Friday, February 8, 2008
Optimized Web Page
The best thing is to write down who you think the target is. Be as detailed as possible. For example, your target may be a 30-45 year old female, in middle management, who drives a mini-van and takes her 3 kids to school before she goes to work. She makes $45,000 per year and has a bachelors degree in finance. This is the type of detail you need. You should be able to picture this person in your mind. Not just the abstract idea of her, but a physical look as well. the better you can picture them in your mind the more successful you will be.
Search Engine Optimization
‘Why does every SEO company promise the earth, and deliver nothing’?
‘Is there anything I can do myself to increase my keyword listings’?
I get these sort questions many times every single day, and you should realise that SEO is not really difficult or expensive, but it can be time consuming and people place different values on their time. Some SEO ’s may also take into account what each client might gain from a great SEO experience.
‘Is there anything I can do myself to increase my keyword listings’?
I get these sort questions many times every single day, and you should realise that SEO is not really difficult or expensive, but it can be time consuming and people place different values on their time. Some SEO ’s may also take into account what each client might gain from a great SEO experience.
30 SEO Tips
SEO consists of two fundamental elements: producing search-engine-friendly content and obtaining high-quality inbound links. There is a third element that you should take seriously: staying on the right side of Google and avoiding Google penalties at all costs, since Google is the foremost search engine and getting banned is pretty much a death sentence for a website, especially if it is a young website without an established following. If you follow the SEO tips in this article your website will attract a lot of traffic from the search engines and will grow exponentially.
A. Producing search engine-optimised content
1. Produce excellent copy
Your content should be written extremely well; great copywriting is the heart and soul of SEO. Firstly, excellent writing is better for your users and is more likely to attract inbound links. Secondly, Google has ways, some of them very subtle, of determining just how good and useful a piece of writing is (see latent semantic indexing). Write with your users in mind, with a view to giving them the best and most useful experience possible. With regard to Google’s subtle ways of assessing the quality of a piece of writing, you should avoid using the same keywords again and again, even if it feels natural to do so. Instead, you should use of a variety of synonyms for every keyword. This makes your writing more readable and interesting, and also persuades Google that your content is not run-of-the-mill spam, but authoritative and useful.
2. Content is king
The only thing Google respects is high-quality text with some links pointing to it. Google considers websites that constantly add content much more useful than websites that add content infrequently. For this reason you should set yourself a realistic target for the production of new content and stick to it. Depending on how ambitious you are, you can aim for one new page of content per day or per week. Whatever you choose, remember that Google likes fresh content. It has an intrinsic preference for websites that focus on creating new content over websites that keep tweaking their existing content again and again. In other words, Google wants to see that you are working on producing new content, not on optimizing content that you already have on your website. The ideal word count for each page is between 500 and 1500 words.
3. Use the Google sandbox
The Google sandbox is an incredibly useful tool that suggests keywords and key phrases on the basis of what people have been searching recently. For example, you might type "SEO consultant" and the Google sandbox will tell you that, in addition to searching for "SEO consultant," other frequent searches are "SEO expert" and "SEO services." Using the Google sandbox will give you an inexhaustible supply of ideas for the creation of fresh content. Put simply, you use Google’s sandbox to find out what people are searching for, and you then write content that targets those keywords. The aim is, of course, to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for those queries.
4. Use the h1 tag
The h1 tag is one of the great secrets of SEO. The h1 tag tells search engines that this is the main title of the page ("heading #1"). The h1 tag is an incredibly powerful tool and Google takes it seriously, providing it is substantiated by the page’s content. In other words, the words in the h1 title tag should also appear in the main text. Using the h1 tag is an excellent way to optimize a page for specific keywords.
Here is how you use the h1 tag:
The h1 tag will make the text quite large; you can have the benefit of the h1 tag without such enormous text by using CSS to format it as desired.
You should also use the h2 and h3 tags for your sub-headings, making the content of your page hierarchical.
5. Keyword density
The keywords you are targeting should appear in the main body of your text reasonably frequently, but don’t overdo it: a page that is stuffed with keywords destroys the credibility of your website and is easily identified by Google as spam. Putting your keywords at the beginning of the page, in most of the paragraphs, and somewhere near the end will be quite sufficient. Do not forget the importance of using synonyms too, as mentioned above. If you want to check the keyword density for a page, you can use this keyword density tool.
6. Use bold, italics and underlining on keywords
When you bold, italicize or underline a word, Google assumes that this is one of your keywords. You should therefore bold, italicize or underline some of the keywords on your page.
Be very careful, because this can also work against you: if you use bold, italics or underlining on words that are not keywords, you will confuse Google and will weaken the effect of these tags on your real keywords.
7. Keywords in the URL
Deciding the URL of a page is an important part of SEO. The page should have a file name that contains your keywords, and the page should be in a directory that also has keywords in its name. For both the directory and the page itself, the keywords should be separated by dashes.
You should follow a sensible rationale when deciding what to call directories and files; it should reflect the hierarchical nature of your website. For example, if you are writing a page about obtaining inbound links, a good URL for it would be:
polyseo.com/seo-tips/how-to-obtain-inbound-links.html
This is a good URL for these reasons:
a) "SEO tips" and "how to obtain inbound links" are related queries and Google knows it;
b) "how to obtain inbound links" is a subset of "SEO tips." Google will give you extra respect for using hierarchical URLs. Don’t forget that Google was developed by two clever mathematicians!
