First off, I would like to thank all my mentors and everyone else that has contributed to my success. If it wasn’t for you this article wouldn’t be possible.

While everyone else is struggling, now is your chance to take over that #1 spot! These changes are a good thing, so long as you follow the advice in this article.

CAUTION: Never obviously cover stuff your pages! and Never use cloaking tactics! Google punishes very severely, and its just a matter of time until your competition reports you.

With that being said, here is my checklist to follow:

• Use a unique title for every page that you create
• Create unique descriptions on all your page’s
• Never use relative URLs within the source of your page
• Create keyword enriched HTML comments within the content areas
• Use keywords in the URL’s for the different pages that they link to
• Go through all the title attributes
• Dial in all alt text
• Use microformats every chance that you get
• Never use over two entries within the meta keywords
• Link all the pages together using a sitemap widget. Put the widget in the footers.
• Never stop creating backlinks!
• Each page should have a paragraph of 300-500 words. Keep the keyword density to around 10%. Make sure that at least 8-10 words link to other related pages.
• Always us canonical tags on all the pages
• Create a social media campaign using the top 5 social media sites and provide links back to website. Maintain daily.
• Register with Google webmaster central
• Update robots txt
• Update all pages regularly
• Add Twitter and Facebook buttons
• Stop AdWords and hire Facebook/social media experts
• Be sure to use image alt tags

These changes are not effecting everyone, but if your one of the unlucky ones, than this advice will work very well for you. Don’t get too concerned, Google always does the “Google dance” and using these simple adjustments will get you “Swinging to the music”!

Source: By Charles Warner

The popularity of a website is based on the links that it receives. Backlinks are the links that enter your website. Backlinks were the only source of web navigation few years back, before the emergence of search engine optimization. Now, backlinks are the backbone of search engine positioning. Backlinking is very useful for the people who cannot afford more money on advertising. These links lead to a web page and back lead to another web page. The backlink works great with the websites that is designed with high quality, well established and with good rank.

There are numerous techniques used in the internet market to gain from backlinks. Some of them are article submissions, Directory submission, press release, blog posting and social networking.

Why search engines consider backlinks to rank a site?

The search engine treat your website is like a Ballet Box. So, it takes every backlink to your site as a vote. Depending on the number of backlinks received, your website is branded in the search engine. So, if your site receives more backlinks, then your site has something useful or informative for the audience.

At present, knowing the value and importance of the backlinks, people have started selling and buying it which is not a good sign for online business. So, people who can spend money to purchase backlinks shines and others with empty pocket are dumped in a corner. This forced the Google to take action on the sites that are selling backlinks. Even this strong punishment could not completely bring solution and even now you can find some culprits in the internet market.

Even though it is a cause of worry for the people who could not spend money on buying backlinks, still they can do better with good content. The content plays the vital role in grabbing the attention of the audience. So, if you can post keyword rich and informative rich content, then you are sure to win the race. The content should be related to your business or that is useful for the audience. You can drive traffic to your site through blogs. Posting blogs will have great impact in building your website and improving search engine rankings.

A Backlinking strategy seems to be easy. For some it also looks like a fun. But, through backlinking, a website owner may learn more and get the opportunity to meet new people. The slow and steady process will definitely lift your website to the first page in the search engine optimization.

Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Gate

Because even if you are an experienced Internet marketer, there was that time in your past that you were a complete newcomer to all things related to the search engines and how you can make your website rank in the search results. All the SEO techniques that you learned were totally fresh to your mind and all helped you achieve great online results. The same rings true if you are just getting started right now.

Therefore here are five SEO secrets that you should know to give your website or online business a good fighting chance.

1. Target the low hanging fruits.

This refers to the keywords that you should be targeting for your Internet campaign. The logic behind this is that all the top and common keywords are already dominated by authority websites. These are sites that have usually been around for a very long time, have accumulated a loyal following, have gathered a great number of links, and already have high quality content. For you to challenge them with the same keywords would be a very long and hard battle for the top rankings. I am not saying it is an impossible task, but it is sure a very hard one.

2. Create original and quality content for your website.

Some people say that duplicate content is a myth, others say otherwise. While this debate keeps on, the only sure thing about content is that you should create your own, original, and great quality content. It should be something that people would love to read and then share with their friends.

