My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘search engine’

Many webmasters who have been following the discussions about Google’s dislike of paid links have been confused about what constitutes bad links and good links, in the eyes of the search engine companies. In this article, I will seek to answer many of the questions people have on this topic.

There are two kinds of links that you can pay to have made for you: rented or paid links, and permanent links.

Introduction To Paid Links, Or More Accurately Rented Links

With Rented links, you can generally make your purchase decision based on the PageRank of a page.

The downside with rented links is that Google has stated that they do not like links that are sold on the basis of PageRank, and they are trying to create systems to identify links rented for PageRank, for the purpose of discounting those links. While they may eventually be able to target and negate links developed by systems like Text-Link-Ads or TextLinkBrokers, they will never be able to completely identify and discount all links that are sold for the purposes of PageRank .

In the end, I suppose Google is not going to penalize the Source or Target websites for those links, but they will nullify the value of the individual links in the Google algorithms. Cutts suggested and implemented the “rel=nofollow” a while back as a tool webmasters could use for the purpose of identifying links for which the webmaster did not want to pass PageRank. The only thing that Google’s algorithm will actually do to links identified as rented or paid links is that it will treat those links as “rel=nofollow’s”. If Google succeeds in their quest, the webmaster buying the links will be throwing away his or her money, if they are buying placement on a webpage solely for the purpose of influencing PageRank.

The Story Of Permanent Links

The second kind of link is the permanent link. Permanent links come in many formats, and in most cases should generally be viewed as non-rental links. With rental links, you pay a fee for placement once a month, quarter or year.

Of course, the Yahoo directory is not viewed as a paid link by the Google engineers, because although you “pay” to get the link, Yahoo does not guarantee placement of your link in their directory. Instead, Yahoo says that we are paying them to “review our link.” This is why Google is not discounting links from the Yahoo directory. Those Yahoo links are nice to have, but they still do require a yearly review for commercial websites, which must be paid for on a yearly basis.

Permanent in all cases is in the eye of the beholder. Permanent as a rule in the Internet world means that you will not have to pay another fee later to keep that link on the page, where it will reside. In the context of links on the Internet, permanent actually means that the link will live at that location, until the webmaster who owns the website changes his or her website’s direction OR goes out of business.

In my experience, perhaps 10% of the website’s where we get links placed will go under within one year. Towards the end of the second year, webmasters will look at their Profit/Loss and make a determination whether their income level will justify shooting for a third year of operation. Another 20% will close their website at the end of the second year run. So, 30% will drop out of business, within their first two years. Of the remaining 70%, many of those websites will survive to the fifth year and beyond. I don’t know how long one will be able to count on a permanent link just yet, but links that I built for myself in 1999 continue to produce traffic for my websites today, and those links have sent me continuous traffic for years.

Permanent, One-Way Links

Many permanent one-way links can be acquired on pages that currently have PageRank on them. In those cases, it may simply be a matter of your link being added to a list of links already on someone’s web page.

However, any link created through a content development method, such as pay-per-post or article marketing, will be posted on a new page on the Internet. All new pages on the Internet begin life at PageRank Zero. It is like the birth of a baby. The baby begins small, but grows into a child, then a teen, and finally an adult. All article pages begin their lives at PageRank Zero, and most of those new pages will increase in PageRank as they age. Some web pages will never mature beyond PR1, but others can grow into pages that are as high as PR6 (at least that is the highest I have seen an article page to date).

If you trust Matt Cutts of Google, he has indicated that all new pages begin life at PageRank Zero and in the Supplemental Results. He also said that Supplementals are not the end of the road. Cutts stated that the only thing required to bring a web page out of the Supplemental Results is to have that web page gain PageRank. (For those curious why a page went from the Primary Results to Supplemental Results, the answer is that either Google began counting links differently OR the links that gave a web page PageRank no longer exist.)

Three Reasons Why Article Marketing Helps Link Building

My conclusion from this information, and I might be biased, is that the use of article marketing for link building is a positive in the Google algorithms.

* I conclude this because links developed through article marketing begin on pages that have a PR Zero. So, we are obviously not getting links placed on websites for the sole purpose of acquiring PageRank, not directly anyway. We are placing links for the sake of having links, but with good luck, many of those links will gain PageRank over the long haul.

