Archive for March, 2006

How link popularity can help your search engine rankings

If you have optimized your web page for high search engine rankings and it still doesn’t get better listings, it is very likely that your web site has low link popularity.

Link popularity is a very important factor for all major search engines. If your web site doesn’t have good link popularity, it is very difficult to get good search engine rankings.

Note that link popularity alone is not enough. The content of your web site is also important so that search engines know what your web site is about.

A combination of optimized pages and high link popularity will bring your web site to the top of the search engine results.

What exactly is link popularity?

Link popularity refers to the total number of links that a search engine has found for your web page. The more web sites link to your web page, the higher the link popularity of your page. High link popularity contributes to a high search engine ranking.

The idea behind the link popularity concept is simple. The more other web sites link to your web site, the more important your site must be. Other sites wouldn’t link to your site if there wasn’t something interesting on your site or if your web site didn’t contain any special content.

It’s nearly impossible to manipulate link popularity. Previous ranking algorithms that took META keywords or similar factors into account have been quickly abused to mislead the search engines. On the other side, it’s very difficult to manipulate the number of links that point to a site.

That’s why link popularity is now one of the most important factors for search engines when they rank a web page.

However, you cannot get high link popularity by submitting your web site to thousands of FFA (free for all) link pages. Not all links are considered equal by the search engines. It does matter who links to you and how they link to you.

Not all links are considered equal

The more web sites link to your web site, the higher your link popularity. However, not all links are equal. Some links count more than others. Links from important web sites have a greater effect on your link popularity and your search engine rankings.

A link from www.Yahoo.com to your web site has more weight than a link from a small private web page. A link from a web site with high link popularity is better than a link from an unknown web site.

It’s also important that the web site that’s linking to you has a similar topic as your web site. Imagine that you sell shoes on your web site. A link from another web site that is all about shoes will count much more than a link from a web site that links to all kind of web sites.

Finally, it’s important how the link to your site looks like. For example, one of your important keywords might be “brown leather shoes”.

The link

Brown leather shoes

leads to much better search engine rankings for the keyword “brown leather shoes” than the following link

Smith and Partners

By the way, many people think that they can increase their link popularity by submitting their web site address to FFA (free for all) link pages and link farms (Web sites that link to all kind of web sites). This doesn’t work.

More and more search engines recognize FFA pages and link farms and choose to ignore these pages. Usually, submissions to FFA pages are a waste of time that only results in many spam email messages.

In addition, you should avoid services that promise you 2000 links to your site within a week or so. If they link to you at all, these 2000 links are of poor quality or they don’t have a similar topic as your web site.

Use common sense. Offers that sound too good to be true probably aren’t true.

Summary:

try to get links from important web sites
try to get link texts that contain your important keywords
don’t use FFA or link farm pages
don’t use services that promise lots of links within days
focus on quality links, not on quantity

How to find good potential link partners

As explained above, it’s important who links to your site. web sites that have a similar topic as your site are more important than web sites with different topics.

In addition, if you can convince web sites with a similar topic to link to your site, you’ll also get targeted traffic from these sites.

People who visit your topic partner sites are usually interested in what you have to offer. They are more likely to come to your site and to buy something. It’s the quality of the traffic that counts, not the quantity.

But how do you find good potential links partners? There are several ways:
User IBP’s Link Popularity Improver to find web sites that could trade links with you.

Use ARELIS to find out who links to your competitors and contact these sites to get links from them.

ARELIS is a professional link popularity tool that helps you to find good potential link partners, to manage them, qo quickly build link pages and more. ARELIS also includes very useful tutorials that help you to write effective link exchange email messages that increase your repsonse rate. Give it a try.

Add comment March 14th, 2006

How to rank well with Flash sites

Flash movies are a popular way to make web sites more compelling. They are useful if you want to impress your web site visitors or if you offer web design services.

Unfortunately, if you use Flash movies, or if you even design your complete web site based on the Flash technology, your odds of getting listed in the search engines are greatly reduced.

Search engines can only “see” pure text. They are not able to recognize text on an image or text that appears as a graphic in a Flash movie.