Depending on exactly what pages you plan to create for your website, there are several ways of naming a URL. For example, with regard to the example above, if you’re going to write many different articles on the topic of "links," you could name your URLs as follows:
polyseo.com/SEO/links/how-to-obtain-inbound-links.html
polyseo.com/SEO/links/why-outbound-links-will-benefit-your-website.html
and so on. (In this example "how to obtain inbound links" is a sub-category of "links," and "links" is in turn a sub-category of "SEO." Furthermore, all three sets are related to each other: they are all about SEO.)
8. Use a high content-to-code ratio
Search engines will give your page a higher ranking if it has a lot of text relative to the amount of code. You should aim for a high signal-to-noise ratio on your page, which means that there should be more content than code. Open any page on the Internet, righ-click on it and select "view source" (or its equivalent). If there is a lot more code than text, search engines are not going to love it.
If you are serious about SEO you will produce pages with good, clean HTML and will avoid anything that requires a lot of code. A small amount of HTML code and a lot of quality text is what search engines (and users) really love.
9. Split substantial articles into several pages
If you write an article about a big topic, it is inevitable that the article will in fact deal with a number of sub-topics. In these cases you should split the article into several pages: one page for each subtopic. This has the following advantages:
a) you will be able to have highly focused search-engine optimisation that targets each specific page, instead of trying to optimize one enormous page for keywords that are relevant to only 10% of it. Remember that Google decides what content is about on a page-by-page basis: this means that every page should focus on one topic - only one;
b) users prefer to read articles that are split over several pages rather than articles that have the "toilet roll" format. The links that take you from one page to the next should have the target page’s title as the anchor text (more about this later).
The page you are reading is an exception; pages with a list of tips generally work better as a single page, even if very long.
10. Avoid frames like the plague
From the point of view of SEO, frames must rank amongst the most disastrous thing you can do. Users hate them, and search engines hate them even more. Put simply, search engines are not able to index websites that use frames; the most they can do is index your homepage. For all intents and purposes you will simply not be present in search engine indexes if your website uses frames. The brilliant Jakob Nielsen has more to say about why frames suck.
11. Avoid Flash like the plague
After frames, Flash is the biggest enemy of SEO and usability. Search engines are not able to read Flash files. Therefore any text displayed on the Flash page will not be read by the search engines and will not give you any SEO benefit. As importantly, Flash is an enormous barrier between your website and its users. I have always found Flash-based websites extremely frustrating and very often leave before the homepage has even finished loading. In the rare occasions in which I waited for the home page to load, the website invariably turned out not to be worth the wait. Truly useful websites have indexable content, preferably in the HTML format. Good, clean, minimalist HTML code is the true friend of SEO. Do not use Flash if you are serious about SEO and getting real traffic from the search engines.
12. Interlink your pages
Every page on your website should have at least a couple of contextual links that point to other pages on your website. These links should follow naturally from the content of your page. For example, if your page mentions an SEO consultant, you can use those words to link to a page that is relevant to them. That’s a contextual link.
This will ensure that Google PageRank will be shared among your pages, and is an additional way of telling Google what your pages are about.
13. Put high-quality outbound links on every page
Every page of the content on your website should also have at least one contextual link that points to a high-quality external website. It has been shown experimentally that Google gives a higher ranking to pages that link to a high-quality external websites. In other words, other things being equal, a page with good outbound links will be placed higher in the search engine results pages than a page with no outbound links.
Deciding who to link to is relatively simple. Choose a word or group of words in your text and do a search on Google. Look at the top 3 or 4 websites and choose one that does not compete with you. Go back to your page and make those keywords the anchor text for an outbound link that points to that high-ranking external website. Google will love you for linking to a website that it deems to be of a high quality, especially if the link’s anchor text has words for which that website ranks very high on Google. Doing this on every page in your website will have the following major advantages:
a) as mentioned above, Google will give you a higher placing in its results pages;
b) it shows your users that you are in good faith and not a sleazy spammer. Remember that the traffic you get from the higher Google ranking will massively outweigh the traffic you will lose through the outbound links, and in any case people will only leave your website if they have not found what they are looking for, in which case they would have left anyway. Outbound links will have the net effect of increasing your website traffic.
14. Produce an HTML sitemap
By "sitemap" I do not mean those special files that tell search engines about the structure and your website, although that kind of sitemap is a good idea too. In this instance I am referring to an HTML page that contains links to every single page on your website, just like a directory. There are two reasons that make such a page essential:
a) f or the purposes of SEO, no page should be more than two clicks away from your homepage. Search engines do not like pages that need a lot of clicks to be found. Furthermore, it makes every page on your website receive some of the Google PageRank of your homepage (the homepage will inevitably have a higher PageRank than any other page on the website);
b) it is extremely useful for users to be able to access any page on your website from a single page of links. In this way they can access a page very quickly, even if it is the last page of multi-page article.
15. Put the menu on the right
To make your website even more search engine- friendly, consider putting the menu on the right, as with this website. This will ensure that the first thing Google sees after the section is your content. This is because search engines read pages from top to bottom and from left to right. Putting the menu on the right-hand side ensures that search engines will come to it after your main content. This is related to having a high signal-to-noise ratio.
16. The tag<br /><br />This is vital because, like the h1 tag, it tells search engines what you claim your page to be about. The title tag should have the same contents as the h1 tag. The title tag for this page is:<br /><br /><title>SEO tips
17. Produce META tags with great care
There are three META tags of interest in SEO: ROBOTS, CONTENT and KEYWORDS. The first two are vital; the third no longer plays a big role.