* By the very nature of article marketing, we can ensure that the links we develop for our websites reside on web pages that are tightly focused and targeted to the content of our websites.

* Most websites that post articles do so through a process of moderation, meaning that all article placements have been human reviewed. That human review process at the other end of the transaction puts most article websites on par with Yahoo’s human-reviewed directory.

When we can get our keywords embedded into the link pointing to our websites, then that is always a much better deal. But, that outcome will be affected by the webmaster at the other end of the process. Each webmaster has his or her own rules for article placement, and some of those folks simply do not permit embedded keywords in our links, either in the body of the article or in the about the author information. A plain text link is better than no link at all, although we always strive to get embedded keywords in our links.

Final Thoughts

When you write a great article people will link to it, no matter where it may reside. So in time, the pages that house your article will gain PageRank.

As the article’s author, you will are in total control of the relevance of the web page linking to your website.

Just as you are in control of relevance, you are also in control of whether people will choose to reprint your article. Write a good article, and people will use it.

Web Directories Explained

By S. Housley

Web directories are an important component to search engine positioning. Directories come in all shapes and sizes, some are generic, while others are highly specialized. Directories, are defined as categorized topics or collections of information organized into a tree like structure where categories are used to define each groups association.

Large directories like Yahoo tend to have general themes and may charge for listings. While smaller niche directories like .finance-investing.com offer free listings and profit from advertising revenue or pay per click models like Google AdSense.

Being listed in a directory not only brings in targeted traffic, it provides a one-way link from a website with similar content. Directories are generally highly ranked in search engines, and are considered well respected resources, two traits that are desirable in link partners.

While smaller directories that focus on a specific niche might generate less traffic, the quality of the traffic from a niche site is usually highly targeted and will be superior to that generated from general search engines.

If you are selling fire alarms, traffic from yahoo will be less qualified than traffic from Alarm Tools, .alarm-tools.net . Most visitors to Alarm Tools will have a genuine interest in alarms and alerting systems. The nature of highly specialized directories result in visitors who have a serious interest in the directories theme, or a at the very least an interest in a theme related to the directory.

As a result, web publishers need to make a conscience effort not to ignore the value of directory listings. Regardless of their size, a related niche directory listing can be extremely valuable.

Many directories offer sponsorship opportunities. Vendors can optionally purchase sponsorship to increased their exposure with a bold listing or top category listings.

Determining a Directories Value

It is difficult to assess the value of directory listing, as there is an obvious advantage to a listing of a closely related theme directory that is difficult to measure and quantify. In general, webmasters can use common web guidelines to determine the popularity of a directory and assess the directory link’s value.

To assess the value of a web directory, consider the PageRank of the webpage where the link placement of your site will occur. The PageRank is indicative of how important Google may find a specific page. Another reliable third party measuring tool is Alexa. The Alexa ranking provides insight into how popular a website is. In general, a link from a web page containing a PageRank of 5 or higher is considered very good. A link from a site in Alexa’s top 100,000 is also generally very desirable.

Compare the following two directories’ Monitoring Tools .monitoring-tools.net and RSS Specifications .rss-specifications.com . Monitoring Tools’ main page has a PageRank of 5 but most internal pages that contain links have low page ranks and the overall Alexa ranking of the site is over 650,000. While RSS Specification’s claims a main Google PageRank of 6 and subpages all contain a minimum of a 5 for PageRank, the overall site is ranked 32,000. Clearly if you are in the syndication business, RSS Specification’s would be a very desirable link partner, while you would have to weigh the cost benefit and position of a link from Monitoring Tools.

To determine a sites PageRank without downloading the Google Toolbar, use the following online tool from RustyBrick .rustybrick.com/pagerank-prediction.php . A website’s Alexa ranking can be found by entering the URL into Alexa .alexa.com .

It is recommended that PageRank and Alexa ranking be only used as a guide when determining a directories reputation. It is important not to get too caught up in either Google PageRank or Alexa Ranking as webmasters can use “tricks” to artificially inflate their numbers.

The bottom line, links from directories that are small but niche, can provide quality web traffic.

