Cost Effective SEO Methods

The very first SEO method is typically known as social media submission which is mainly concerned with your site ranking on major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo persistently. All you have to do is to just find most favorable and popular social media sites so as to get higher search engine ranking and quality of traffic to your site efficiently. Second most exemplary search engine optimization method is called as blogs commenting without which site ranking is null and void at all. This way, professional bloggers would definitely need to enhance their writing skills on the dot so that they may be able to leave highly unique and competitive blog comments on different websites and forums easily. Similarly blog posting becomes mandatory for link builders right away.

Next most staggering link building technique is called as directory submission which plays a vital role in improved website traffic on the dot. Then forum posting is something a technique without which Off-Page Optimization is impossible at all. Besides try to use search engine optimized content as much as you can for the reason that it is the backbone in your site relevancy on the Google without any doubt. That is why article marketing becomes mandatory for professional search engine optimization experts right away. On the other side, do not overlook the worth of On Page Optimization techniques at all because they are the major factors in yours website visibility, exposure, and awareness on the search engines. So do not hesitate to use Meta tags, site maps, site navigation, title optimization, and image optimization techniques at all if you want to get improved results for your site quickly.



Madison Andrew is the director of Part Time Jobs. He has 20 years of experience in the marketing and E-commerce industries and has been helping jobless and startup.

Directory Submission




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Madison_Andrew

Increasing Business Positioning Online Via Effective SEO Methods

Have you ever heard the quote, "You can't do today's job with yesterday's methods and be in business tomorrow." This is the superlative for today's business economy. Nowadays, even if companies world-wide are cutting costs, they are still looking for creative, high-impact immerging and reliable marketing strategies. When it comes to making the most of marketing dollars, the rules of the marketing game have changed forever. Regardless of whether you are a corporate conglomerate or a small business that's just getting started-the internet cannot be ignored as a powerful resource and marketing tool.

In fact, according to a recent survey about marketing budgets for 2009 and 2010, conducted by btobonline.com, a magazine for marketing strategist published by Crain communications Inc, almost 43% of the 500 companies that participated said that their budgets in 2009 went down by a significant margin over this year. However, despite the decreases, 65% said that their online marketing budget was increasing this year, which shows the shift of marketing budgets from the more traditional methods over to an online medium.

"We are seeing an ongoing secular shift from traditional to online media, as marketers recognize that ad dollars invested in interactive media are effective at influencing consumers and delivering measurable results," said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. "In this uncertain economy, where marketers know they need to do more with less, interactive advertising provides the tools for them to build deep, engaging relationships with consumers-the experience marketers' gain from this will deliver dividends, especially after the economy turns around."

However, it is more than just online advertising that drives traffic to a site or makes up an online marketing campaign. Troy Bohlke states that things have evolved. "Now a marketing campaign doesn't just focus on advertising. You have to focus in search engines, social marketing, blogging, article marketing, link connections, etc.," Bohlke says. "All of these play a vital role in determining a marketing campaigns' effectiveness."

While the answer may vary slightly depending upon the size of the ad budget, the Forbes 2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey says marketers of all sizes should start with search engine optimization (SEO). According to this survey, 48% percent of marketers said that SEO was the best method for generating conversions online. More than one-half of marketers with budgets over $1 million also agreed. In fact, in 2007 only 19% utilized SEO as part of their online strategies, and as of 2009 now 39% of businesses are including it. Email and e-newsletter marketing (46%), and pay-per-click/search marketing (32%) were also ranked as important tools in conversion, as seen in the Forbes Survey.

What is Search Engine Optimization? It is the science of increasing traffic to your Web site by improving the internal and external factors influencing ranking in search results. It is mostly technical in nature and includes Web programming expertise combined with business, persuasion, sales and a love for competitive puzzle-solving.

SEO marketing is the instrumental key to promote your company's visibility, credibility and sales. In fact, it has been said that a business serious about success cannot afford not to do it. The question is how? And who will do it for you in an effective way, but also in a cost effective way?

