It’s coming to a age where having a website is necessary for all business owners. But who has time to update all the new products and business changes on a daily basis? The reality is the majority of business owners update their web page every 6-12 months. Usually this consists of something they think will improve the image of the website. The part that’s commonly overlooked is that updating your website pages and text at least once a month has huge benefits far beyond any benefit of a slight image change.

By updating the web page once a month it adds credibility with customers and even more credibility with the internet process (Search engines and other websites). Search engines will always list a website that is active over stale, plain, and low text (content) websites. The differance between adding even a little more text each month is huge for how search engines will consider your website in the SE ranking system.

Of course adding jiberrish will not help much, but adding good text based stories, information, and by building more pages you WILL make a huge differance.  With that said here is the top 5 reasons to update your website atleast once a month:

1. Search Engines - They see changed and content rich web pages as a active website and will always rank this over a stale website.

2. Other Websites - The internet starves for new original information and by adding it to your website regularly you will have a much better chance to get free one way links to your website.

3. Customers - When customers see a website that is updated and has lots of perdinant information they are more likely to save the page to there favorites and come back!

4. Personal  Investment - I’m not big on tricking myself but the more you add to your website and see actual results the more fun it will be to add more content and watch your website grow.

5. Website Quality - Eventually you will notice errors or little ways to clean up and make the website more usable when your actively updating it.

The best way to stay active is to add a blog to your website, www.wordpress.com is a search engine friendly and is super easy for anyone to use. Most web hosts like www.dwhs.net  has it available for free by the push of a button. For example www.ocfocus.com You can see how the main website is the front line for the business and just adding a link on the bottom of each page to your blog you can have a easily updatability website that the search engines and your customers will love.

The other option is to have a non-static website, you can so this with blog software or any CMS (content management system)  www.drupal.com is a good option for this but might require slightly higher hosting fees to run it.

Written by Charles Yarbrough for www.marketingspot.com
www.charlesyarbrough.com

It is virtually impossible to build a site in which each page brings good search engine position. The home page, for example, will likely change frequently. Thus spiders will not find it the same when they return, which they do, roughly once each month.
Pages devoted to selling product do not often rank well. The same is true of a page where visitors can subscribe to your newsletter. Or the one you pop up to say thanks when they do subscribe. So how does one go about getting good search engine positions?

Great Content Is The Answer

So what is great content? Any information surfers may need. However, it must also be a topic that enhances your site purpose. That is, there is no room on a site devoted to baseball for a piece describing the inner workings of steam engines.

Assuming you have a clear read on who your visitors are, then it’s only a matter of selecting a topic likely to be of interest to at least some of them. Given this, write the page for your visitors, not the search engines. Then do what you can to make the spiders happy.

Happy Spiders?

Not likely. It is impossible to please them all. Some see “Market,” “MARKET,” and “market” as separate words; others see only one repeated three times. Some see “market” as “marketing;” most require a specific match. “Markets” may be seen as “Market,” but in other cases both forms may be required.

Okay, we’ll include all cases in our keyword tag: Market, MARKET, market, Markets, MARKETS, markets, Marketing, MARKETING, marketing.

That’s got it covered fine, but how do we make this work with a spider that considers more than three repetitions as spam? One that might even consider all of the above as 9 repetitions of one word?

You Can’t Get There From Here

Search engines are competing in a multi-billion dollar race. The winner will be the one that can most consistently present the most relevant information available in response to a query.

Be assured that with the stakes this high, the competition is fierce. They are not about to reveal their latest wrinkle to improve their listings. Which leaves us with empirical evidence and educated guesses.

Try to sort this all out for each search engine, and you’ll go crazy. Not to mention constant changes which mean one or more of the carefully defined “rules” no longer holds.

Even supposing you had an accurate listing of the rules for each engine. Would you seriously consider creating a separate page for each? Not me. I have much more profitable ways in which to use my time.

Take the longer view. Spiders are getting smarter every day. And they are becoming smarter at a rapidly increasing rate. Some are now reading a page as if with a thesaurus in hand, thus being able to see house and home as having similar meanings.

Grammar checkers exist; I expect to see these and related tools implemented in spider logic. In the not-to-distant future, those keyword-rich doorway pages are going to be discarded.

Meanwhile we need to create some great content pages and try to make the spiders as happy as possible. Here’s my approach.