The robots tag should be as follows:
The contents tag should be identical or similar to the title tag - it has been found that Google loves this. The content tag for this page is as follows:
In the dark ages of the pre-Google anarchy the keywords meta-tag was taken very seriously by the primordial search engines. Accordingly, the SERPs were dominated by spam websites that stuffed their meta-tags with keywords. Nowadays the keyword tag is almost irrelevant. By all means include it, but make absolutely sure that no keyword appears in the tag more than once. Do not put more than 20 words in the meta-tag. The keywords meta tag for this page is as follows:
18. Remember that search engines cannot read pictures
The essence of SEO is putting high-quality content on a page, and making sure that search engines can fully read and understand the content. This means that the heart of SEO is quality text. Any text that is displayed as a JPEG file or other graphics cannot be read by the search engines. Look at the source code of a webpage: that’s what search engine can see. If you can’t read it in the source code, search engines will not be able to read it either, and you will therefore get no search-engine credit for it. I have seen entire articles displayed as a JPEG file. The author is probably despairing over why Google won’t show it in its search results at all.
Therefore, do not use graphics to display content. This does not mean that you should not use pictures; when used appropriately, pictures enhance your users’ experience and make your content more useful.
You can tell search engines what a picture is about by using the ALT tag. Make sure that the description in the ALT tag faithfully describes the content of the picture; stuffing athe ALT tag with keywords that are not relevant to the picture is considered spam.
19. Make sure you have "index, follow" in the ROBOTS tag
Every single page on your website should have this tag. It tells search engine spiders to index the page, and it also tells them to follow all links to their respective target pages. This is useful in making sure that all the pages on your website are indexed.
Spiders are programs that search engines use to analyze pages on the Internet; they go from page to page, following links and reading every page, making decisions on their quality and keeping a copy in order to show them on the search results pages for relevant queries. SEO is essentially about convincing these automated programs that a given page deserves to rank highly for a specific search query.
20. When you produce a new page of content, link to it from the homepage
Once your homepage has a few quality inbound links, Google will regularly spider your homepage. Therefore, a good way to make sure that Google spiders and indexes a new page as soon as possible is to link to it from the homepage. Search engines will follow the link and index the target page within a few days.
21. Use a unique IP address for your website
It is very important that your website be associated with a single, unequivocal IP address. There are two reasons for this:
a) if you use a shared IP address and another website with that IP address gets a Google penalty, your website will also suffer;
b) Google will take your website a lot more seriously if it has a unique IP address.
Having a unique IP address for your website will cost you a few extra dollars a month but it is undoubtedly worth it.
22. Use a quality web host
You cannot develop a successful website without using a reputable, high-quality web host. You should also make sure that you have a top-notch traffic statistics program that will display detailed data regarding your traffic and search engine referrals.
B. Links
23. Get inbound links
Inbound links are the kingpin of the Google algorithm. Google revolutionized online search by introducing a simple but very effective answer to a complicated question: "If a user performs a search for widgets, and there are one million web pages about widgets, how do we decide the order in which these web pages should be presented in the search results? In other words, how do we rank them?"
The answer provided by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was simple: pages that have more links pointing to them are more likely to be useful than pages with fewer links pointing to them. Google considers inbound links as votes in favor of a particular webpage.
It is therefore absolutely imperative to obtain inbound links that point to your website and to content pages within your website. The links that are most beneficial are one-way inbound links: links that point to your website without your website linking back. Google considers these the most genuine endorsements and therefore the most reliable indicator of a page’s objective usefulness. Buying links is a great way to obtain high-quality links quickly. Text Link Ads is the most reputable link broker and offers a wopping $100 in FREE Links to new advertisers.
How much weight Google will give to a link depends on the page’s PageRank and on whether the link’s target page is related to the content on the linking page. In other words, a link pointing to a page about SEO is worth more if is in a page about SEO; if the link is on a page about cars, it will be less beneficial.
24. Link anchor text is important
The anchor text of links is extremely important, because it answers Google’s all-important question: what do users think this page is about? The more relevant the the inbound link’s anchor text is to the target page, the more the page will benefit. The most beneficial links for SEO purposes are one-way inbound links with relevant anchor text. If you manage to get a one-way inbound link with a anchor text that contains the words in the target page’s h1 tag, to Google this is an independent third party confirming the topic and usefulness of your page, and your ranking will go through the roof. Such links are worth pursuing.
This is not to say that other links are useless. Getting inbound links from pages with a high PageRank, even if the links are reciprocated, will still be beneficial. Links with "click here" as the anchor text should be avoided as they do not tell Google what the linker thinks the target page is about.
Probably the only way to start out with links is to start e-mailing webmasters, once you have produced some quality content, and ask to trade links. Most will decline, but some will say yes, and this will get you started. Remember that no decent website will link to you unless it has free useful content. Part of the point of writing excellent content is to obtain natural, unsolicited one-way inbound links. For this reason, such content is sometimes referred to as link bait.
25. Use advertising to generate some traffic
A website’s traffic should grow exponentially once a certain critical level of traffic is reached, because the more people visit your website, the more incoming links you will get, the higher your ranking will be, which in turn will bring in more traffic - assuming, of course, that your website offers value to its visitors. If you follow the SEO tips in this article your website will get good search engine traffic from the get-go.
