make a RSS out of them. But enough of the rambling, the top six reasons for having an RSS feed on your site:

6. Reputation - A good RSS feed will increase your reputation as a honest and willing to help business, not just a business that wants to take your money, and nothing else. A feed with quality articles shows that you want to help the reader learn more about a topic instead of just give the reader a sales pitch. Making your business prospects knowledgeable in the area that you are focused will hopefully show how your product/service is superior in it’s design.

5. Advertising - A RSS feed can be used to advertise your website for no money at all. If you submit it to RSS directories, the name of your website will appear at the top of your feed every time! Not only does it appear, it also functions as a link (but we’ll get into that later).

4. Increase in traffic - Designing your RSS feed to only include part of your article forces the reader Read the rest of this entry »

Link building and link popularity are the elixir of life for both flagging and fledgling websites on the internet. Link popularity, which refers to the amount of text links that lead to your website from other sites, is a crucial web marketing tool because of the huge impact that it makes on any web page’s search engine ranking and Pagerank. In fact, link popularity is the most important factor that is used for calculating a web page’s rank and any web site that wants at least a fighting chance for survival in the virtual jungle needs to make a conscious and concentrated effort at achieving a high link popularity.

Even if your web site is not facing a life or death situation, you should turn towards link building because of the huge advantages that it offers to web masters. Some of the main advantages of link popularity, which will undoubtedly make you give a second look to text links are:

• Link Popularity Increases Your Pagerank: The Google Pagerank is a crucial factor that decides where your web page will feature in a user run search result or not. And page rank is something that is mainly based on a site’s link popularity. The larger the number of existing links to your site, the higher will be its page rank (PR) and the better will be its search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

• Link Popularity Leads To Traffic Generation: A link to your web site on any other site on the internet acts as an advertisement for people to come and peek into your site, and this is what a lot of users actually do! Therefore, any website that has a large number of links from related websites pointing to it automatically gets an increased flow of relevant traffic. Since most reputable websites will be ready Read the rest of this entry »

Contrary to popular opinion, RSS is not only good for delivering content from your blog, although blogs are what made RSS so popular.

In fact, RSS can be used to deliver a great variety of content and content types. If you can break down your content in to individual stories or individual pieces, you can deliver it via RSS.

Just to give you an impression of the power of RSS, here are some examples of content you can publish using it …

–> MarketingVOX is using RSS to deliver internet marketing news to their readers as it becomes available. Instead of having to wait to receive all the news in a single e-mail newsletter, RSS users get them as soon as they are ready.

–> Amazon.com is using RSS to announce their bestsellers and to help their users keep track of releases they are most interested in.

–> Some affiliate managers already communicate with their affiliates using RSS. You can of course use it to communicate with any other target audience as well, such as your employees or team-members, and even your company owners.

–> FindSavings.com uses RSS to deliver savings coupons and related information.

–> Lockergnome uses RSS to provide visitors with the latest downloads and relevant software. Yet again other companies are using RSS to deliver product updates and patches directly to their customers, just as they become available.

–> A few hundred content publishers are using RSS to deliver audio content, such as .mp3 interviews and even “radio” shows.

–> Textamerica.com allows people to post pictures, videos & text from their mobile phones and then make this content available via RSS feeds.

–> Other companies are using RSS to deliver whitepapers and other educational content.

–> One company uses RSS as a consulting billing awareness tool. The consultants create activity reports and the RSS feeds from the activity channels carry the billable information to the accounting staff for invoice preparation.

–> Many internet publishers are using RSS to deliver their newsletters, as a supplement to their e-mail delivery. Since many people no longer want to give their e-mail address away to publishers, this is a great way to keep your e-zine Read the rest of this entry »

Search engine is all about content and every SEO gurus have been trying very hard to optimize their pages just for the search engine and often forgetting that the end user is actually the human reader. It is of paramount importance that a page has to be written for humans and designed for search engines in terms of SEO.

There is nothing more important than creating unique content for a site. In SEO, allocating keywords in the title, header and bold HTML tags not only helps the reader to identify the topic of a page easily but it also aids in optimization since search engine takes into consideration of the keywords in these tags.

Many writers are concerned about the perfect keyword density for the maximum benefit of SEO. Unfortunately, there are no hard figures for a perfect keyword percentage. The most important factor when creating content is to make it readable and unique. As long as the content is readable, there is no need to follow a set percentage of keyword density.

Designing a page to facilitate the indexing by the search engine bots is another important factor to consider next to content creation. A page with rich content without indexed by the search engine bots is equivalent to no content at all. To help the search engines to find the page, the navigation system and sitemap plays important roles here. It is advisable to have text links navigation so that bots can spider all the internal pages smoothly. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash made navigation Read the rest of this entry »

It is a simple truth. Yet while many of the biggest players on the web know it, most webmasters overlook the fact that customer reviews can provide for a source of constantly updated content that potential customers would find to be an invaluable source of information.

It is also true that by simply combining customer reviews with RSS feeds, you too can ride a new wave of shopping (or social) traffic.