Google advises on its webmaster guidelines page: “If fancy features such as […] Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.”.

So how can you achieve high search engine rankings in spite of Flash contents?

First of all, you should re-consider using Flash on your web site. Keep in mind that many visitors still use slow dial-up connections to access web pages. They don’t like to wait 1-2 minutes only to see your company logo fancy animated. Your Flash movies must carry invaluable information to the visitors, otherwise they will be disappointed.

Entry pages that only show your company logo are becoming more and more annoying to users. Using web pages like company brochures only show that your company didn’t get the whole Internet idea.

Keep in mind that not everyone has installed the Flash player. Always add a link to a web page that contains the same important information as found in the Flash movie in plain text.

For these reasons, not using Flash or building a duplicate site without Flash are the easiest ways to make sure that your web site visitors and the search engines can access your web site.

If you really must use Flash on your web site, the following tips can help you getting your Flash contents indexed by the search engines:

Provide links to alternate pages that contain a lot of text and some keywords that the search engines can index.

Place some text above and below your Flash movie that contain your keywords. Along with your title and maybe your meta tags, this gives the search engines some contents to index.

If you embed the Flash movie in your HTML code, use your most important keywords in the movie filename using the HTML tags

and

attribute to include some text that is displayed while the Flash movie is being loaded. In addition, you can use the

attribute to include a keyword-rich movie title.

Use the tag to provide text for web browsers which don&#8217;t support the Flash plugin. Use it to describe the contents of the Flash movie as search engines can index that description.</p> <p>You may want make your Flash movie transparent and place it &#8220;over&#8221; your web page using CSS layers. However, some search engines might consider this spamming.</p> <p>Some search engines offer pay for inclusion programs that guarantee the inclusion of your web page regardless of the contents. Note that these search engines still need text to index.</p> <p>You could provide an alternative, &#8220;pure text&#8221; web page solely to search engine crawler programs. However, this technique is called &#8220;cloaking&#8221; and search engines don&#8217;t like it (click here for details).</p> <p>Link from other pages of your web site to your Flash page with a keyword-rich link text.</p> <p>Use the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK to convert a Flash file&#8217;s text and links into HTML for search engine indexing.<br /> Macromedia, the developers of the Flash technology, have recognized the difficulties in getting Flash contents indexed. For this reason, they have developed an accessibility kit that helps you to embed pure text and links in the movie file.</p> <p>Macromedia hopes that search engines will learn over time to read the embedded text.</p> <p>Flash is a trade mark of Macromedia Corp. You can find out more about Flash here. This web site gives useful advice for making user-friendly Flash sites.</p> <blockquote></blockquote> <p>

Add comment March 14th, 2006

How to choose the right web page title

The title of a web page is one of the most important elements. Good web page titles can remarkably increase the effectiveness of your web site.

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the

and

tag in the HTML code of a web page. If you write the right text between these tags, your web site can get more targeted visitors.

Why are web page titles so important for your web site success?

The titles of your web pages are important for search engines

To many search engine spiders the title of a web page is more important than other web page elements. If your web page title contains your most important keywords, it’s likely that the web page will have a good search engine ranking for these keywords.

The titles of your web pages are important for web surfers

The title of your web site is the first thing web surfers will see from your web site. Many search engines display the title of a web page as the main link to a web site in the search engine result pages.

In addition, the web page title is used when a web surfers bookmarks your web site.
While most search engines don’t allow you to influence the description of your web site, the title of your web site is often listed without any changes.

What does this mean to you?

It’s important that your web pages have compelling titles that are compelling to web surfers and that contain your most important keywords.

For example, if you have a sports shoe shop in London, don’t use this title tag:

Welcome to Smith & Son
People probably won’t click on that link because they don’t know who you are. That web page title doesn’t look very attractive to the average surfer. Better use this title:

Buy sneakers and sports shoes at competitive prices in our shop in London. Nike, Adidas, Reebok and all other major sports shoe brands.
Why is the second title better than the first one?

The second title has many advantages over the first title.

The second title contains keywords that are important for a sports shoe business: sports shoes, sports shoe, sneakers and several brand names.