Finding Keywords

Given a topic and a mental draft of what needs to be written, I identify 1 to 3 keyword phases (I don’t think individual words work well now). I work at this, trying to put myself in the shoes of one who will search for this information. If I am building a major page, or one of a set of related topics, I may take the time to visit Overture to find phrases actually entered. ( For details, keywordlot@sitetipsandtricks.com )

Meta Tags

I build a rough draft of the title and description tags before beginning to write. They must serve two purposes. First, the title is the headline of an ad which draws the reader into the ad copy (description). And the description must compel a click to my site. Second, to please the spiders, keywords need to be included, and the closer to the beginning of the statements the better (I try not to think about the fact that some spiders will ignore both tags).

Since Excite limits a title to 70 characters, I try to hold under this. If I go over, I try to work things out so that truncation does little harm. I try to hold the description under 150 characters, the limit at AltaVista. I use these limits because together, AltaVista and Excite dominate among search engines.

These two tags are so vitally important, that I review them as often as I write.

The keyword tag, on the other hand, gets little attention. This tag has been so abused, I simply can’t get a handle on what works best. Some meta tag checkers still claim you ought to use all 1000 characters allowed. This seems unwise.

I include only my keyword phrases, all in lower case. But I do add the plural case and “ing” when appropriate.

The Content

When I begin to write, I think only of communicating as effectively as possible with my visitor. I keep the keywords in mind and seek to build in a theme based upon them. After editing a first draft, I will often lay it aside for a day or two before continuing. My visitors are my target here, not the spiders.

The Spider’s Turn

If I can build some header tags with keywords, I will. I don’t bother with ALT assignments or comments in the source, although this reportedly gives a boost with some search engines.

I work at including keywords as close to the top of the page as possible, in the first 100-200 words. For this is the part of the page in which one expects to find the subject defined, followed by further explanation and expansion. Even now, spiders also expect this.

I also work at rephrasing things to add more repetitions of keywords and to bring them as close to the beginning of paragraphs as possible.

And I make a point of repeating the keywords in the close of the page, a sort of “theme” wrap up, if you will.

One further thing I do is look for words I used so frequently they may dilute the weight of the keywords. For example, if I have used “buildings” too often, I may replace some instances with “structures” or a specific name for a type.

But throughout, I absolutely refuse to sacrifice readability. To me, my visitor is far more important than any search engine.

Other Guidelines

Keyword density is the percentage of words that the keywords are to the total number of words. It is considered quite differently by different spiders. Some suggest as much as 15% of a page be keywords. To me this is nonsense, for it makes the page unintelligible to a visitor. I have never been able to get above 2% without decreasing readability, even when using three keywords.

Page length expected also differs drastically. Many claim short pages are better. 300-600 words is often suggested. But Excite doesn’t care how long a page is. I say what needs saying as briefly as possible and call it good.

Never Look Back

When the page is polished, I submit it to the major search engines. Then I do something you really ought to try.

I never look back. The page is up and that’s that. I’ve got more important things to do than worry about what position it has today. Or where it may be tomorrow. If I’ve done the job properly, my visitors will enjoy the page. And that’s the end of it.

File Structure

She also discussed her definition of site architecture:

• A site’s navigation scheme (referring to image maps, text links, and dynamic content);

• Layout of individual pages;

• How directories are set up on your Web server.

In order for you to sell your products and services, your target audience needs to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible.

Thurow closed with the following reminder. “Make sure your pages have visible text. Give the spiders a suitable link architecture to help them find visible text. Use external files whenever possible. Use the Robots Exclusion Protocol to exclude information that is not important to the search engines. And, keep the most important pages in the top-level directory on your server.”

As with many other things which are unseen, there is a lot of unnecessary mystery surrounding the use of meta-tags on web pages. The meta tags are information slots in the “head” portion of a web page.
Though there are several possible meta tags that may be included in the head of a web page, the ones which are most important for search engine optimization are the Title Tag, the Description tag and the Keywords tag.

TITLE TAG

The title tag is really one of the most important single things you can work on for improving your website’s search engine results. Go to Google and make a search for any particular keyword. If you look at the top ten entries in that search you will see that all of them have this key word in the title, sometimes more than once. So when writing your title tag, it is helpful to have your keywords included in the title tag, and not only in the tag, near the beginning of the title.

Suppose that your company is the Acme Manufacturing Company and you are selling electric widgets and you are located in California. What should your title tag be? Most people would opt for the name of their company as the first word of the title. It makes sense, in that it looks good in the blue strip at the top of the browser, but it doesn’t necessarily help you to get a good ranking in search results for your keywords “electric widgets, California”.

The first few words of your title tag are very important. People may not be searching for Acme Manufacturing, unless it is a very important brand, but they are searching for electric widgets, and they may not want to purchase it from someone in New York, especially if it is not a mail-order type item.