If you do all this right, you will have a website capable of maintaining desired revenue goals, while achieving high rankings in the organic sections of search engine results pages. Creating a website does not just involve technical skills, or copywriting, or links, or search engine submission, it involves an intricate blend of more than 200 variables woven into the fabric of a website.

Bill Gates once said, "The Internet will help achieve friction-free capitalism by putting buyer and seller in direct contact, and providing more information to both about each other."

Troy Bohlke with the exact same train of thought states that, "Considering that 8 out of 10 consumers these days find the companies they eventually do business with online, there is so much work to be done on driving victors to the site and then converting them to consumers. Our firm is 100% directed to this," explains Bohlke. "Especially if SEO is changing on a daily basis, then companies need to rely on someone who is dedicated to SEO."

Bohlke, president of 10 Day Publicity, shares his experience as it relates to SEO, "All I wanted to know is whether or not I could increase my business positioning on the internet and how much it costs. I must have interviewed a half a dozen SEO companies before I was introduced to some experts. I was seeing these guys all over the internet in all the right places," Bohlke explains. "I was marketed to effectively and I knew it was what I was looking for."



Publicity is Credibility [http://www.10daypublicity.com/]. Learn how to gain national publicity [http://www.10daypublicity.com/] in just ten days.




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Jon_Lazar

Cost Effective Advertising - Which Online Advertising Methods Give You the Most For Your Money

The most cost effective advertising method or methods are: Article Marketing, Blogging, & Video Marketing. Hands down, These are the most cost effective advertising methods online. But what does That mean for you? You asked a question and I answered it. Now what...? You now know some of the best forms of advertising online but that really doesn't mean anything. Just because you know what forms of advertising are effective; doesn't mean you know How to advertise effectively. Online Advertising can be a very lucrative activity IF it is done right. Many individuals do o.k. online, but these same individuals have to continually work and advertise in order to continually get paid. But there are other marketers who receive paychecks month after month and have not worked online in years.

What's The Difference Between Marketers that Struggle and Marketers that Don't?

The ones that last long in the business of online advertising and don't have to work anymore have"learned the business" and have created many streams of residual income from their advertising methods. Everyone else just "knows the business". For instance, if you're reading this, you now know about some very cost effective advertising methods. And with a couple more searches on the web, you'll know about a couple other ways to advertise. So eventually, it will be safe to say that you "know the business" of online marketing. Those who only "know the business" can easily "Tell" someone how to advertise (Do this, Post that, write this, etc.) But those who have "learned the business" can "Teach" you--Not just how to advertise, but how to advertise effectively. That's Key. And another big difference is the "why" factor. The marketers who "know the business" can tell you what works, but The marketers who have "learned the business" can tell you "Why" everything works.

Look No Further

I have already mentioned what I believe to be the most cost effective ways to advertise; But I am going to leave the "Why" these methods work up to you to find out. But, before you do, I might as well tell you about some other methods that you should take interest in:

PPC (Pay-Per-Click)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Banner Ads

Viral & Social Marketing

Forums

Press Releases

One Last Thing That You "MUST" remember

Each of the above methods I mentioned, including the first three are all good methods of advertising, but you do not need to learn them all at one time. You need to take it one method at a time. Learn how to do one method effectively and then move to other. And eventually you'll have a bunch of advertisements all over the web; Thus creating longevity.



Rodney Ransom is an Internet Network Marketing Teacher and Coach. Learn How to Get on Google's 1st Page [http://rodneyransom.net] Without Spending A Single Penny!




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rodney_Ransom

Search Engines vs. SEO Spam Statistical Methods

High placement in a search engine is critical for the success of any online business. Pages appearing higher in the search engine results to queries relevant to a site's business will get higher targeted traffic. To get this kind of competitive advantage Internet companies employ various SEO techniques in order to optimize certain factors used by search engines to rank results. In the best case SEO specialists create relevant well-structured keyword rich pages, which not only please the eyes of a search engine crawler but also have value to the human visitor. Unfortunately it takes months for this strategic approach to produce feasible results, and many search engine optimizers use so-called "black-hat" SEO.