Precisely because traffic breeds more traffic, you might want to consider spending a small amount of money on advertising at the beginning. Although advertising does not have a search engine benefit, the extra visitors it brings might link to your useful content, which will have an SEO benefit. Google’s Adsense is a cool program for this sort of thing.
26. Post in forums
An excellent way of getting one-way inbound links is to post in forums and place contextual links pointing to pages on your website, in addition to a link to your homepage in your signature. Of course this is only acceptable (and beneficial) if the forum’s topic is the same as your website’s.
Make sure all such links have anchor text that is a highly focused on the target page’s content. Not all forums make this possible, but I have seen several that publish posts as HTML pages and that allow links. The most beneficial forums are those that allow you to post a link without the rel=nofollow tag. Of course, make sure that you write quality posts that add value to the forum, or your posts will be considered spam. Also, the outbound links will be worth more if they are embedded within a good chunk of quality text.
27. Use press releases to obtain backlinks
A great way to obtain one-way inbound links is to broadcast a press release through an online service. By all accounts PRWeb is the best facility for this sort of thing. Make sure that your press release is well-written and interesting, and of course make sure that it has a link to your website.
28. Do not link to bad websites
If you link to a website that Google has penalized or that for some other reason Google considers to be a bad website, your website will be penalized. Google will not penalize you if a bad website links to you, but it will penalize you if you link to a bad website. For this reason you should only link to the best websites, and you should check those links frequently to ensure that the website does not have a new, spammy owner (it can happen).
You should avoid so-called bad neighborhoods. Bad neighborhoods are clusters of interlinked websites that are suffering a Google penalty (maybe without even realizing it). If you link to a website which in turn links to a penalized website, you are part of a bad neighborhood. Avoid this like the plague.
29. Produce link bait
One-way inbound links are essential to SEO. The only reason anyone will ever link to you is if you have something useful or interesting on your website. I have already stressed the importance of writing great content. Other examples of link bait include:
* free resources, such as my free SEO tools;
* offering a free e-book for download (make it a PDF file with at least one link to your website).
30. Staying on the right side of Google
The third vital element in search engine optimisation is avoiding anything that is even remotely spammy or unethical. You should follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines scrupulously. If you do any of the things banned by the Google Webmaster Guidelines, sooner or later Google will find out and penalize your website. The following tricks are expressly prohibited by Google:
* Cloaking: this means displaying a different version of your website depending on the IP address of those accessing it
* Redirecting your homepage to another page
* Using text that is the same color as the background
* Hidden links
* Registering many domains and interlinking them all
The Google algorithm has become very sophisticated and if you breach any of the Google Webmaster Guidelines sooner or later your infractions will be detected and you will be subjected to a penalty. An irritated user might also file a Google spam report.
A. Producing search engine-optimised content
1. Produce excellent copy
Your content should be written extremely well; great copywriting is the heart and soul of SEO. Firstly, excellent writing is better for your users and is more likely to attract inbound links. Secondly, Google has ways, some of them very subtle, of determining just how good and useful a piece of writing is (see latent semantic indexing). Write with your users in mind, with a view to giving them the best and most useful experience possible. With regard to Google’s subtle ways of assessing the quality of a piece of writing, you should avoid using the same keywords again and again, even if it feels natural to do so. Instead, you should use of a variety of synonyms for every keyword. This makes your writing more readable and interesting, and also persuades Google that your content is not run-of-the-mill spam, but authoritative and useful.
2. Content is king
The only thing Google respects is high-quality text with some links pointing to it. Google considers websites that constantly add content much more useful than websites that add content infrequently. For this reason you should set yourself a realistic target for the production of new content and stick to it. Depending on how ambitious you are, you can aim for one new page of content per day or per week. Whatever you choose, remember that Google likes fresh content. It has an intrinsic preference for websites that focus on creating new content over websites that keep tweaking their existing content again and again. In other words, Google wants to see that you are working on producing new content, not on optimizing content that you already have on your website. The ideal word count for each page is between 500 and 1500 words.
3. Use the Google sandbox
The Google sandbox is an incredibly useful tool that suggests keywords and key phrases on the basis of what people have been searching recently. For example, you might type "SEO consultant" and the Google sandbox will tell you that, in addition to searching for "SEO consultant," other frequent searches are "SEO expert" and "SEO services." Using the Google sandbox will give you an inexhaustible supply of ideas for the creation of fresh content. Put simply, you use Google’s sandbox to find out what people are searching for, and you then write content that targets those keywords. The aim is, of course, to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for those queries.
4. Use the h1 tag
The h1 tag is one of the great secrets of SEO. The h1 tag tells search engines that this is the main title of the page ("heading #1"). The h1 tag is an incredibly powerful tool and Google takes it seriously, providing it is substantiated by the page’s content. In other words, the words in the h1 title tag should also appear in the main text. Using the h1 tag is an excellent way to optimize a page for specific keywords.
Here is how you use the h1 tag:
Your keywords
The h1 tag will make the text quite large; you can have the benefit of the h1 tag without such enormous text by using CSS to format it as desired.
You should also use the h2 and h3 tags for your sub-headings, making the content of your page hierarchical.
5. Keyword density
The keywords you are targeting should appear in the main body of your text reasonably frequently, but don’t overdo it: a page that is stuffed with keywords destroys the credibility of your website and is easily identified by Google as spam. Putting your keywords at the beginning of the page, in most of the paragraphs, and somewhere near the end will be quite sufficient. Do not forget the importance of using synonyms too, as mentioned above. If you want to check the keyword density for a page, you can use this keyword density tool.