In addition, if there are tons of widget companies, it will be difficult to get to the top of the heap in a search simply for the term “widgets”. But if it is “widgets, California”, then you will have a good chance of getting a high ranking if you put the keyword California prominently in the title. So, if you are in a very competitive category and your customers don’t already know about you, then you might consider a title tag like this “Electric widgets from Acme Manufacturing of California” or even better “Electric Widgets in California produced by Acme Manufacturing.”

Some guidelines for the title tag suggest that this tag be limited to 70-80 characters including spaces. (I confess to have used more on several occasions.)

META DESCRIPTION TAG

The next tag that has to be done is the Description tag. Many search engines use the description tag as a way to tell the searchers what the page is about. On MSN, for example, the description of the site shown underneath the title is the description that has been placed in the description tag.

The description tag is thus important in two respects: the search engine robot searches it for keywords to “get an idea” of what the page is about, and this tag will be seen by the surfers as they scroll down through the search results. If it is an interesting and well-written description then they may click through to visit the site. So this tag should be well written but also contain the important keywords that you wish to highlight.

Going back to our example of Acme Manufacturing. We could make a description tag that reads as follows: “Acme Manufacturing is the largest producer of electric widgets in California, providing round the clock service and warranties on all products.” This description contains the keywords again and also says something about the company.

Some guidelines for description length recommend a maximum length of 250 characters. Once again there is no precision about this, but it is good to be cautious until you are already entered into a search engine’s index.

META KEYWORDS TAG

The last of the important meta tags relevant to search engine optimization is the keywords tag. In this tag you have a chance to list your important keywords, but this time they do not have to be in a coherent phrase as in the Title and Description. Put your important keywords near the beginning. Make sure that all the keywords used in the title and the description tags are again listed. On top of that, add prominent keywords, especially those that appear in the actual text of the page you are optimizing. For the Acme Manufacturing company we could have these keywords: “widgets, widget, electric widgets, California, widgets in California, Acme Manufacturing, service, warranty, warranties.”

Many pundits advise against excessive repetition of any single keyword even if they appear in different phrases separated by commas. Once again the guidelines vary and are not precise but it would be better to be conservative at first. How big should the keywords section be? 800-1000 characters is the estimate provided by some search engines and commentators alike.

The thing to remember about meta tags is that they are just one part of search engine optimization. If your text is keyword rich and your page structure allows the search engines to get to this text easily and if, on top of this, you have crafted your meta tags well, then you have an excellent chance of getting the search engine positioning results that you are aiming for.

You’ve spent the last few months optimizing your web site. You did your homework and learned all about optimizing techniques for your web page. Your relevant keywords are prominently placed in all the right places on your pages. Yet your site still isn’t ranking the way you want. What do you do?

It’s time to improve you link popularity!
Why bother with link building? Link popularity and link quality are very important because every major search engine now considers them as a part of their ranking algorithms. If you don’t have links, you won’t rank well for competitive keywords.

If your page includes all the important on-the-page criteria and scores well with Page Primer, it’s time to focus on your links. Good inbound links can move your page up the ranking ladder and act as new entry points to your site. But how does your site get those coveted inbound links we hear so much about?

First off, let’s make sure we understand the basics. Link popularity is the measure of inbound links to your web site. Link analysis evaluates which sites are linking to you and the link text itself.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to improve your link quality and popularity, which will give you a boost in the rankings. Here are some guidelines to help you set up your own linking campaign:

1. Prepare your site first
Before you start your link building campaign, take time to get your site in shape. Make sure your site looks professional, has good content and is easy to navigate. Validate your HTML code and check your links with a tool like HTML Toolbox. If a potential linker goes to your site and finds broken pages, they are not going to want to link to you.

In addition, directories have gone on record saying they may exclude sites with broken links and page errors. Directories want only professional looking sites in their databases, so do your homework on your site before you start promoting it and your linking campaign will be more effective.

2. Budget time for link building
Don’t expect to grow your link popularity overnight. Budget time every week to work on link building. If you force yourself to spend a couple hours a week on link building, it will become part of your routine. Pick one day a week and set aside time as your “link building time.” If you don’t make it a priority, it won’t get done.

Link building is an incremental activity. Over time these one or two new links start adding up until they are hundreds or even thousands of links.

3. Establish realistic link goals
Don’t expect to see instant results. Link building is difficult, frustrating and time intensive. Convincing another web site to link to you can be exasperating. If you get one good quality link a month you’re doing better than the majority of sites out there.