'Black Hat' SEO and Search Engine Spam

The oldest and simplest "black SEO" strategy is adding a variety of popular keywords into web pages to make them rank high for popular queries. This behavior is easily detected since generally such pages include unrelated keywords that lack topical focus. With the introduction of the term vector analysis search engine became immune to this sort of manipulation. However "black-hat' SEO went one step further creating the so-called "doorway' pages - tightly focused pages consisting of a bunch of keywords relevant to a single topic. In terms of keyword density such pages are able to rank high in search results but never seen by human visitors as they are redirected to the page intended to receive the traffic. Another trend is the abusing the link popularity based ranking algorithms, such as PageRank with the help of dynamically-generated pages. Such pages receive the minimum guaranteed PageRank and the small endorsements from thousands of these pages are able to produce a sizeable PageRank for the target page. Search engines constantly improve their algorithms trying to minimize the effect of "black-hat"' SEO techniques, but SEOs also persistently respond with new more sophisticated and technically advanced tricks so that this process bears a resemblance to an arms race.

"Black-hat" SEO is responsible for the immense amount of search engine spam -- pages and links created solely to mislead search engines and boost rankings for client web sites. To weed out the web spam search engines can use statistical methods that allow computing distributions for a variety of page properties. The outlier values in these distributions can be associated with web spam. The ability to identify web spam is extremely valuable to search engine not just because it allows excluding spam pages from their indices but also using them to train more sophisticated machine learning algorithms capable to battle web spam with higher precision.

Using Statistics to Detect Search Engine Spam

An example of an application of statistical methods to detect web spam is presented in the paper "Spam, Damn Spam and Statistics" by Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse and Marc Najork from Microsoft. They used two sets of pages downloaded from the Internet. The first set was crawled repeatedly from November 2002 to February 2003 and consisted from 150 million URLs. For each page the researches recorded HTTP status, time of download, document length, number of non-markup words, and a vector indicating the changes in page content between downloads. A sample of this set (751 pages) was inspected manually and 61 spam pages were discovered, or 8.1% of the set with a confidence interval of 1.95% at 95% confidence.

Another set was crawled between July and September 2002 and comprises 429 million pages and 38 million HTTP redirects. For this set the following properties were recorded: URL, URLs of outgoing links; for the HTTP redirects - the source and the target URL. 535 pages were manually inspected and 37 of them were identified as spam (6.9%).

The research concentrates on studying the following properties of web pages:


URL properties, including length and percentage of non-alphabetical characters (dashes, digits, dots etc.). Host name resolutions. Linkage properties. Content properties. Content evolution properties. Clustering properties.

URL Properties

Search engine optimizers often use numerous automatically generated pages to massively distribute their low PageRank to a single target page. Since the pages are machine generated we can expect their URLs to look differently from those created by humans. The assumptions are that these URLs are longer and include more non-alphabetical characters such as dashes, slashes or digits. When searching for spam pages we should consider the host component only, not the entire URL down to the page name.

The manual inspection of the 100 longest hostnames had revealed that 80 of them belong to adult site and 11 refer to the financial and credit related sites. Therefore in order to produce a spam identification rule the length property has to be combined with the percentage of non-alphabetical characters. In the given set 0.173% of URLs are at least 45 characters long and contain at least 6 dots, 5 dashes or 10 digits -- and the vast majority of these pages appear to be spam. By changing the threshold values we can change the number of pages flagged as spam and the number of false positives.

Host Name Resolutions

One can notice that Google, given a query q, tends to rank a page higher if the host component of the page's URL contains keywords from q. To utilize this search engine optimizers stuff pages with URLs containing popular keywords and keyphrases and set up DNS servers to resolve these URLs to a single IP. Generally SEOs generate a large number of host names to rank for a wide variety of popular queries.

This behavior can also be relatively easy detected by observing the number of host name resolutions to a single IP. In our set 1,864,807 IP addresses are mapped to only one host name, and 599,632 IPs -- to 2 host names. There are also some extreme cases with hundreds of thousands host names mapped to a single IP, and the record-breaking IP referred by 8,967,154 host names.