6. Use bold, italics and underlining on keywords
When you bold, italicize or underline a word, Google assumes that this is one of your keywords. You should therefore bold, italicize or underline some of the keywords on your page.
Be very careful, because this can also work against you: if you use bold, italics or underlining on words that are not keywords, you will confuse Google and will weaken the effect of these tags on your real keywords.
7. Keywords in the URL
Deciding the URL of a page is an important part of SEO. The page should have a file name that contains your keywords, and the page should be in a directory that also has keywords in its name. For both the directory and the page itself, the keywords should be separated by dashes.
You should follow a sensible rationale when deciding what to call directories and files; it should reflect the hierarchical nature of your website. For example, if you are writing a page about obtaining inbound links, a good URL for it would be:
polyseo.com/seo-tips/how-to-obtain-inbound-links.html
This is a good URL for these reasons:
a) "SEO tips" and "how to obtain inbound links" are related queries and Google knows it;
b) "how to obtain inbound links" is a subset of "SEO tips." Google will give you extra respect for using hierarchical URLs. Don’t forget that Google was developed by two clever mathematicians!
Depending on exactly what pages you plan to create for your website, there are several ways of naming a URL. For example, with regard to the example above, if you’re going to write many different articles on the topic of "links," you could name your URLs as follows:
polyseo.com/SEO/links/how-to-obtain-inbound-links.html
polyseo.com/SEO/links/why-outbound-links-will-benefit-your-website.html
and so on. (In this example "how to obtain inbound links" is a sub-category of "links," and "links" is in turn a sub-category of "SEO." Furthermore, all three sets are related to each other: they are all about SEO.)
8. Use a high content-to-code ratio
Search engines will give your page a higher ranking if it has a lot of text relative to the amount of code. You should aim for a high signal-to-noise ratio on your page, which means that there should be more content than code. Open any page on the Internet, righ-click on it and select "view source" (or its equivalent). If there is a lot more code than text, search engines are not going to love it.
If you are serious about SEO you will produce pages with good, clean HTML and will avoid anything that requires a lot of code. A small amount of HTML code and a lot of quality text is what search engines (and users) really love.
9. Split substantial articles into several pages
If you write an article about a big topic, it is inevitable that the article will in fact deal with a number of sub-topics. In these cases you should split the article into several pages: one page for each subtopic. This has the following advantages:
a) you will be able to have highly focused search-engine optimisation that targets each specific page, instead of trying to optimize one enormous page for keywords that are relevant to only 10% of it. Remember that Google decides what content is about on a page-by-page basis: this means that every page should focus on one topic - only one;
b) users prefer to read articles that are split over several pages rather than articles that have the "toilet roll" format. The links that take you from one page to the next should have the target page’s title as the anchor text (more about this later).
The page you are reading is an exception; pages with a list of tips generally work better as a single page, even if very long.
10. Avoid frames like the plague
From the point of view of SEO, frames must rank amongst the most disastrous thing you can do. Users hate them, and search engines hate them even more. Put simply, search engines are not able to index websites that use frames; the most they can do is index your homepage. For all intents and purposes you will simply not be present in search engine indexes if your website uses frames. The brilliant Jakob Nielsen has more to say about why frames suck.
11. Avoid Flash like the plague
After frames, Flash is the biggest enemy of SEO and usability. Search engines are not able to read Flash files. Therefore any text displayed on the Flash page will not be read by the search engines and will not give you any SEO benefit. As importantly, Flash is an enormous barrier between your website and its users. I have always found Flash-based websites extremely frustrating and very often leave before the homepage has even finished loading. In the rare occasions in which I waited for the home page to load, the website invariably turned out not to be worth the wait. Truly useful websites have indexable content, preferably in the HTML format. Good, clean, minimalist HTML code is the true friend of SEO. Do not use Flash if you are serious about SEO and getting real traffic from the search engines.
12. Interlink your pages
Every page on your website should have at least a couple of contextual links that point to other pages on your website. These links should follow naturally from the content of your page. For example, if your page mentions an SEO consultant, you can use those words to link to a page that is relevant to them. That’s a contextual link.
This will ensure that Google PageRank will be shared among your pages, and is an additional way of telling Google what your pages are about.
13. Put high-quality outbound links on every page
Every page of the content on your website should also have at least one contextual link that points to a high-quality external website. It has been shown experimentally that Google gives a higher ranking to pages that link to a high-quality external websites. In other words, other things being equal, a page with good outbound links will be placed higher in the search engine results pages than a page with no outbound links.
Deciding who to link to is relatively simple. Choose a word or group of words in your text and do a search on Google. Look at the top 3 or 4 websites and choose one that does not compete with you. Go back to your page and make those keywords the anchor text for an outbound link that points to that high-ranking external website. Google will love you for linking to a website that it deems to be of a high quality, especially if the link’s anchor text has words for which that website ranks very high on Google. Doing this on every page in your website will have the following major advantages:
a) as mentioned above, Google will give you a higher placing in its results pages;
b) it shows your users that you are in good faith and not a sleazy spammer. Remember that the traffic you get from the higher Google ranking will massively outweigh the traffic you will lose through the outbound links, and in any case people will only leave your website if they have not found what they are looking for, in which case they would have left anyway. Outbound links will have the net effect of increasing your website traffic.