3. Stick with white hat search engine optimization techniques.

These are called white hat because these are what the search engines would consider good practices. Learn about the black hat techniques and stay away from these as far as possible. As they always say, it is better to be on the safe side.

4. Get links the natural and logical way.

What this means is that you should think how people would normally link to a website that they genuinely like. They would link using the site’s URL for the anchor text and not an obvious keyword. They would not link to it more than a couple of times within just one web page.

5. Always be up to date.

This is perhaps the best of all the SEO secrets that you can learn. The rules or best practices when it comes to search engine optimization is continuously changing. What you know a year or two ago may no longer apply today or in the next few months. How can you achieve this? By reading SEO blogs, participating in Internet marketing forums, and subscribing to newsletters about the topic.

Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Reed_Slidell

Relevant backlinks to your site can be obtained from many places, such as blogs, article directories, link exchanges, etc. However, in order to produce the intended results, you need to control your backlinks.

The necessity backlink software stems from the fact that many of the backlinking sources are unreliable and as a result, you might put your backlink just to notice that shortly it has vanished into thin air.

When you have spent lots of time on building backlinks you will hardly be happy to see fact a backlink you have paid for is not active anymore. What is more, the time you spend tracking your backlinks can exceed the time you have spent building them. A typical while ranking site has thousands of backlinks and manually checking if they are still active or not is a mission impossible. Even if you could track your backlinks manually, it makes no sense to do it because automation is much better.

Link trackers allow you to automate the process of monitoring your backlinks. A link tracker does all the grunt work in monitoring your backlinks and when it encounters a broken or missing backlink, you will be the first to know.

In addition to broken or missing backlinks, link trackers generally report Page Rank as well. PR of the backlinking page matters because, all equal, the higher the PR of the backlinking page, the more useful for you this backlink is. High PR of backlinking pages can improve your search engine rankings dramatically.

Link building and SEO in general are much easier when you have a link tracker at your disposal. If you have never tried to backlink tracker, you might want to see what BacklinkReporter.com can do for you. This is a free link tracking tool and it will relieve you of the hassle to create thousands of backlinks without any visible effects on your search engine rankings. BacklinkReporter.com will save you time and money.

Source: Surf Rocket - Information, Guides, And Pricing

SEM – Adwords, YPN, & site advertising, builds qualified short-term traffic. While it is possible to build steady, targeted traffic implementing SEM alone, it can be extremely expensive and is good only for as long as you pay for it. Once you stop paying, the traffic disappears. The amount and quality of traffic you receive depends heavily on targeting the correct keywords. Knowing what keywords to target is the most important factor in receiving lots of targeted traffic from your SEM campaign. When considering the costs of an SEM campaign, it is important to note that even if you have a unique edge, if you are in a highly competitive industry, the costs and competition for the targeted keywords and market will increase as well.

SEO will be a key factor in creating long-term, organic (natural) traffic. There are three characteristics of sites that have this type of traffic: First, a site should have good, relevant, appropriate content. Second, a site must be optimized for search engines; including site structure optimization, content optimization, link structure optimization, error free W3C compliant code, and offloaded scripts. Third, a strong number of back links (the number of links required to rank well for any one keyword), is heavily dependent on the market niche itself and requires a good bit of research. Retaining organic search traffic depends on whether or not search engines believe your site is still relevant when they periodically re-index. Sustained relevancy requires a modest effort in continued content building over a period of time. Capturing new, organic search engine traffic from this point forward, all depends on the relevancy of continued content creation as related to the terms by which people are using to find your site on an on-going basis. Building authority with the search engines and a strong web presence takes strategic planning.

Converting traffic to leads or sales depends on how professional and trustworthy your site appears to be to the traffic it receives. Just as a face-to-face meeting or a sales call, you have one chance to make a first impression. You have one chance to show a site visitor your product is the solution to their problem and that you can fulfill their need; that you are trustworthy.

An easy way to understand the difference between SEM and SEO – SEM is traffic that you are paying for and chase, while SEO is traffic that comes to you naturally. Having an effective online marketing campaign is not a static process. The dynamics change and it is important to be flexible and pro-active in your efforts. A combination of a good SEM campaign and solid SEO characteristics will enable you to have solid, long-term, convertible, profitable traffic. The more SEM you have to use, the higher your conversion costs are per new client.