The inclusion of these words in the title increase the change of good search engine rankings for these keywords.

The second title informs web surfers about the purpose of the web site and it gives them a reason to click: Buy sneakers and sports shoes at competitive prices.

The second title includes geographical information: …in our shop in London. People who live in Chicago are probably not interested in a shop that’s based in London.

The inclusion of “London” in the web page title allows people to quickly find out if it’s worth to visit the web site. In addition, it’s more likely that the web site will be found for a search term such as “shoe shop London”.

Good web page titles can help you to increase your search engine rankings and to get more people to click on your link.

To find the perfect title for high rankings on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines, use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer.

Add comment March 14th, 2006

How often should you submit your web site?

You’ve probably seen them on the web and you’ve probably received many spam email messages from them: services that promise you to submit your web site to thousands of search engines and that tell you that your web site will get high search engine rankings if you just submit your web site often enough.

The frequency of your search engine submission is not important

When you submit your web site URL to a search engines, you basically ask the search engine spiders to visit your web site and to evaluate it. If the search engine spiders cannot find anything useful on your site, they won’t list your web site. It doesn’t make sense to submit your web site again and again if it isn’t search engine ready.

Search engines must be able to find out what your web site is all about. They need to find text and links on your web pages and they also need to find the keywords for which you want to have high rankings on your web pages.

Submitting alone doesn’t guarantee visitors

Submitting your web site to search engines is important, but it is not the most important step in your search engine marketing campaign.

It’s much more important that your web pages are optimized for search engines. Many web sites are designed in a way that prevents them from showing up in search engines.

If your web pages are not search engine ready, it’s pointless to submit them. If the search engines index your web site at all, it will be listed on position 17,352 or worse. With a listing on that position, you won’t get any visitors.

The key to successful search engine submission

Before submitting your web pages to search engines, you must make sure that they are optimized for your important keywords and for the special search engine you target.

If your web pages are prepared for a special search engine and for a special keyword then it’s much more likely that your web site will receive high rankings.

Make sure that your web pages contain enough text and that search engine spiders can find the pages of your web site trough normal text links. Don’t use web site intros and don’t use too many Flash elements on your web site. It is extra work to optimize your web pages for search engines but it is well worth the effort.

Professional search engine submission takes some time

Don’t fall for services that promise you to submit your web site to thousands of search engines. It will only result in thousands of spam messages. Invest some time in optimizing your web pages before you submit them and then submit your site to important search engines. You’ll get much better search engine rankings

Add comment March 14th, 2006

Can SEO companies guarantee rankings?

Some SEO (search engine optimization) companies guarantee that you get a special search engine position if you let them do the work for you. Actually, this is not possible. No company can guarantee search engine listings.

If a company makes such promises, take a closer look at the guarantee. The catch is often that the company selects the search terms. You’ll be listed for obscure search terms that nobody searches for. If you have a unique company name or a unique product name, it’s relatively easy to get high search engine rankings for that term.

Before paying a company to get high search engine rankings for you, try it yourself with IBP. You’ll find out that you can get high search engine rankings for yourself.

The only way to get high search engine rankings and staying there is good web page content any playing by the rules.

Add comment March 14th, 2006

Frames and search engines

It’s very difficult to get a good rankings on search engines if your web site uses frames.

The problem is that search engines do not index framed web sites well. Actually, the search engines do such a poor job of indexing frames that we recommend rebuilding your web site without them. For some search engines, rebuilding your site without frames is the only way to get a good ranking.

If you must use frames on your Web site for some reason, make sure you use the NoFrames tag so that search engines can find some text to index. The NoFrames tag is a tag specifically for search engines that cannot read the actual pages in your frame set.

Some search engines will be able to index the text you enter in the NoFrames tag. The contents you enter there should be text that is related to your site. It should contain your most important keyword phrases, but should remain readable to your Web site visitors.