14. Produce an HTML sitemap
By "sitemap" I do not mean those special files that tell search engines about the structure and your website, although that kind of sitemap is a good idea too. In this instance I am referring to an HTML page that contains links to every single page on your website, just like a directory. There are two reasons that make such a page essential:
a) f or the purposes of SEO, no page should be more than two clicks away from your homepage. Search engines do not like pages that need a lot of clicks to be found. Furthermore, it makes every page on your website receive some of the Google PageRank of your homepage (the homepage will inevitably have a higher PageRank than any other page on the website);
b) it is extremely useful for users to be able to access any page on your website from a single page of links. In this way they can access a page very quickly, even if it is the last page of multi-page article.
15. Put the menu on the right
To make your website even more search engine- friendly, consider putting the menu on the right, as with this website. This will ensure that the first thing Google sees after the section is your content. This is because search engines read pages from top to bottom and from left to right. Putting the menu on the right-hand side ensures that search engines will come to it after your main content. This is related to having a high signal-to-noise ratio.
16. The
17. Produce META tags with great care
There are three META tags of interest in SEO: ROBOTS, CONTENT and KEYWORDS. The first two are vital; the third no longer plays a big role.
The robots tag should be as follows:
The contents tag should be identical or similar to the title tag - it has been found that Google loves this. The content tag for this page is as follows:
In the dark ages of the pre-Google anarchy the keywords meta-tag was taken very seriously by the primordial search engines. Accordingly, the SERPs were dominated by spam websites that stuffed their meta-tags with keywords. Nowadays the keyword tag is almost irrelevant. By all means include it, but make absolutely sure that no keyword appears in the tag more than once. Do not put more than 20 words in the meta-tag. The keywords meta tag for this page is as follows:
18. Remember that search engines cannot read pictures
The essence of SEO is putting high-quality content on a page, and making sure that search engines can fully read and understand the content. This means that the heart of SEO is quality text. Any text that is displayed as a JPEG file or other graphics cannot be read by the search engines. Look at the source code of a webpage: that’s what search engine can see. If you can’t read it in the source code, search engines will not be able to read it either, and you will therefore get no search-engine credit for it. I have seen entire articles displayed as a JPEG file. The author is probably despairing over why Google won’t show it in its search results at all.
Therefore, do not use graphics to display content. This does not mean that you should not use pictures; when used appropriately, pictures enhance your users’ experience and make your content more useful.
You can tell search engines what a picture is about by using the ALT tag. Make sure that the description in the ALT tag faithfully describes the content of the picture; stuffing athe ALT tag with keywords that are not relevant to the picture is considered spam.
19. Make sure you have "index, follow" in the ROBOTS tag
Every single page on your website should have this tag. It tells search engine spiders to index the page, and it also tells them to follow all links to their respective target pages. This is useful in making sure that all the pages on your website are indexed.
Spiders are programs that search engines use to analyze pages on the Internet; they go from page to page, following links and reading every page, making decisions on their quality and keeping a copy in order to show them on the search results pages for relevant queries. SEO is essentially about convincing these automated programs that a given page deserves to rank highly for a specific search query.
20. When you produce a new page of content, link to it from the homepage
Once your homepage has a few quality inbound links, Google will regularly spider your homepage. Therefore, a good way to make sure that Google spiders and indexes a new page as soon as possible is to link to it from the homepage. Search engines will follow the link and index the target page within a few days.
21. Use a unique IP address for your website
It is very important that your website be associated with a single, unequivocal IP address. There are two reasons for this:
a) if you use a shared IP address and another website with that IP address gets a Google penalty, your website will also suffer;
b) Google will take your website a lot more seriously if it has a unique IP address.
Having a unique IP address for your website will cost you a few extra dollars a month but it is undoubtedly worth it.
22. Use a quality web host
You cannot develop a successful website without using a reputable, high-quality web host. You should also make sure that you have a top-notch traffic statistics program that will display detailed data regarding your traffic and search engine referrals.
B. Links
23. Get inbound links
Inbound links are the kingpin of the Google algorithm. Google revolutionized online search by introducing a simple but very effective answer to a complicated question: "If a user performs a search for widgets, and there are one million web pages about widgets, how do we decide the order in which these web pages should be presented in the search results? In other words, how do we rank them?"
The answer provided by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was simple: pages that have more links pointing to them are more likely to be useful than pages with fewer links pointing to them. Google considers inbound links as votes in favor of a particular webpage.
It is therefore absolutely imperative to obtain inbound links that point to your website and to content pages within your website. The links that are most beneficial are one-way inbound links: links that point to your website without your website linking back. Google considers these the most genuine endorsements and therefore the most reliable indicator of a page’s objective usefulness. Buying links is a great way to obtain high-quality links quickly. Text Link Ads is the most reputable link broker and offers a wopping $100 in FREE Links to new advertisers.
How much weight Google will give to a link depends on the page’s PageRank and on whether the link’s target page is related to the content on the linking page. In other words, a link pointing to a page about SEO is worth more if is in a page about SEO; if the link is on a page about cars, it will be less beneficial.
24. Link anchor text is important
The anchor text of links is extremely important, because it answers Google’s all-important question: what do users think this page is about? The more relevant the the inbound link’s anchor text is to the target page, the more the page will benefit. The most beneficial links for SEO purposes are one-way inbound links with relevant anchor text. If you manage to get a one-way inbound link with a anchor text that contains the words in the target page’s h1 tag, to Google this is an independent third party confirming the topic and usefulness of your page, and your ranking will go through the roof. Such links are worth pursuing.