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Putting up a business would of course require a lot of things, to get straight to the point, you need a capital. To make money requires money as well. But of course, with the versatility the Internet offers, there are many ways you could find that could help optimize the potential of your site or business in generating traffic without spending tons of money.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don’t have the resources that others have to produce more traffic for your site. Well, you don’t have to spend a cent; all you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.

How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent? Now it’s a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods. Because it is possible, you don’t need to speed a single cent, it may take time, to say honestly, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. You get better chances by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I’m about to tell you.

Take advantage of online forums and online communities. The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. Show them what you are made of and WOW! them with your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

You can also make use of newsletters. Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.

Another great idea is trading links with other sites. You don’t have to spend a cent. All you have to do is reach an agreement with another webmaster. With exchanging links, the efforts both sites do will benefit both sites. Every traffic that goes to the site could potentially click on the link of your site and visit your site as well. This works well especially when both sites feature the same niche.

Write articles that could pique the attention of people that have interest in your product. Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

Many sites offer free submission and posting of your articles. When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write good content for your site. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.

Generally, Internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.

All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the methods depicted here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.

If you’re doing any type of business on the internet than search engines like Google and Yahoo! could play a large role in the success or failure of your business. Even though most internet user have experience using search engines, many don’t know how the engines work.

For website owners it is important to understand how, at least at a high level, search engines work so they can take advantage of the website traffic that only search engines can deliver.

Search Engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various Search Engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

- They search the Internet or select pieces of the Internet based on important words,

- They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them, and

- They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early Search Engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top Search Engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Before a Search Engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a Search Engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called web crawling.

In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a Search Engine’s spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

To increase the likelyhood that the spiders find your website make sure you are listed on high ranked websites like Merchant Circle. You can create a free business page and blog that will not only increase your chances of being found but also be another place for potential visitors to find about about your website.

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages, the Search Engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users:

- The information stored with the data, and

- The method by which the information is indexed.

In the simplest case, a Search Engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. A Search Engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the META tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial Search Engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different Search Engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders.

You can get a customized Page Critic Analysis Report from Webs 4 Small Business that tells you how YOUR webpages should be set up to make sure give the search engines what they are looking for when they review your page.

An index has a single purpose: it allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word.

The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table’s effectiveness.

When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the Search Engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.

Not sure what keywords you should use? Picking the right, or wrong ones, can make or break your chances at online success. Consider getting a customized Key Word Report from Webs 4 Small Business that tells you which keywords you should and should not consider for your site. These keywords are specific to YOUR website not a generic list of keywords.

So, why are search engines important to business website owners? Simple. You need traffic and Search Engines have lots of it. And, their purpose is to drive traffic to sites that they think match their visitors’ needs.

The way to get a portion of that traffic, is to optimize your website (you’ve likely heard of Search Engine Optimzaiton or SEO). That way when a someone searches for a keyword that is relevant to your website, the search engines includes a link to your website in the search results. That puts traffic and potential visitors just a click away from you website.

If your business is focused on a very particular, small market, you are going to love search engines. The more focused you are, the easier it is to win on the engines.

Search Engines and Small Markets

Once you have identified a small market and built a site, you need to start thinking about Internet marketing. Search engines present the best marketing platform on a dollar for dollar basis. There are two specific ways to go about the process.

Pay-per-click advertising on search engines is a great way to immediately reach your target audience. Google Adwords and Overture represent the two best ppc platforms. Place ads using these two platforms and the ads will appear on the search results for Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and a host of other search engines.

The second platform for getting in front of your market on the search engines is search engine optimization, better known as seo. The goal in seo is to identify the keyword phrases your prospects are using to find things. You then try to get your site ranked in the top three or four positions when the relevant search engines return results for any of the searches. The upside of seo is you don’t pay for advertising and rankings tend to stay high once you achieve them. The downside is it can take a couple of months before you appear high in MSN rankings and up to a year or longer on Google.

