Achieving a top ranking position in Google is every webmasters dream. Unfortunately very few ever make it high enough for it to make a big difference on their traffic volume. If you are one of the few to make it onto the Top 10 list, you have probably found out that your listing doesn’t always stay on top. So, besides all the other advice online, it is also extremely important to under stand your competition, and to properly use their key words to your advantage. This article is the conclusion in a 2 part series. In part 1 we looked at how to effectively use Google rankings in helping us better understand our competitors. Part 2 will discuss how to maximize and use Google Suggest to determine the frequency of various key word searches.

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As discussed in before, not only is it important to find out how your competitors rank for a certain term in Google, but it is also perhaps even more important to find out how many times that specific phrase has been searched for. Google Suggest Beta is the perfect answer for this problem. Just type in a few words and it will immediately display multiple results for that specific term, and variations of it.

***Hint*** Remember, it is not always necessary to have a top 10 listing for the most popular searched phrase. Just imagine the potential of having 5 top listings for keywords that are not quite as popular. Not only will it be easier to achieve a top 10 listing, but while all your competitors fight over 1-3 key words, you are capitalizing on all the others. In the end this will mean a literal financial windfall depending on your product, etc.

Just hold on, we’re not done yet. It is also important to pinpoint your key words even farther, and most people always seem to miss this step. Use the same keyword(s) in Google Suggest, but this time place apostrophes around the term and hit “submit”. This time you will find out how many competing sites exist for that exact phrase, not just every word in your phrase.

For instance the phrase – Natural Acne Cure shows 796,000 results
However, now do a search for “Natural Acne Cure” as of today it shows 9,820 results.

In the end, if you can find a specific term that ranks 5000 or less, you have an excellent chance of receiving a higher ranking within Google once you start marketing and implementing successful strategies to maximize your specific key word.

Remember, while the marketing and promotion, and “how to’s” are extremely important, you must always start with the correct keywords first, and properly understand your competition or else you will fail before you ever begin. Or at the very least, you will be climbing a mountain of adversity instead of a leisurely stroll in obtaining your first Top 10 ranking.
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Would you like to know some of the best kept secrets to search engine improvement? You’ve probably heard of using backlinks to get a good Google website ranking, well get ready to learn the nuts and bolts of this proven strategy.

There are many methods of getting free backlinks to your site. The best technique is to combine as many of these as you possibly can for each piece of content you publish. This strategy will not only help you to advertise web site additions and bring new traffic to your site, but it will also help with search engine ranking improvement.

The search engines reward sites that have many other sites linking back to them, so begin implementing the techniques below and you may see some startling results!

YouTube – YouTube has an Alexa ranking of 4, which means it’s the fourth most popular website on the Internet. Backlinks from this site can be very helpful in search engine ranking improvement. Once you’ve uploaded a video, you should always add a link to your website in the Description box, include quality keywords, then add the video to your blog or website. EzineArticles – EzineArticles.com, another authority site, has an Alexa ranking of 57 in the United States. Every time you publish a new blog post, it will help your Google website ranking if you submit an article to EzineArticles.com that complements your post. Use the same keywords, but mix up the content. Duplicate web content is frowned upon and will never help search engine ranking improvement. Many of my Ezine articles are condensed versions of the information on my blog, so I send readers to my blog for more information. When using this strategy always be sure that you don’t promote anything in the article itself. EzineArticles gives you the opportunity to market whatever it is you’re promoting through use of the About the Author box below your article. Commenting on Popular Blogs – Many blogs have a plugin called “CommentLuv”, which automatically adds a link to your most recent blog post with each comment you submit. This is a great way to get free backlinks, while at the same time getting a great education by reading valuable information provided by others in your niche. Site Directories – Directories provide a simple, free source of backlinks to your site. The most popular directory is DMOZ. Link Exchange Programs – Link exchange programs can help boost your Google website ranking, as long as you follow some important guidelines. The first thing to realize is that link exchange pages, sometimes referred to as “link farms”, will not help with search engine ranking improvement. These are typically pages that contain many links but no valuable content, and they are frowned upon by the search engines. The best link exchange programs offer backlinks that from sites that are in the same niche as yours. One way links carry more weight than two way links, so the best theory is to find a link exchange partner who is willing to offer you a one way link. You might consider thinking out of the box and forming a link exchange partner co-op, where site A links to site B, which links to site C, which links to site A… Participating in Forum Discussions – We’re all looking for backlinks that can drive very targeted traffic back to our sites, right? Forums are a great method of accomplishing this. Get involved in conversations that are related to your niche, and use the signature box to add links to your site. Forums do not allow self promotion and, so be sure to offer valuable information, insights, etc, and limit the advertising to a backlink in your signature line. Social Media Sites – Links from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Squidoo can greatly enhance search engine ranking improvement. Google loves these sites! Social Bookmarking Sites – Social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg contain tons of great articles that users can bookmark on their computers. You can submit your own content to social bookmarking sites, but better technique is to have it submitted by a reader other than yourself. This could be a good time to find a link exchange partner, who will submit your content in exchange for your submission of his or her content.