You should place the NoFrames tag just before the tag in your frameset, for example:





<br /> <body></p> <h1>All about fishing equipment</h1> <p>If you&#8217;re looking for fishing equipment, you&#8217;ll find it<br /> here. We offer rods, reels, lines, flies, waders, vests<br /> and apparel, tubes and boats and more.</p> <p><a href="this.html">More about fishing equipment</a> </p> <p></body><br />

An easy way to do this is to create a new not framed web page for your site that describes your products and services. Often the content can be taken directly from one of your existing framed pages.

Once you’ve created the new page, view the HTML source of the page and copy everything from within the and tags. Then paste the new content within the and tags found within the NoFrames tags of your frameset.

Note that the text between NoFrames tags in our example contains a link to the main frame set page. That way, Web surfers with older browsers that don’t support frames will also be able to visit the page.

Don’t use a list of keywords within the NoFrames tags and don’t try to overuse this tag because the search engines might penalize your web site for that.

Even if you use the NoFrames tag, it’s still difficult to get a good ranking for a web site that uses frames.

If at all possible, avoid frames on your site.

Add comment March 14th, 2006

Filter words and stop words

Google and other big search engines ignore common words such as ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘where’, as well as certain single digits and single letters. These words are called “filter words”. They are ignored because they tend to slow down a search without improving the results.

Of course, every search engine has its own list of filter words. We’ve found out that the following words seem to be ignored by most search engines:

a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, i, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with

What does this mean to your site?

Search engines consider keywords in the title, in the body text and in link texts of a web page as an important ranking criteria.

Be careful when you choose your keywords for the title and the rest of your web page. If your web page title contains a list of filter words you won’t get any results. You might also dilute the effectiveness of your other keywords if you include too many filter words in the title.

Many search engines recommend limiting the number of letters in the title and in the meta tags. If your web page title or the meta tags contain too many filter words, you might reach the character limit before your important keywords begin.

Some words can get you banned on search engines

While filter words might dilute the effectiveness of your other keywords, some words might get your web page banned on search engines. These words are called stop words.

Adult words and phrases that contain sexual content are the most common stop words. However, some search engines build custom stop word lists to penalize web sites that use “keyword stuffing”. Some sites use the same keyword over and over on their pages to get a high rank for that keyword on search engines, even if it is not related to their content.

Of course, search engines try to find those sites and they penalize web pages that use keyword stuffing. Unfortunately, some sites are penalized although their webmasters didn’t try to spam the search engines just because they use a keyword too many times.

That’s why keyword analysis and the right keyword density is very important for a successful web site. If the keyword density is too low, you won’t get a good ranking, if it’s too high, your site might get accused of keyword stuffing.

Summary

Use your most important keywords at the beginning of the title, meta tags, link texts and body text.

Avoid using filter words to increase the effectiveness of your keywords.

Make sure that your web pages have the right keyword density and don’t contain stop words.
The right keyword mix on your web pages will help you to improve your ranking on all important search engines. To find the perfect keyword density for your web site, use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer.

Add comment March 14th, 2006

Ethical search engine optimization

Some search engine optimization companies and software developers use unethical tricks and techniques to artificially boost the search engine rankings of a web site. This dilutes the quality of search results and the accuracy of search results becomes questionable.

For this reason, the search engines are continuously trying to trace out the spam techniques which webmasters might be using and penalize or ban them.

They continue to reconstruct their algorithms to prevent spammers from flooding the results page with irrelevant or low quality content.

If you use a web site promotion tool that uses these unethical tricks and techniques, you’ll put your web business at severe risk.

Axandra tools use only ethical SEO methods.

Our products use only ethical search engine optimization methods. They use only techniques that produce lasting results and that don’t offend search engines.

Search engines consider the following search engine optimization techniques as SPAM. For that reason, Axandra products DO NOT use or promote them:

automatically generated doorway pages
cloaking and false redirects
keyword stuffing
hidden text or hidden links
pages loaded with irrelevant words
duplicated content on multiple pages
misspelling of well-known web sites
unrelated and centralized link farms
other methods that try to trick search engines
You might get short term results with these techniques but it’s very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you use one of these techniques. You’ll put your web business at severe risk if you use one of these methods.

Axandra web site promotion tools use only ethical search engine optimization techniques that produce lasting results.