Patience and creativity are key to link building. Track your progress so you know who you’ve asked already. It could be embarrassing to ask a site for a link if they’ve already given you one.

If a company initially declines your link request, wait a while and then ask again. Their company focus may change over time. A “no” today may change into a “yes” 6 - 9 months later.

4. Develop internal management support
If you’re link building in-house, build support from your company’s internal management for your link building. This usually means educating management about the benefits of link building.

Link popularity is unique to the search engine industry - it’s not taught in graduate schools (not yet, anyway). Sit down with your management and explain the concept behind link building - don’t assume they understand it or have even heard of the term. In fact, most won’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

Explain link building in terms they will understand and in ways that will get their attention, such as describing the relationship of link building and increased revenue. Talking about making more money usually gets management’s attention.

Why worry about management support? You will need it to provide the time and money you need to get into search engines or directories.

5. Link popularity is all about quality
Be selective about the sites from which you request links. Search engines use sophisticated rules when judging the importance of a link, and the popularity of the site linking to you is a key criteria. One link from CNet is worth far more than a link from a personal web site.

And don’t even think of using a link farm! Link farms are sites that exist solely to link to other web sites. Link farms are a blatant attempt to inflate your link popularity, and search engines take a dim view of them. Google in particular has been known to ban sites found using a link farm.

Try to identify non-competitive sites in the same field as your site. Links from sites that are related to your area carry more weight than sites from Aunt Sue’s favorite horse site. That doesn’t mean you should refuse a link from Aunt Sue, just be aware it won’t help you much in link quality terms. On the other hand, links from sites within your industry are strong endorsements for your site.

6. Develop a relationship with a site
Before you ask for the link, get to know the web site. Establish yourself as a real human first. That way, when you ask for a link, it’s harder for them to say no.

Impersonal broadcast emails asking for links are spam. Sure, it’s easier, but it will only result in making another company mad at you. Spam link requests do not work and waste everyone’s time. Don’t do it!

7. Provide the linking code
Make it easy for other sites to link to you. Send the prospective linker the exact HTML code you want in the link and suggest which page you want the link from. This ensures the right words are used in the link and reduces the burden in setting up the link. Everybody on the Internet is pressed for time and if you don’t make it “drop-in simple” by giving them the exact HTML, you’ve made their job too hard. Make it easy and your success rate will go up.

8. Get directory listings
Jumpstart your link campaign by getting directory links first. This is especially important if you have a new site or a site with no inbound links. A shortage of inbound links puts your site at a severe disadvantage because link analysis is an important part of every search engine’s ranking algorithm.

The way to overcome this disadvantage is to get a few quality links. A good way to start is to get listed in as many directories as you can. There are many directories out there, and the more you can get into the better.

A few to target include:

Open Directory
Yahoo
LookSmart
Zeal.com
Joeant.com
Business.com
Be aware that most of these directories require you to pay for a listing. It’s worth the expense.

9. Consider bartering for links
It’s a good idea to have something to offer in return for a link. Many sites won’t link to you unless you link back to them or otherwise make it worth their while. Create a Resources or Partner page that allows you to have a place from which you can easily link to them.

You might also offer to work a barter arrangement with them. If you have a popular site with their target market, they might consider free advertisements in exchange for a link. If the link is of great value to you, be prepared to give something back.

10. Link building alternatives
If time constraints keep you from link building, consider outsourcing your link popularity work. Link building is undoubtedly the most time consuming part of search engine optimization. You may find it is not cost effective to do it in house. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, it just means you hire someone else to do it for you.

Many top SEO firms have turned to outsourcing this function. For example: Jill Whalen of highrankings.com uses Debra O’Neil-Mastaler’s link building firm.

Outsourcing to a reputable link building firm ensures good links and could be a more efficient model for you if you are already time limited.

One word of caution if you do chose to hire a company specializing in link building: make sure any firm you hire follows good link building practices. Ask them to describe the process they use to request links Make sure they follow a personalized approach, and don’t simply spam sites with requests for links.

If they refuse to discuss their link building methods you can assume they use impersonal widespread email drops or link farms - that’s spam. They may call it a fancy name, but if the process involves sending out large numbers of form emails, it’s still spam and will only set your campaign backwards and injure your company’s professional reputation. Go find a different company or develop your links in house.

Just do it!
Link popularity is important and the link building process needs to be given high priority. Link analysis is only going to get more important to search engines, not less. Search engines have found it highly resistant to manipulation and a legitimate way to measure the importance of a site. Since link building takes time, the sooner you start the better.