When you combine many or all of these ideas together, search engine ranking improvement can be accomplished easily and for free. The keys are to remain consistent and provide valuable content for your readers.
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What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Briefly put, SEO can be defined as all the techniques that are used to gain more notice and index for your site on all the important search engines like MSN, Yahoo or Google.

What is the importance of SEO?

The foremost way in which people locate websites is through search engines, so obtaining a higher ranking in your keywords (usually the first page or 1-10 in the engine) is an excellent way to pull traffic to your site. When you have a quality ranking, the investment is worth making, and it is a lot like “free” promotion 24/7/365.

What is the way of becoming SEO friendly?

I am not exaggerating when I say that the methods of SEO are literally countless. However, here let me share a few of the chief elements of making it to the top order.

Domain age – Search engines give a lot of preference to a seasoned site – a site that has been working for many years and has a beneficial output for the browsers.

Clean, relevant, new content – You need to ensure that the content of your site is always fresh and is regularly updated. Both the search engines and your visitors will like the novelty.

No Flash – It is a wonderful multimedia device but Flash is generally not favored for SEO, the text and content within the Flash piece cannot be identified by search engines, and hence it cannot be utilized into your SEO progress. A major fault is possessing a flash introduction, because a flash introduction page stands as an obstacle between the main page and the remaining content that lies inside your site.

Meta tags – Meta tags are nothing but invisible tags that are implemented by search engines to categorize your site content.

Heading tags – Heading tags (h1) should be put on the headline or most essential and relevant element of your page. These tags also need to be written on the keywords which you think users will be looking for that will lead to your site.

Site maps – Site maps is a link by link breakdown of your site. They assist search engine “spiders” maneuver through your site and index each separate page.

SEO :What you should avoid

Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing is jam packing your content with your chief keywords to such an extent that your content holds no meaning at all.

Invisible content – This is something that you don’t intend your visitors to see but have used to keyword-stuff your page. It will quickly place you on the wrong side of a search engine.

Too many h1 tags

Link farms – Link farms are simply individual pages with plenty of links to other sites.

Going overboard with any of the “what not to do” can lead to your site being “sandboxed” which will set aside your site from the search engine completely. Being “sandboxed” may last years or months, or even forever.

How long will it take to have a good ranking?

SEO, as a practice, is very time-dependent. Even though you will implement only above-board SEO techniques, you should not hope to see results for at least a few months .

Your investment is bound to pay off

Although the correct ROI of your SEO services is literally incalculable because of its longish timeframe, the unanimous opinion of experts is that SEO is the most money saving marketing tool if practiced in the right manner.
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It’s not enough to have a great website – people need to know it’s there! Let’s say you’ve put together a site which showcases photographs. Your “niche” (to use the jargon) is photography and you need to establish yourself as an authority on all things photographic. You can do this by writing articles.

Each article, like this one, will be a few hundred words long. It will be easy to understand and informative, but it may well only deal with one main point (other points can be discussed in other articles). Tell your readers about the techniques, equipment and artistry involved in choosing and buying the kit, selecting subjects, lighting them, taking the photographs, printing or processing, exhibiting or publishing or sharing them… In fact you’ll never run out of things to say about your niche as it’s your hobby as well as your business.

Submit your article to an Article Directory such as Ezine, where – for no charge – it will be read by people who want to know about photography. Ezine has great ranking with Google already, so when someone searches on Google for keywords and key phrases which appear in your article’s title, teaser copy and body, your article could well appear near the top of the list and they may well click on it and read it.

At the end of your article you’ll have a link to your website. The reader will click there to find out more – and there you have your visitor. Believe me, a great many people read these articles, and if you submit lots of articles you’re going to get lots of visitors. You’ll be able to track the success of your articles and the number of clicks they generate through the tools provided (for free) by Ezine.

But that’s not all! Google values these incoming links greatly, and the more articles you have (all with links), the greater the SEO ranking of your site. Put the same articles in your blog, and have links from your blog to your site as well (and vice versa). Include links to your site and your blog in everything you put on the web including social pages, and contributions to discussion forums.