Traffic! It is the one problem that webmasters continually face, and which can NEVER be fully solved. How to find visitors in a reliable, repeatable, and cost-effective way. Because without visitors all your beautiful content might as well be locked away in a vault–no one is ever going to see it. If the purpose of your site is to sell, you will sell nothing. If the purpose of your site is to build a social network, you might remain its only member. You need traffic to succeed. Lots of it.

In this article I am going to consider just one traffic building initiative–one that happens to be enjoying a growing wave of popularity. It involves harnessing the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to build traffic. You are probably aware of RSS as a means of syndicating news content. Websites that produce news have been building XML-formatted news stories for years. These files are retrieved by other websites, the new stories are extracted, and the content is placed (on these publisher sites) before a public ever-hungry for new information. The arrangement has worked well for everyone. Those who have displayed the RSS feeds have gained content to feed their visitors. Those who have produced the RSS feeds have obtained backlinks to their websites, which has helped to bring in new traffic. In fact the arrangement has worked so well that webmasters have been encouraged to move beyond simple news syndication.

This makes a lot of sense. News articles hardly represent the only content that surfers are looking for. Recipes, shopping coupons, MP3s, schedules for local events… The list of possible things that people search for is endless, and if you can provide “new” instances of such information, then RSS represents an ideal means of getting that information in front of the people searching for it. Sure, it used to be the case that everything you wrapped up in an RSS feed had to take a very simple form. Every item in your news feed was reduced to a title, a url (to the source of the information), and a short snippet, or description, to hook the reader. But RSS has sprouted wings over the years and now you can package practically any data structure into a feed that you like. Because of this there is no reason why we cannot suitably package customer reviews into a feed.

But what exactly would we put into an RSS-formatted customer review feed? And is this a good idea? Let me answer the second question first. Yes! It is a very good idea to package customer reviews as RSS feeds. Why? Because if you think about it, a customer review is very much like a news item. It is a packaged Read the rest of this entry »

Here is one method that you can use to get traffic to your web site. It relies on choosing some niche keywords based on your web site theme. The process is fairly simple and can be expanded to get tons of traffic to your site. Here is how.

It is often tempting to chase after popular themes and then select the major keyword as your target. However this is not a great move, well, not in the beginning anyway. You first have to build your credibility with the search engines before they will place you near the top.

The key is to choose a keyword phrase that people are using in the search engines such as Google but have very few web sites that cater to that keyword phrase. How do you find such valuable keyword phrases? Here’s how!

If you use a software tool such as Good Keywords or the Google AdSense tool, it will return you many different keyword phrases. Look for specific phrases that look a bit odd. One of the ones that I look for are those that are book titles. Sometimes the words are jumbled but after you have gone through a few of them you will easily recognize them because initially they seem to make no sense. This is often because the words in the title of the book have been sorted into alphabetic order.

If you choose this phrase and set up a web page targeting that phrase, you can then produce a few paragraphs on the book based on reviews at any of the book sellers such as Amazon. You can then have affiliate links to the major booksellers and receive an affilaite commission from them.

I have used Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of people get confounded when attempting to exchange links, you’re not alone. The people who have the spot you want are competitors. The people who don’t aren’t worth exchanging links with. What to do?

It’s not necessarily the method you’re using, it may be the approach.

If you know anything about SEO, you know you need relevant links to your site, preferably more in than you have out. And whether you actively pursue search engine listings or not, you’ll find that many surfers travel the web through the links they find, often without realizing it.

So how do you achieve this without linking to the sites you are competing with?

Think Parallel Markets.

When most people think of this term, they are speaking from an investment standpoint. In this discussion, I’m simply referring to groups of products and services which cater to people with similiar needs.

If your market is delivery or carry-out pizza, your market is fast food. But your parallel market might be frozen pizzas, Italian food store chains, or cheese, maybe even films.

Pizza delivery chains offer free DVDs with a delivery order because they figure that people who eat pizza at home watch films while they eat - ordering in and watching a movie is (sadly) the new third date.

To discover your parallel market, think of things that your customers have in common that brings them to your site, then eliminate things that compete.

So now you know *who* to ask to link to you. But *how* do you get them to link back?

Especially as a new webmaster, it helps if you think from the opposing end of your desires.

Meaning that, before you ask for something, think of what you can give in return. What are the other person’s needs? If you don’t know, you can probably find out by subscribing to their newsletter or feed.

That way, when you write to them, instead of sending the standard cookie-cutter email, you can add personalized information that lets them know that you have been to their site repeatedly, list specific issues they have stated before, and use this information to make it worth their while.

Which email would you answer? The one that is obviously a copy, personalized only with your email address? Or the one that states your name and shows that the other person has actually been to your site before?

So take a look at your site. Why should anyone link to you? What will they get out of the deal? Is your site a great resource? Do you have a higher Google PR? Do you do site reviews? Or maybe you’ll just use whatever text they ask for?

When you first start out, with no links back to your site, find other people in your parallel markets who need links too. You’re both in the same boat. Help each other.

Then as you see your traffic rising, you can start going after bigger and bigger fish. But again, make it worth their while.