To flag pages as spam a threshold of 10,000 name resolutions was chosen. About 3.46% of the pages in the Set 2 are served from IP addresses referred by 10,000 and more host names and the manual inspection of this sample proved that with very few exceptions they were spam. Lower threshold (1,000 name resolutions or 7.08% pages in the set) produces an unacceptable amount of false positives.

Linkage Properties

The Web consisting of interlinked pages has a structure of a graph. Therefore in graph terminology the number of outgoing links of a page can be referred to as the out-degree, while the in-degree equals to the number link pointing to a page. By analyzing out- and in-degrees values it is also possible to detect spam pages which would represent the outliers in the corresponding distributions.

In our set for example there are 158,290 pages with out-degree 1301, while according to the overall trend only 1,700 such pages are expected. Overall 0.05% of pages in the Set 2 have out-degrees at least three times more than suggested by the Zipfian distribution, and according to the manual inspection of a cross section, almost all of them are spam.

Similarly the distribution for in-degrees is calculated. For example 369,457 pages have the in-degree of 1001, while according to the trend only 2,000 such pages are expected. Overall, 0.19% of pages in the Set 2 have in-degrees at least three times more common than the Zipfian distribution would suggest, and the majority of them are spam.

Content Properties

Despite the recent measures taken by search engines to diminish the effect of keyword stuffing, this technique is still used by some SEOs who generate pages filled with meaningless keywords to promote their AdSense pages. Quite often such pages are based on a single template and even have the same number of words which makes them especially easy to detect using statistical methods.

For Set 1 the number of non-markup words in each page was recorded, so we can draw the variance of word count in pages downloaded from a given host name. The variance is plotted on the x-axis and the word count is shown on the y-axis, both axes are drawn on a logarithmic scale. Points in the left side of the graph marked with blue represent cases where at list 10 pages from a given host have the same word count. There are 944 such hosts (0.21% of the pages in Set 1). A random sample of 200 these pages was examined manually: 35% were spam, 3.5% contained no text and 41.5% were soft errors (a page with a message indicating that the resource is not currently available, despite the HTTP status code 200 “OK”).

Content Evolution

The natural evolution of the content in the Web is slow. In a period of a week 65% of all pages will not change at all, while only 0.8% will change completely. In contrast many spam SEO web pages generated in response to an HTTP request independent of the requested URL will change completely of every download. Therefore by looking into extreme cases of content mutation we search engines are able to detect web spam.

The outliers represent IPs serving the pages that change completely every week. Set 1 contains 367 such servers with 1,409,353 pages (97.2%). The manual examination of a sample of 106 pages showed that 103 (97.2%) were spam, 2 were soft errors and 1 adult pages counted as a false positive.

Clustering Properties

Automatically generated spam pages tend to look very similar. In fact, as already said above, most of them are based on the same model and have only minor differences (like inserting varying keywords into a template). Pages with such properties can be detected by applying clustering analysis to our samples.

To form clusters of similar pages the 'shingling' algorithm described by Broder et al. [2] will be used. Figure 7 shows the distribution of the cluster sizes on near duplicate pages in Set 1. The horizontal axis shows the size of the cluster (the number of pages in the near-equivalence class), and the vertical axis shows how many such clusters Set 1 contains.

The outliers can be put into two groups. The first group did not contain any spam pages, pages in this group are more related to the duplicated content issue. In the same time the second group is populated predominantly by spam documents. 15 of 20 largest clusters were spam containing 2,080,112 pages (1.38% of all pages in Set 1)

To Sum Up

The methods described above are the examples of a fairly simple statistical approach to spam detection. The real life algorithms are much more sophisticated and are based on machine learning technologies which allow search engine to detect and battle spam with a relatively high efficiency at an acceptable rate of false positives. Applying the spam detection techniques enables search engine to produce more relevant results and ensures a more fair competition based on the quality of web resources and not on technical tricks.