On-page factors play a key role in determining relevancy. But, in-order-to fight index spam, Google and most other search engines have implemented counter measures to fight spam. For example, it used to be relatively easy to rank number one for a particular key term or several key terms for that matter. All a website owner had to do was to place hundreds of repeating keywords or key phrases in their sites keyword Meta tag, this was known as keyword stuffing.

This is a factor that the webmaster had full control over and the search engines could do little about. So other factors were introduced to mitigate the impact of this strategy. As search engines become more sophisticated more and more counter measures are introduced to fight index spam. Usually, these counter measures focus on factors that are not in the control of the website owner. An example would be the number of inbound links that a website has and from how many websites these links are coming from. There are literally hundreds of factors that search engines employ to try and keep spam out of their index. Most of these factors, you, as a website owner, have little if any control over.

Relevancy is determined by several factors including:

1. On page SEO.
2. A web pages authority – how other web sites on the internet see it.
a. Number of inbound links.
b. Inbound link text.
c. Quality of inbound links.
d. Spread of inbound links across domains and IP addresses.
e. Domain name age.
f. Web page age.
3. Quality of the website.
a. Compliant html.
b. Compliant CSS.
c. Page load time.
d. No hidden objects.
4. Quality of the sites content.
a. Is it spammy content?
b. Is it unique content?
c. Is it quality content?
i. Wikipedia
5. Trust of the Website
a. Number of inbound links.
b. Inbound link text.
c. Quality of inbound links.
d. Spread of inbound links across domains and IP addresses.
e. Quality of outbound links.
f. Are there duplicate Title and Meta tags.
g. Does the site contain duplicate data?
h. Age of the website.

These are only a few of the factors that are taken into account by search engines to determine SERP relevancy. Most of these factors are controllable to a certain degree. The bottom line is that if you give the search engines what they want, good relevant content, they can feed to their users. And you don’t try to scam them. Then they will give you what you want, A steady flow of naturally derived organic targeted traffic.

One thing to keep in mind is that these factors do not all have to be present for a web page to rank for a keyword or phrase. A web page can rank in the SERPs for a keyword although its content is not specific to that keyword or phrase.

If the content of a web page is related to the search term and there are no “trusted” web pages directly targeting that keyword then search engines attempt to return the most relevant related web pages in their index. When search engines return these types of results they base their decision primarily on a site’s authority in the general topical niche that the term is related to.

However, the more competitive a niche is the more important it becomes to cross your Ts and dot your Is. The difference between a first and second place ranking can be as small of an issue as internal link structure or having better quality content. But, the difference in the amount of traffic seen between a site that ranks first and a site that ranks second can be huge. Remember, each rank below number one will receive at least 10 to 20% fewer visitors. So if the keyword phrase is “web merchant account,” which is searched for 246,000 times a month, then that can mean potentially loosing 48,000 chances to convert. That is a lot of potential clients lost.

1.Find commonly used niche keywords and keyword phrases.
2.Find commonly used niche keywords with little competition.
3.Find uncommonly used keywords with some consistent volume of search and little competition. These types of keywords or keyword phrases are known as “long tail keywords”.

When you offer online services, it is best to target both broad based target keywords as well as more focused long tail keywords. As a site begins to rank for long tail keywords, its competitiveness for the broader keywords will begin to increase. As you begin to rank higher for the less competitive long tail keywords, those higher rankings will pull up your rankings for the tougher, more competitive terms.

The more topically relevant keywords and phrases that you rank for, the more competitive you become for the parent term. Moreover, if you ignore either category of keywords you may loose potential customers. The general idea is don’t trip over the less trafficked keywords to get to the more heavily trafficked keywords. Add the less competitive, lower yield, long tail keywords and, in the long run, you will rank and convert better.

1.A page’s title tag.
2.A page’s Meta description.
3.A page’s Meta keywords (only very few use this any more).
4.The h1, h2,….h6 heading tags.
5.The actual content of the page.
6.Inbound anchor text.
7.Outbound anchor text.
8.Image Alt text.
9.Image Title text.

Each one of these factors combines to help tell a search engine what the web page is about. The more focused a page is on a single keyword or phrase, or a single set of semantically related keywords or phrases the better a web page will do in the SERPs. These factors combined, along with a few other factors, are known as “On-Page SEO.

In essence, search engine optimization has two basic facets; telling the search engines what you are targeting and telling them why you should be trusted. Although this statement is an oversimplification, we will stick with it for the sake of brevity.