This is not to say that other links are useless. Getting inbound links from pages with a high PageRank, even if the links are reciprocated, will still be beneficial. Links with "click here" as the anchor text should be avoided as they do not tell Google what the linker thinks the target page is about.
Probably the only way to start out with links is to start e-mailing webmasters, once you have produced some quality content, and ask to trade links. Most will decline, but some will say yes, and this will get you started. Remember that no decent website will link to you unless it has free useful content. Part of the point of writing excellent content is to obtain natural, unsolicited one-way inbound links. For this reason, such content is sometimes referred to as link bait.
25. Use advertising to generate some traffic
A website’s traffic should grow exponentially once a certain critical level of traffic is reached, because the more people visit your website, the more incoming links you will get, the higher your ranking will be, which in turn will bring in more traffic - assuming, of course, that your website offers value to its visitors. If you follow the SEO tips in this article your website will get good search engine traffic from the get-go.
Precisely because traffic breeds more traffic, you might want to consider spending a small amount of money on advertising at the beginning. Although advertising does not have a search engine benefit, the extra visitors it brings might link to your useful content, which will have an SEO benefit. Google’s Adsense is a cool program for this sort of thing.
26. Post in forums
An excellent way of getting one-way inbound links is to post in forums and place contextual links pointing to pages on your website, in addition to a link to your homepage in your signature. Of course this is only acceptable (and beneficial) if the forum’s topic is the same as your website’s.
Make sure all such links have anchor text that is a highly focused on the target page’s content. Not all forums make this possible, but I have seen several that publish posts as HTML pages and that allow links. The most beneficial forums are those that allow you to post a link without the rel=nofollow tag. Of course, make sure that you write quality posts that add value to the forum, or your posts will be considered spam. Also, the outbound links will be worth more if they are embedded within a good chunk of quality text.
27. Use press releases to obtain backlinks
A great way to obtain one-way inbound links is to broadcast a press release through an online service. By all accounts PRWeb is the best facility for this sort of thing. Make sure that your press release is well-written and interesting, and of course make sure that it has a link to your website.
28. Do not link to bad websites
If you link to a website that Google has penalized or that for some other reason Google considers to be a bad website, your website will be penalized. Google will not penalize you if a bad website links to you, but it will penalize you if you link to a bad website. For this reason you should only link to the best websites, and you should check those links frequently to ensure that the website does not have a new, spammy owner (it can happen).
You should avoid so-called bad neighborhoods. Bad neighborhoods are clusters of interlinked websites that are suffering a Google penalty (maybe without even realizing it). If you link to a website which in turn links to a penalized website, you are part of a bad neighborhood. Avoid this like the plague.
29. Produce link bait
One-way inbound links are essential to SEO. The only reason anyone will ever link to you is if you have something useful or interesting on your website. I have already stressed the importance of writing great content. Other examples of link bait include:
* free resources, such as my free SEO tools;
* offering a free e-book for download (make it a PDF file with at least one link to your website).
30. Staying on the right side of Google
The third vital element in search engine optimisation is avoiding anything that is even remotely spammy or unethical. You should follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines scrupulously. If you do any of the things banned by the Google Webmaster Guidelines, sooner or later Google will find out and penalize your website. The following tricks are expressly prohibited by Google:
* Cloaking: this means displaying a different version of your website depending on the IP address of those accessing it
* Redirecting your homepage to another page
* Using text that is the same color as the background
* Hidden links
* Registering many domains and interlinking them all
The Google algorithm has become very sophisticated and if you breach any of the Google Webmaster Guidelines sooner or later your infractions will be detected and you will be subjected to a penalty. An irritated user might also file a Google spam report.
10 smart ways to get inbound links
1. Post in forums and include a link to your website or one of its pages.
You should choose a forum that is relevant to your website’s topic, and that allows its users to post links without the rel=nofollow tag. (This tag tells Google to disregard the link, although in my experience Google follows the link anyway, and in some cases even gives it a lot of weight, boosting the ranking of the target page – see Google PageRank is overrated.) For best results the links should be contextual: that is, they should be a natural part of the text. Write good, substantial, useful posts with a few contextual links to high-ranking websites, including your own. Make sure that the anchor text of each link is totally relevant to the target page; never use “click here” as the anchor text!
2. Syndicate content
Another great way to obtain back-links is to write articles and syndicate them on eZinearticles.com or some other service. Make sure the article contains a link to your website. These websites tend to rank quite highly and they are an excellent source of back-links. Of course users who decide to publish your articles will do so with your link.
3. Let as many people as possible know about your articles
The more people know about your articles, the more likely you are to get unsolicited inbound links. These links can come from a social book-marking website such as del.icio.us, or they can come from private websites.
If you have written genuinely useful articles you can ask online library services, such as lii.org, to link to you. Not all websites are suited to this sort of thing. If you sell shoes, it’s going to be extremely difficult to persuade a library or authoritative directory to link to you. Conversely, if your website’s business is technical, there is plenty of scope for the creation of the sort of articles that authoritative libraries and directories are willing to link to. Do not approach them before you have produced a least 15 pages of extremely high-quality content. College websites are also great for this. You should contact them before filling your website with ads or anything else that is too commercial, if that is what you are aiming at.
4. Hold an online competition offering a desirable prize.
Word will spread fast and people will start linking to you in the forums and blogs.