References:

1. Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse, Marc Najork. "Spam, Damn Spam, and Statistics: Using statistical analysis to locate spam web pages" (2004). Microsoft Research. Available at: http://research.microsoft.com/~najork/webdb2004.pdf [http://research.microsoft.com/%7Enajork/webdb2004.pdf]

2. A. Broder, S. Glassman, M. Manasse, and G. Zweig. "Syntactic Clustering of the Web". In 6th International World Wide Web Conference, April 1997.

Graphics omitted. The full version of the article can be found here: Search Engines vs. SEO Spam: Statistical Methods



Oleg Ishenko, MCSE, MCDBA, BSc, 8 yrs of IT experience gives useful advice on search engine optimization at his SEO Guide




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Oleg_Ishenko

Things to Avoid in Search Engine Optimization - Black Hat Methods

A few search marketers use unfair methods or Black-Hat methods to get to the top of the search engine rankings. However Black hat Techniques are sure to make you act in haste and repent in leisure

In this article I will be highlighting a few techniques to Optimize your website ethically without using Unfair or Black Hat Optimization Techniques to get good rankings in the organic search engines.

So what exactly is Black Hat SEO ?

Black Hat SEO refers to all those optimization activities that violate the basic search engine guidelines. Black hat methods are adapted to manipulate the Search Engine Result Pages and get to the top of the search engines as soon as possible and with minimal efforts.

If Black Hat gets result, then what's the harm ?

It's true that some black hat methods will get you desired results. The only problem with adapting black hat methods is that the results are temporary and causes major damage to the web site. There is something known as the New Site Boost which every new website gets in the search engine result pages. If black hat methods are applied to such new sites, they may come up pretty well in the search engines and may out pass major players. But that's only temporary, that site will soon start falling in the Search Engine Result Pages and gradually vanish from the search engines.

Once search engines figure out that a site has adapted black hat methods to manipulate the rankings, they will not only penalize the site but might also ban them from the search engines result pages, which means that you will no longer be seen in the search engines even if you search with your domain name.

What are black hat methods?

The following is the list of some commonly used black hat methods:

Keyword stuffing - This is one of the most commonly used black hat methods practiced by black hat SEOs to get faster results. Keyword stuffing refers to redundancy of targeted keywords in the page title, description, body, images etc. This is a serious violation of search engine rules and may result in penalization of your site from the index.

Cloaking - Cloaking refers to pointing one page to the search engine spiders and another version of the same page to the web site visitors. This is done so as to get the spiders to the optimized page while the visitors get to see a different page. Cloaking is another black hat method which will surely ban your site from the search engines. In fact, this is the only reason why major car manufacturer BMW got their German site banned from Google recently.

Hidden Text - Hidden text is a way of plugging in additional text so as to increase the keyword density of a page. Texts are hidden by using a font color that matches the one used in the page background. Hidden texts are hard to be seen by humans but it's a mere child's play for search engines to find them out.

Using Redirection - Many webmasters optimize a page for the search engines and then redirect those pages to some other destination using a META REFRESH tag which redirects a visitor to a new destination after a fixed period of time. This is considered as spam by the search engines and may lead to serious penalties or even permanent ban.

Another way of redirection which, if kept for a long time might raise some red flags in the search engines is the 302 temporary redirect. This is a redirection which is made at the server level of web sites and such redirection are meant to redirect visitors to a new page on a temporary basis. But if such a redirection lasts more for than 6 months, it raises some red flags in the search engines and thus the site gets penalized or banned by the search engines.

Another redirection which will surely get your site in a soup is the one using Java Script redirection. Such a redirection is made using Java Scripts and is a serious violation of search engine guidelines.

Take care not to use any of the above methods to optimize a website. Using any of the above means to optimize your website may result in your website being banned in Google and many other Search Engines. Use fair methods of optimizing your site by following proven Search Engine guidelines Remember you are making a site for a human not a robot.



Michael Ringwood is an avid internet marketer and an expert on a variety of online marketing Techniques, search engine optimization , social media and web2.0 marketing. He has worked for several start up internet Companies and currently does consulting work for several top digital media online properties including 123greetings.com.

He also writes on Holidays and Events round the World




Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Ringwood