Ethical search engine optimization is about everyone winning

Ethical search engine optimization leads to a symbiotic relationship:

Search engines: They win as they are provided with pages that are easy to understand and that contain the quality information that their visitors search for.

Searchers: They win as they are getting what they ask for from the search engines. They search for “green widgets” and get a page about green widgets.

Web site owners: They win as they are getting quality visitors who are interested in what their web site has to offer.
IBP helps you to build web sites that are beneficial to web surfers, web site owners and search engines.

Add comment March 14th, 2006

Pemerintah Pelajari Cara Turunkan Tarif Broadband

Jakarta, Pemerintah berjanji akan menggelar studi demi menurunkan tarif internet broadband. Jika perlu, pemerintah siap telurkan kebijakan revolusioner.

Sofyan Djalil, Menteri Komunikasi dan Informatika, mengaku pihaknya sadar bahwa tarif internet di Indonesia masih mahal dibandingkan negara lain. “Broadband saja 45 kali lebih mahal dibanding negara lain. Untuk itu, kita akan berusaha mengurangi regulasi yang sifatnya monopolistik,” ujarnya kepada wartawan pada acara IndoWireless Exhibition 2006 di Jakarta Convention Center, Jakarta, Selasa (14/03/2006).

“Intinya regulasi kita harus equal level playing field. Pokoknya yang pro konsumen,” Sofyan menambahkan.

Apakah ini berarti pemerintah akan membuka izin pemain baru demi menumbuhkan kompetisi? “Kita akan melakukan studi tentang bagaimana caranya menurunkan biaya broadband. Kalau kesimpulan studi perlu izin baru, akan kita berikan. Terutama untuk komunikasi internasional,” ujarnya.

“Jadi kita memang sudah sadar. Biaya broadband di Indonesia masih mahal, padahal semua punya fibre optic. Tapi mereka itu (pemilik serat optik-red) keberatan, gak mau nurunin harga. Oleh sebab itu, kita akan ciptakan environment regulasi yang kompetitif,” Sofyan berusaha menjelaskan.

Namun, Sofyan mengatakan, jika tarif broadband sudah bisa turun pemerintah tak akan menelurkan regulasi baru. “Kemungkinan policy-nya revolusioner. Jika perlu izin baru, kita beri kebijakan yang revolusioner,” ujarnya. “Dalam dua bulan ini nanti kita umumkan lagi,” ia berjanji.

Menurut Sofyan studi itu akan mempelajari mahalnya broadband di Indonesia dan apa yang bisa dilakukan untuk menurunkannya. Selain itu, studi tersebut juga akan menggarap soal akses ke pengguna akhir (last mile). (wsh)(wsh)

Add comment March 14th, 2006

Laptop, Bawaan Wajib Putri Indonesia

Jakarta, Nadine Chandrawinata. Wanita keturunan Jerman ini terpilih sebagai Puteri Indonesia masa bakti 2005-2006. Dalam menjalankan tugasnya, selain mahkota dan selempang puteri, Nadine juga merasa wajib membawa laptop.

Laptop, tutur Nadine, adalah barang yang sangat membantunya di setiap perjalanan dinas Puteri Indonesia. Salah satunya adalah untuk mencari informasi seputar daerah yang akan dikunjungi.

“Walaupun hobi saya travelling, tapi saya jarang ke luar negeri. Maka kalau saya ditugaskan ke satu negara yang saya belum familiar, saya tinggal buka laptop dan connect internet,” ujar Nadine beberapa waktu lalu.

Jika akan menghadiri sebuah acara dan ada materi yang masih belum jelas, Nadine lagi-lagi mengandalkan laptopnya. “Saya lumayan bergantung sama laptop ini,” tambahnya lagi.

Mei mendatang, Nadine akan dikirim ke Chili untuk mengikuti kompetisi Miss Universe 2006. Menurut Nadine, ia buta sama sekali soal negara tersebut. “Saya akan browsing-browsing. Cari tahu di sana seperti apa. Soalnya saya memang belum pernah ke sana dan sama sekali ngga tahu Chili tuh seperti apa,” ujarnya. (nks)(nks)

Add comment March 13th, 2006

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