Regardless of the approach you take on the search engines, your focus on a small market gives you a huge advantage. By focusing on a lucrative, defined area of the Internet, you have limited the number of competitors you must take on. It is far easier and cheaper to market to “San Diego Mortgage Loans” than going after “Mortgage Loans.” The first phrase has a limited number of competitors while the second phrase is contested by huge sites with lots of advertising dollars. To this end, make sure you stick to your area when pursuing your marketing. If you offer services in a location, only advertise for keywords incorporating that location. Having a person three states over call you is just a waste of time.

Advertising for small, defined markets on the search engines is inexpensive compared to general markets. It is also easier and quicker to get seo listings.

With its global audience, the Internet provides a unique revenue generation platform with search engines. This is where your business will be made or thrown on the refuse pile.

Marketing on Search Engines &ndash Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Buck

Search engines are similar to the streets of a major city. Some search engines represent the major avenues where people congregate while others are more similar to back alleys where almost nobody goes or at least not the kind of people you want to meet in…a dark alley.

Cutting to the chase, your traffic generation efforts should focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines control the vast majority of traffic on the Internet. Not only do lots of people uses them to find things, the big three provide search results to many other search engines as well. For instance, Google supplies ads and search results for AOL. Dogpile compiles the various search results from the big three in its listings. Alta Vista uses Yahoo search results. This scenario is so expansive that the big three search engines are simply the only way to go. This means you need to focus on them to the exclusion of others.

When you focus on these sites, two approaches can be taken &ndash pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Other forms of search engine marketing, such as banner ads, produce poor results and should be avoided. Let’s take a closer look at the big two.

Pay-per-click advertising [ppc] is platform whereby you pay for placement on a search engine. The two major ppc platforms are Overture and Google Adwords. Overture places ads on the Yahoo and MSN search engines. Google Adwords places ads on Google and AOL search results. Both platforms place ads on other search engines and sites, so you will see your listings appearing everywhere.

The advantage of PPC advertising is you get immediate traffic for your site. You can use the traffic to test the content on the site and whether visitors convert into paying customers. The downside is you are paying for traffic, which means you must pay close attention to your return on investment. All and all, PPC advertising should be used at the outset of a marketing campaign while you wait for optimized pages to get natural rankings.

Search engine optimization [seo] is by far the most effective way to go on the big three. Once you obtain top three rankings for a keyword, you receive more traffic than you would from ppc and it is all free! This does wonders for your profitability. If you can figure out seo on your own, your cost of marketing should eventually become your time and a few dollars a month for tools. This results in obscenely high profits margins. If you prefer to use a seo firm, your costs are going to go up significantly. Once the free traffic starts rolling in, however, you should get an excellent return on investment.

The downside to seo is it takes a lot of time and work. You can expect to wait up to a year for top Google rankings, although Yahoo and MSN rankings will appear much sooner. In light of this waiting period, PPC advertising is a must at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign.

Internet marketing is a fairly simple game. Focus on the big three search engines with a combination of ppc and seo efforts. Stick to these two and you should see good results.

If you are not a full-fledged geek, AKA, programmer this is new tool is not for you!

A Silicon Valley startup launched a search engine in March that will allow developers to search for code and source code. Sorry Martha, (Steward that is) I’m afraid your wonderful “Docorating the Drive with Pink Lillies” will not appear in the search engine result on this site.

The name of the engine is Krugle, and it will provide simple search for retrieving information related to source code – as well as other techy info – all from an easy to use, un-cluttered GUI.

It is surely possible to use Google for programmers to find source code, but this can be a tricky task.

The new engine functions by crawling, indexing, and parsing its information from open source directories and archives. It also pulls its results from Email lists, blogs and websites. Kruggle says the site will run using open source and private technology. For open source, Apache Software called “Nutch and Lucine” is used. The parsing is done using a generator called “Another Tool for Language Recognition.”

It is similar to two other search tools called Koders and another Codefetch. What should be different with Kruggle is it will permit programmers and developers to notate the results they find, make bookmarks, and save their results in their own space (incidently, in early May, Google announced a similar feature that allowed users to save results in their own workspace).

Using the workspace gives coders exact URLs in order to share their results with others. Users will also be able to separate coding pieces to see the differences between various languages. For example, it may be that an ASP programmer could search for “ASP content management system”.