And that’s still not all. If your articles are any good, people who send out newsletters will publish your work (together with your link) and distribute it to everyone on their list. Some of those people on the list may well use your articles too. Ezine will show you which of your articles are published by other parties.

If you write lots of articles, you will be establishing yourself as an expert, and people will be more likely to read all your other articles. The effect is cumulative. And once people learn to value your opinion and trust you, they’ll be more likely to buy from you.
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Excellent images are essential for web sites and can lift an ordinary web site to a professional level. The average surfer responds better to websites that use good quality images, tending to linger longer and browse more pages than when faced with dense, text-heavy pages. There are many reasonable priced picture libraries online where one can source everything from flower pictures to computer equipment images.

Here are a few rules that need to be followed to ensure that the images become an asset to your site rather than an unwieldy burden and that your careful SEO use of keywords in the text is enhanced by the images:

1. Make sure all your images are correctly optimized: i.e. a relatively large image of 600×475 pixels should be between 20KB and 50KB in size(maximum). If you use a lot of thumbnail images on one page (125×125 pixel) then they should be between 5KB and 10KB in size.

By sticking to these simple size guides you will ensure that your page loads quickly. Do check every single image that you put up. I have seen images on websites that are 2MB in size, leaving the web site owner scratching his head and wondering why the page takes so long to load. Casual surfers will have long since departed to faster loading sites.

2. Naming your images appropriately will substantially help by making it easier for Google to find the images on your web site (Google has recently changed its algorithm to take into account images and other media more than ever before) improving your overall search engine optimization.

Try to name each image using keywords that link to the subject of the page that the image is on. If the subject of your page is red flowers, then find an image of a red flower and name it red-flower.jpg. Hyphenate the image names or use underscore between the words. The search engine spiders will see this image name as separate words if you do this.

Don’t be tempted to abbreviate your image names, thus rendering them unrecognizable for SEO purposes e.g. rdflwr.jpg. You may end up with rather long image names by using the full keyword names but you will maximise the SEO benefits of your chosen key phrases for each page.

Lastly vary the image names that you use, when you have multiple images on one page, even by one letter to make it a plural e.g. red-flowers.jpg or flowers-red.jpg so that the search engines don’t penalise you for keyword loading.

3. Make sure you add alt tags to every image, which are also taken into account by the search engine spiders, once again using appropriately varied keyword phrases that link to the subject of the page.

4. Search on the Net for royalty free stock picture libraries. There are many of them, some specialising in one subject others covering a huge range of subjects. They are normally free to register with and generally use one of two payment systems: a credit system whereby you purchase x number of credits and each image costs a number of credits according to size; or a monthly subscription which allows you to download a certain number of images each month. Most libraries provide web ready images at 72 dpi or print ready images at 300 dpi. Web ready images are generally from 450-800 pixels wide or high, but this is perfectly adequate for use on a website. With prices often ranging from $1 per web ready image to $50 for a A4 sized print ready image this is a very affordable way of enhancing your web site and attracting both spiders and surfers.
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In today’s world of internet, it doesn’t matter much whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, you need to have a strong online presence. If not, you would be loosing heavily to your competitors. However, having a website only is not going to do a lot of good to your business. You should be able to generate quality traffic to your website, you have to convert that traffic as consumers for your business and you have to make them loyal for a long time. Then only, the online presence is going to add to your business.

Research tells that more than seventy five percent of web traffic comes from search engines like Google, MSN and so on. So, it is very important for your website to have higher rankings on these search engines for the keywords with which your potential customers search on the internet for information. Hence, improving search engine ranking is very important for your business. And also, maintaining that search engine raking for at least the chosen keywords is also very important.

There are lots of things that have to be done by any web master if he wants to have a very good search engine ranking. First the content should be quality content and you should be updating it quite regularly. You should have keyword rich content. You should first do a lot of research in finding out keywords which your prospective customers will be using while searching on the internet. Then you have to get content accordingly. This can immensely help in improving search engine ranking. But, never use content which is only focusing on keywords and have no substance. You have to strike a good balance between the both.

Google uses Page rank concept to rank the websites. Hence, you should have quality links that are referring to your website. This can be done by getting loads and loads of reciprocal links. You should do a lot of research to find the companies which will be interested in participating in the reciprocal link programs of yours. Even though, this consumes a lot of time, as a web master you should do it to improve search engine ranking.

It’s not a better idea to concentrate only on tier-1 search engines. Try and get into top ten rankings of other search engines also. For example, if your site is a career site then it is advisable to get good ranking on search engines which are mainly dedicated for job portals like bixee.com in INDIA. This helps quite a lot in improving your search engine ranking.
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