So think of link building as a long-term investment in your site. Put in a little time now to improve your linking today to insure a good search engine ranking in the future.

Search engine promotion and website rankings are really not that hard so long as you know what to look for and what to do. My biggest asset is that I do way too much reading and I do what many others don’t… research. Every month the engines can easily change their system of ranking the websites. The only way to truly know is to stay on top of it. This involves research. Most importantly it involves knowing where to get the RIGHT answers.

I by know means know what necessarily works best on all the search engines. But then again I focus the majority of my time on the inktomi and Google search engines. If you can rank a site on these search engines, who cares about the rest? I don’t!

So without me babbling on anymore let me point out a few tips for how to rank well on Google. These are no secrets like I said. They are just common sense ways to rank at the top of Google. And I know, because I do it all the time. Try out these techniques, develop your own and see what happens.

Include your keyword In the title: If you want to improve your ranking make sure the keyword is in the title. But also make sure that the title is at least three words. To better enhance this technique. Link the page to another page that has a title that contains the keyword, which is similar, but not the exact same title.

Purchase Multiple Domains: Link popularity is very important. What link popularity does is very simple, the more people linked to you the better your linking (don’t use link farms) My advice and it works for me is buy three domains, link them together, put relevant content on them and watch your ranking rise even higher. One thing I advise is hosts them on different systems. That way the search engine does not penalize you.

Link Farms are SPAMMING! Google has officially let everybody know that if you participate in a link farm you will find yourself banned from the engine so fast your head will spin. A link farm is basically where you submit your site to a site that has hundreds of links, the add your link and in exchange you put there list on your website. This is a link farm, and it is not worth being banned over.

Link Popularity: Let me say that although this has not really affected me yet. I have been told many times that the more people linked to your website increase’s your website ranking. So keep in mind, don’t use link farms. One really easy way to do this is to simply link all of your pages together with a text navigation system. Simple and it works.

Headers: You want to rank higher on goggle. Use headers. Google’s own staff has admitted that this does increase your ranking. Does not make much sense to me but I know it works, so hey give it a try.

Don’t use automated Submitters: The search engines are smarter these days and they really hate automatic submitter. So my advice is do not waste your time on them. Since none of the search engines like them and can sometimes see it as spamming you are better to invest some time and submit it by hand. It does not take that long and it is better then getting a ban!

Cloaking: Can’t say too much here, my advice if you are not an expert search engine guru and coder don’t even bother trying. You will screw yourself in the long run and end up banned.

Pick the right keywords: This is SO important. I am so tired of seeing people that put together these really nice websites and hire some yahoo to submit them and nothing happens. Submitting it properly is only half the battle. Picking the right keywords is more important then anything else. Not only that but matching your content and code to the keywords is VERY important.

I hope that everybody finds this little article useful. And if I get some positive feedback I might even consider writing another article on the other engines… or maybe something a little more complex and with detail.

What If You
Accidentally Spam the Engines?

Google and other search engines will boot anyone using spam tactics to get high rankings. But what if this happens accidentally — or worse still, an unethical search engine contractor uses spam tactics on your site without your knowledge? Believe it or not, there can be light at the end of the tunnel. If your listings suddenly disappear and you suspect something’s wrong, here’s what you can do.

Start From the Beginning

Begin by reviewing some of the possible reasons for your page/s being excluded from the engine database. For instance, Google, and most others, publish a page with Reasons your site may not be included. Take a look at each engine to determine if you have inadvertently breached their guidelines or simply have not followed the correct procedures for getting listed in the database.

If you suspect your page was manually removed from a search engine’s index because of spamming, the engine will likely not comment on the reasons for removal. Furthermore, they will not give you an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal.

Spam Tactics to Avoid

Below are some of the common tactics identified as search engine spam:

Cloaking: When one page is served to search engine crawlers to get a good ranking but a different version of the page is served to search engine users. Sometimes involves changing of meta tags after positioning.

Spoofing/Redirects/Meta Refresh: A meta refresh tag permits visitors to automatically be taken to a different page. When abused, users are taken to content unrelated to their search. Thus search engines are suspicious of pages with a fast meta-refresh rate. Pages using JavaScript to perform redirection are also suspect. Use server-side redirection if legitimate redirection is required.

Domain Spamming: Identical sites found under different domain names to increase search engine traffic, also known as mirror sites.

Tiny Text: Overused to hide keyword stuffing.

Invisible Text: Used to hide keyword stuffing by making the stuffed keywords the same color as the page (white on white).

Deceptive Title and Tags: Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags.