Webmasters often ask if paid directory submissions worth the money? Of course the answer depends on the directory and the money.

There are two things you can get from a directory: link popularity and traffic. I don’t know of any directories that really deliver much traffic. Listings in Dmoz, and the Yahoo directory don’t even get me much traffic. Still if you’re buying a permanent listing, getting a few visits a year for 20 years isn’t so bad. There’s little doubt that this is targeted traffic.

Then you want backlinks or link popularity. This depends on the directory and the category where your listing will be placed. The structure of the directory categories will determine if your site will get a top-level listing (one or two clicks away from the homepage) or a deep listing (3 or more clicks removed from the homepage). Then it depends on the number of links on that page. Many paid inclusion directories are selling everypage links, but these are a serious link popularity drain.

So the two main problems with web directories are where your listing will be placed and how much link popularity gets passed on to your site. My solution is to submit to 300 free non-reciprocal directories (with new sites I do 100 submissions a week for three weeks) and choose several paid directories that will place my new site in a top-level category or on a page that has only a few links.

A recent case study revealed that these 300 free directory submissions, combined with one listing in a top-level category of jtrotta.com web directory and one homepage link from a related site produced, in just over a month, over 130 backlinks (according to Yahoo) and led to my site being fully indexed by Google. Search engine traffic has been good, due to high rankings in Google and MSN search results. All this would cost the average webmaster 30.00 for the 300 directory submissions, 69.90 for the top-level jtrotta.com listing, and 45.00/month for the homepage link. The best part is that it required so little of my time.

The importance of articles in the success of today’s internet based companies is immeasurable. They are the life blood of product promotion and drive traffic to commercial web sites. Articles are key elements in making web sites produce profits. And business owners must include them in their marketing campaigns in order to create credibility for themselves and their product or service.

Submitting articles for publication creates links to your web site resulting in higher ranking on the search engine result pages. The higher a site ranks the bigger slice of the traffic flow pie they receive. With increase traffic to your web site comes more profit and potential for producing other income streams as well.

It is not enough to just stuff your site with articles; there are other elements to be considered as well. You need these additional elements to obtain the maximum benefit articles can provide. A well written article will peak the interest of site visitors and keep them coming back for more. These added elements can also prompt visitors to recommend your site to others.

Here are four tips to help you spice up your articles to produce more traffic that will result in increased attention to your site.

1. Keywords and Keyword Phrases.

An article must be centered on keywords and keyword phrases. Visitors to your site are looking for something specific. Their at your site because they may have been sent there via a search engine as a result of typing in a keyword or phrase they were looking for (e.g. Toyota Camry, Tax Lawyer etc).

You need content on your web site that has the keywords that are related to what visitor’s are searching for. For example, if you maintain an auto parts site, you must have the auto parts listed in your article. Look for tools on the internet that can help you determine what keywords and keyword phrases are mostly sought after. You can use these tools to determine what keywords to use and write about.

2. Keyword Density

You must use the keywords and keyword phrases you choose throughout your web site content. Keyword density is important for search engines to “feel” their way to your site. Web site content should have at least ten to fifteen percent keyword density for search engines to rank them high in their results.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used in an article. The number varies depending on the number of words used in an article. An effective article must have a keyword density that is not too high or too low. With a very high density, the essence of the article is lost and may turn off a reader as well as search engines. It comes off as overeager, and a low number may be ignored by the search engines.

3. Good Article Content

Like what is stated above, you cannot just riddle an article with keywords. They must also be regarded as good reading material. Articles must be able to entertain people as well as provide good information and help for their needs. Articles should be written well with correct spelling and good grammar. If you want people to trust you, make sure your writing is well thought out.

People respond well to figures, facts and statistics. Try to get great information and as many facts as you can. A good and well written article will boost your reputation as an expert in your chosen field or topic. As more people believe in you. They will be able to trust you and your products.

4. Linking Articles

Here’s another important thing to remember. If you are going to submit articles to e-zines and/or contribute your articles to newsletters and other sites, DON’T ever forget to include a link to your site. A little resource box with a brief description about you and your site should always be placed right after the articles you submit. If people like your articles, they will most likely click on the link directing them to your site.