Here are some ways in which you can make a link trade a little Read the rest of this entry »

Why use it?

Search engine marketing is helpful in a number of ways. The overriding goal is to increase the revenue by increasing the number of visitors to your web site. Additionally, the visitors must show a high conversion rate. In other words, the visitors who are directed to your web site should be those who are targeted. They look for a product on the internet, are directed to your web site and are convinced to purchase the product you offer. Although search engine spiders don’t read web pages–people do–it is still important to provide enough information in the text of your web page that searchers are directed to your page for the answers they seek.

How does it work?

Search engine marketing is both very simple and as complex as you want it to be. It is simple in the sense that if you use a variety of keywords–ones that the searcher is likely to enter in a query box on your web page, the search engine spider will rate those favorably and your page will be returned as a response. However, this doesn’t mean that just listing a lot of possible keywords on your page will make it rank higher than others selling the same product or service. This is where the complexity of the practice enters in. The web page must be readable and informative to the human reader as well.

Using tricks of the trade

You can take advantage of several tricks of the trade that are perfectly acceptable to the search engine robots who visit your web site in order to index it and provide page rankings. Search engine marketing, for example that includes the key word in the title or subtitle of your page is acceptable, in fact, encouraged. Take advantage of the images descriptions on your web page. This not only allows the visually Read the rest of this entry »

If you have just finished building your website and are discouraged by the lack of traffic, then you need to learn about SEO. SEO is simply making your website search engine friendly.

When a search engine user enters a search term into their favorite search engine, those search engines use a ranking system to return websites based on relevance and popularity of the site. The higher your site ranks in the search engines rankings, the more likely the searcher will click on the link and land on your site.

The key is to have your site in the top ten listings for your keywords. The trick to getting your site higher in the rankings is through the use of SEO. SEO is something that must be ongoing with your site. You can start by learning how the search engines compute their rankings.

Many people think that the major search engines have virtually every page on the internet indexed. The truth is that any given search engine has less than 20% of the internet in their index. some sites are not indexed because they are new or just have copies of other content on the internet. There may also be technical problems with your site like bad robot text, or broken links that prevent the search engines from crawling your site. There are literally hundreds of factors used by the search engines to rank you site and all are important.

So, if we presume that your site is not technically preventing the search engines from looking around, then there are some fairly easy ways to improve your ranking. Having unique content is one very important step in the process. No matter what your site is about there are ways to keep the content fresh and unique. By adding a blog any site can be updated regularly with content specific to your niche. Be creative and think of what makes your business unique and add that to your site, whether it is product information, customer testimonials, pictures etc.

Some new marketers think there are ways to shortcut the process, but don’t be tempted these techniques will backfire and hurt your site. Techniques like keyword spamming, hidden text, link spam, meta tag stuffing and more will all end up hurting your ranking at best, and at worst will get you banned from the search engines all together.

After building your unique content, gaining links to your site will help increasing your ranking. Again, there are right and wrong ways to build these links. Natural, one-way links to your site are the best way to build your ranking and traffic. Having high quality content may lead other webmasters to link to your site, however these may be difficult to gain in the beginning. Links that can help can come from writing and submitting articles on your niche, commenting on articles or blogs, and posting to public forums. All of these techniques will help you gain exposure and increase in the search engine rankings.

SEO does require some effort, but the benefits are well worth the effort. Most successful sites receive more than half of their traffic from search engines. If your site is designed to be SEO friendly, then that traffic will be highly targeted to your niche. You can try to trick the search engines into sending traffic to your site by using less ethical SEO practices, but the traffic may not be the quality that will come from doing it right.

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Rob Emmerson is a leading expert in SEO and has written extensivly on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers a free step-by-step SEO Course at http://www.theseosecretrevealed.com . In addition he writes a daily SEO Blog at http://www.robemmerson.com where he shares tips and tricks to improve your SEO.

Why use it?

Search engine marketing is helpful in a number of ways. The overriding goal is to increase the revenue by increasing the number of visitors to your web site. Additionally, the visitors must show a high conversion rate. In other words, the visitors who are directed to your web site should be those who are targeted. They look for a product on the internet, are directed to your web site and are convinced to purchase the product you offer. Although search engine spiders don’t read web pages–people do–it is still important to provide enough information in the text of your web page that searchers are directed to your page for the answers they seek.

How does it work?

Search engine marketing is both very simple and as complex as you want it to be. It is simple in the sense that if you use a variety of keywords–ones that the searcher is likely to enter in a query box on your web page, the search engine spider will rate those favorably and your page will be returned as a response. However, this doesn’t mean that just listing a lot of possible keywords on your page will make it rank higher than others selling the same product or service. This is where the complexity of the practice enters in. The web page must be readable and informative to the human reader as well.

Using tricks of the trade

You can take advantage of several tricks of the trade that are perfectly acceptable to the search engine robots who visit your web site in order to index it and provide page rankings. Search engine marketing, for example that includes the key word in the title or subtitle of your page is acceptable, in fact, encouraged. Take advantage of the images descriptions on your web page. This not only allows the visually Read the rest of this entry »