Deceptive/Misleading Links: Setting up pages/links for the sole purpose of deceiving search engines.

Over-submitting: Using the AddURL form to submit hundreds of deceptive pages.

If You Get Caught

If you intentionally spam the engines with any of the above tactics and get caught, the removal of your links will be disturbing when you are penalized. Spamming is not worth the temporary benefits. Search engine marketing done right is a long-lasting marketing investment, so don’t jeopardize your rankings with any suggestion of spamming a search engine. Search engines have many ways to detect spamming with so called spam filters. They also actively encourage spam reporting by users. So even if you get by the spam filters a few times, others might report you, especially your competitors.

Making Your Way Back

If your site was removed from Google’s database, the first thing to do is to clean up the page/s and send a re-inclusion request to help@google.com. Google probably won’t make any guarantees about if and when it will re-include your site. If everything is in order, your site should reappear in a month on the next Google refresh.

Before re-submitting your site, ensure there are no technical problems with your server. Check for any robots.txt files that turn away search engine spiders. Remember, if you use frames or Flash, it can be hard to get indexed. You need plenty of relevant text on your pages and tags to get indexed by search engine crawlers.

In any event, you should contact the search engine in writing. Also make an attempt to contact them by phone. Admit your mistake and make a sincere promise that it will not happen again.

Search Engine Algorithms

Should you worry about the changes in search engine algorithms? Yes, but there are acceptable and unacceptable methods for dealing with these changes. Spamming is simply unacceptable. Currently, the engines are emphasizing relevancy. Algorithms seem to favor relevant content, relevant title and description tags, and a relevant linking strategy. In other words, tell it like it is and be precise in your descriptions. Know what keywords are used to find your site and use those keywords appropriately. Provide good navigation so the engines can crawl deep into your site.

Algorithms have been affected by search engine optimization practices and user behavior. That’s how spamming and best practices have surfaced. That’s why search engines continually adjust their algorithms.

Good Search Engine Visibility

Google is only one search engine; there are many more with substance, integrity, and a large number of users. All of these engines should be referring searchers to your Web site.

There are millions of new web pages being submitted daily, many of them competing for top rankings with your site. Don’t risk your future business online by spamming search engines. It’s your responsibility to know the rules and act responsibly.

The Major Search Engines

Below is a list of the major search engines, their editorial content guidelines, and contact information to settle-up any possible abuse issues:

* MSN: Receives editorial content from Inktomi. Inktomi editorial guidelines. Inktomi’s content policy FAQ will answer most questions on do’s and don’ts or email their spam reporter for help.

* Netscape: Receives editorial content from Google. Google Guidelines are worth reading before getting started. Google partners with Yahoo! and Netscape, providing results to Yahoo! and DMOZ directories. Email googlebot@google.com with the name of your site and a detailed description of your problem. Be honest and be sincere.

* Open Directory Project aka DMOZ: Provides content to several partners including Netscape, Google, AOL, HotBot, Lycos, and Pandia. See guidelines or email any category editor for advice. List of editors appears at the bottom of every ‘category page’ within ODP.

* Yahoo Web Sites and Yahoo Web Pages: How to suggest a site provides basic information about what they expect from you. Or email Yahoo customer care for further assistance.

* AltaVista: Submission Policies will help understand the rules. Alta Vista’s contact e-mail. Include “Search Results Manipulation” in the subject line puts you in touch with their spam reporter.

* AllTheWeb (Fast)/Lycos: Webmaster resources. Here is the Spam Policy and Spam Report email address. Write if you’ve inadvertently made a mistake.

* HotBot: Receives editorial content from Lycos. See guidelines. To contact its Abuse Manager send an email inquiring about your situation.

* AOL Web Sites: Receives editorial content from DMOZ and Google. See suggestions for getting listed. To contact AOL for information write an email and describe your problem.

In a nutshell: Work with all the engines, use their guidelines, admit it when you’ve made a mistake, make written contact, follow-up with phone calls, and be sincere in your request for re-admission into the database.

Remember, your editorial content (a search engine link to your site) below a search engine’s advertising fold is your business’s best means of acquiring a target audience. This audience consists of astute individuals performing searches and research who are interested in what you do. You can’t afford to make mistakes. If you do start with damage control right away.

In October 2002, the Yahoo! portal changed the way it delivers search results. In the past, the most prominent results were exclusively culled from websites listed in the Yahoo directory itself. Since October, sites listed in the Yahoo directory no longer enjoy this privileged status.
The Google search engine now drives the primary search results on Yahoo. While this is certainly an improvement for users of Yahoo search, it’s a disaster for many businesses that counted on their Yahoo listing to deliver substantial traffic.

This change has also led many site owners to question the value of a listing in the Yahoo directory. In this article, I will outline the pros and cons of maintaining, or paying for, a Yahoo listing. In the process, I will delve into more details of the recent changes.

Argument #1: Yahoo Listings Mean Link Popularity

PRO:
Even if the Yahoo listing itself delivers little or no traffic, other search engines will rank your website higher if it’s listed in Yahoo. Because Yahoo is so important, a link from Yahoo counts more than a regular link. Thanks to its higher “PageRank,” Yahoo means even more to Google.

CON:
Yahoo listings do not deliver nearly as significant a contribution in this area as you might think. You can verify this by doing a “backward links” search on Google for any Yahoo-listed website. The most important links are listed first, and the Yahoo listing is rarely even on the first page of links for top ranked sites on Google.

Argument #2: Listed Sites Look Better In The Search Results

PRO:
Websites with a Yahoo listing show up in the combined Yahoo/Google results with their title, description, and category from the Yahoo directory. This may boost the response when the site appears in the search results. This applies when the URL listed in the results is the same as the URL in the Yahoo listing.

CON:
Results listed with Yahoo information include a link to the site’s category, which may prompt surfers to pass over your listing and go to the category. Sites without Yahoo listings have the more inviting “search within this site” link, which leads to more results exclusively from your site.

So, Is A Yahoo Listing Worth It?

If you have a non-commercial site and can get listed for free, of course! If you’re not one of the lucky few, though, you have to evaluate whether it’s worth $299 a year for what amounts to a better than average incoming link. Everyone must make their own decision. If $299 is small compared to your total marketing budget, it may be easier to just continue paying. My own listing expires in March, and I don’t intend to renew it.

How Can You Profit From The Changes At Yahoo?

The obvious answer is that you must take steps to improve your own position in Google’s search results. Google’s rankings are made up of many factors, but the dominant factor is “PageRank,” which is based on the number and quality of incoming links from other websites.

Therefore, the first step in improving your position on the Google search engine (and now Yahoo) is to improve your site’s link popularity. This takes time, and trying to take shortcuts can get you into real trouble - Google doesn’t like “link farms,” or any program designed to artificially boost your link popularity.

Finding Quality Link Partners Through Google

Since only links from quality sites will count for much with Google, let’s take a quick look at how you can find these sites. Start by targeting the sites that link to existing top-ranked sites. You can do a backward links search for any site by typing “link:http://www.domain.com” in the Google search engine.

An even faster method is to use the Google toolbar, which requires Internet Explorer 5 or greater, running on Windows. With the toolbar’s advanced features enabled, you can conduct a “backward links” search from the “Page Info” menu for any site you visit.

Since Google lists these results in descending order by “PageRank,” you can quickly determine the best places to get links by doing backward links searches on the top 10-20 sites for your desired search terms, and seeking links from the top 10-20 places that link to them.

Links Are Not Enough: Optimizing For Google

While “PageRank” is the dominant factor in Google’s algorithm, it’s not the only factor, and you still need to optimize your web pages. This can be a complicated topic, but the most important factors are:

- Keywords in the title of the page
- Keywords in headings on the page (H1 or H2 tags), especially the first heading.
- Keywords in the body text of the page, particularly the first paragraph.

Don’t Complain, Act!

By some estimates, Google now controls 2/3rds of the searches conducted on the Internet in a given day. Not only is Google.com extremely popular in its own right, but Google also controls the search results on popular portals like AOL and Iwon.com - not to mention Yahoo.

A lot of website owners are complaining bitterly about this change. All the more reason for you to take action now, while so many of your competitors are busy licking their wounds. With a little planning and effort, you could be in a dominant position on Google before they even get started.

Ever since there have been search engines, there have been techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady search engine optimization firms have used to artificially boost rankings. As search engines caught on to these techniques, they devised ways to detect them without having someone physically look at each site (a practical impossibility, considering that several individual engines now index well over a billion pages). While most engines are becoming more adept at detecting “spam” pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side effect to this efficiency- some companies that are innocent of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall into the “spam” category. What follows is a list of some of the issues that can hurt such sites, followed by suggestions of how to prevent penalization or removal.

Issue #1: Bad Links.

Much of the internet is founded on sites linking to one another (a search engine itself is really just a very large collection of links). However, with the relatively recent emphasis placed upon a site’s links as part of the ranking formula (commonly called “link popularity”), it has become crucial to carefully select and closely monitor the sites with which you exchange links. Google, the pioneer of this ranking methodology, often penalizes sites that provide links to what they call “bad neighborhoods”- sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for artificially boosting link popularity. It is important to note that sites are only penalized when they actively link to another site, not when a site links to them (which is only fair, as webmasters have no real control over what sites choose to link to theirs). If any page of your site contains links to outside sites, it is important to make certain that these outside sites are not being penalized. The easiest way to do this on Google is to download the Google toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/). Most pages that you find on the internet have been assigned a “Pagerank”, which is represented by a sliding green scale on the toolbar (visit the link to see an example). To be safe, avoid linking to any site that does not show any green on this scale (most importantly when this scale is grayed out). Such sites may be penalized, and linking to them may get your site penalized in turn (do not, however, refrain from exchanging links with sites simply because they show just a sliver of green- these sites are not being penalized and links from them may become more valuable over time). It is also very important to monitor the sites that you link to periodically to make certain that they have not been penalized since you originally added their link to your site.

Issue #2: Hidden Text.

Almost all search engines use the words on the pages of web sites as one factor in their ranking equation. This means that if the text on your pages includes your keyphrases, you have a better chance of ranking highly for those phrases than a competing page that does not include them. Some webmasters, aware of this but not wanting their visitors to actually see the text (usually for “aesthetic” reasons), began taking keyphrase-rich text and making it the same color as the page background. For example, if a page had a white background, they would add text to the page, loaded with keyphrases, in the same shade of white. A human visitor would not be able to see the text, but the search engine “spider” (the programs that search engines use to go out and index web pages) would, and it would get a ranking boost accordingly. However, engines soon caught on and began penalizing pages that used this tactic. Unfortunately, some innocent sites are still penalized for this, even though the text on their pages is visible. Say, for example, that the background of a page is white. On this white background is a large blue box that has white text within it. Even though the text is clearly visible to the visitor, the search engine is not smart enough to realize that the white text appears in a blue box- it just assumes that the white text has been placed on a white background. To avoid any potential problems, it is important that you let your webmaster know that the text on your pages should never be the same color as the assigned background color.

Issue #3: Keyword Stuffing.

As mentioned above, the words on your pages can be an important factor in the ranking of your web pages. However, it is entirely possible to have too much of a good thing. “Keyphrase Density”, as it is commonly called, is the ratio of keyphrases on your page to the overall number of words on the page. While different engines prefer different keyphrase density, almost all have an upper limit, after which pages can be penalized. In most cases, this threshold would be hard to break without the text sounding inane. However, particularly when a keyphrase is part of a company name, density can accidentally become unnaturally high. For example, if your company name was “Atlanta Plumbing Pros” and you styled your text so that this company name was used in almost every sentence, you would have a dangerously high density for the phrase “Atlanta Plumbing” and would be at risk of penalization. To correct any potential problems, go over the text on each of your pages and make certain that it reads naturally and that no phrases are repeated too frequently (for example in more than half of the sentences).

Issue #4: Cloaking

Cloaking, loosely defined, is the practice of showing a search engine spider a different page than what an actual human visitor sees. This means that the server of a cloaked page makes a note of the unique address assigned to each visitor, and when that visitor is a spider, it feeds it specialized content that is designed to rank highly for certain search terms. Virtually every major engine now imposes harsh penalties on sites that use cloaking (although a few of them will allow you to pay them for the privilege, but that’s a topic for a future article). Unfortunately, the intent of cloaking isn’t always necessarily to trick search engines. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked simply to prevent others from stealing the underlying code (such theft is commonly called “pagejacking”). This concern, however, is somewhat unfounded today. With the increased emphasis of “off the page” elements, such as link popularity, an unscrupulous webmaster could steal the code from a high-ranking page and replicate it exactly without achieving the same high rankings. In any case, the practice of cloaking, for whatever reason, puts your site at risk of being penalized or removed from major engines, so make sure that your webmaster does not employ the technique.

Conclusion:

Search engines are becoming increasingly cognizant of the techniques used to try to fool them, and they are also becoming better at detecting and removing pages that violate their terms of service. It’s important to remember that search engines make decisions on how to rank pages based upon extensive studies of their users and their preferences, and any webmaster or optimization firm that claims to know better (and subsequently uses underhanded techniques) is doing a disservice to their client. Unfortunately, however, sometimes the spam detection methods that the engines use target good sites that inadvertently meet the criteria for removal or penalization. By paying attention to the four issues above, you can help ensure that your site isn’t one of them.