5. Network and make friends
It is much easier to gain inbound links if you are on friendly terms with other experts and owners of websites. You’d be surprised at how many links you will accumulate if you make friends with the right people and have genuinely useful content on your website.
6. Online press releases
If something interesting and newsworthy happens with your business you can broadcast a press release using a service such as PRWeb. The idea is to write an extremely interesting and well written press release that has a good link to your website. The press release will be broadcast to all relevant websites, and hopefully as many of them as possible will publish it, your link included. The key is to write the sort of press release that other websites would be interested in broadcasting.
7. Craigslist
Using Craigslist to promote your website is a great way to get back-links. These links won’t give you any PageRank but will bring in good traffic and will boost the search engine position of the pages you link to, providing the post and its target page are both well-written. Please don’t spam Craigslist - posting once in a while will be enough.
8. Social bookmarking websites
If you write a great article, submitting it to Digg or del.icio.us can get you a lot of traffic. If other readers like it, the article will make it to the front page and you will get many pageviews. If enough people like your article, you are bound to get some back-links. There are several blogs and websites that have attained a permanently high status by creating great content and submitting it to Digg and del.icio.us - you can do it too! Just make sure that your article is original enough to please the masses: run-of-the-mill copy will not cut it with Digg.
9. Trade links with related websites
An oldie but goodie. Trading links with related websites is perfectly acceptable and makes the websites concerned more valuable. Just don’t overdo it. It will not make your website a superstar but it’s a good way to get started, and it will ensure that search engines spider your website.
10. Produce really valuable content
It’s a huge cliche, but it is a cliche for a reason. If your content provides amazing value to its users, sooner or later someone will link to you. It might even snowball from there and start to gain one-way inbound links exponentially - it has happened to several bloggers.
You should choose a forum that is relevant to your website’s topic, and that allows its users to post links without the rel=nofollow tag. (This tag tells Google to disregard the link, although in my experience Google follows the link anyway, and in some cases even gives it a lot of weight, boosting the ranking of the target page – see Google PageRank is overrated.) For best results the links should be contextual: that is, they should be a natural part of the text. Write good, substantial, useful posts with a few contextual links to high-ranking websites, including your own. Make sure that the anchor text of each link is totally relevant to the target page; never use “click here” as the anchor text!
2. Syndicate content
Another great way to obtain back-links is to write articles and syndicate them on eZinearticles.com or some other service. Make sure the article contains a link to your website. These websites tend to rank quite highly and they are an excellent source of back-links. Of course users who decide to publish your articles will do so with your link.
3. Let as many people as possible know about your articles
The more people know about your articles, the more likely you are to get unsolicited inbound links. These links can come from a social book-marking website such as del.icio.us, or they can come from private websites.
If you have written genuinely useful articles you can ask online library services, such as lii.org, to link to you. Not all websites are suited to this sort of thing. If you sell shoes, it’s going to be extremely difficult to persuade a library or authoritative directory to link to you. Conversely, if your website’s business is technical, there is plenty of scope for the creation of the sort of articles that authoritative libraries and directories are willing to link to. Do not approach them before you have produced a least 15 pages of extremely high-quality content. College websites are also great for this. You should contact them before filling your website with ads or anything else that is too commercial, if that is what you are aiming at.
4. Hold an online competition offering a desirable prize.
Word will spread fast and people will start linking to you in the forums and blogs.
5. Network and make friends
It is much easier to gain inbound links if you are on friendly terms with other experts and owners of websites. You’d be surprised at how many links you will accumulate if you make friends with the right people and have genuinely useful content on your website.
6. Online press releases
If something interesting and newsworthy happens with your business you can broadcast a press release using a service such as PRWeb. The idea is to write an extremely interesting and well written press release that has a good link to your website. The press release will be broadcast to all relevant websites, and hopefully as many of them as possible will publish it, your link included. The key is to write the sort of press release that other websites would be interested in broadcasting.
7. Craigslist
Using Craigslist to promote your website is a great way to get back-links. These links won’t give you any PageRank but will bring in good traffic and will boost the search engine position of the pages you link to, providing the post and its target page are both well-written. Please don’t spam Craigslist - posting once in a while will be enough.
8. Social bookmarking websites
If you write a great article, submitting it to Digg or del.icio.us can get you a lot of traffic. If other readers like it, the article will make it to the front page and you will get many pageviews. If enough people like your article, you are bound to get some back-links. There are several blogs and websites that have attained a permanently high status by creating great content and submitting it to Digg and del.icio.us - you can do it too! Just make sure that your article is original enough to please the masses: run-of-the-mill copy will not cut it with Digg.
9. Trade links with related websites
An oldie but goodie. Trading links with related websites is perfectly acceptable and makes the websites concerned more valuable. Just don’t overdo it. It will not make your website a superstar but it’s a good way to get started, and it will ensure that search engines spider your website.
10. Produce really valuable content
It’s a huge cliche, but it is a cliche for a reason. If your content provides amazing value to its users, sooner or later someone will link to you. It might even snowball from there and start to gain one-way inbound links exponentially - it has happened to several bloggers.
5 attributes of the perfect link
Inbound links are half the battle in search engine optimization, but not all inbound links are equally good. Here are five characteristics of the perfect back-link.
1. Anchor text
For maximum benefit, inbound links should have anchor text that is totally relevant to the target page. If the anchor text of the link matches words within the h1 tag on the target page, the effect will be even more powerful.
2. Quality of the source page
Links will be more beneficial if they come from a page whose topic is highly relevant to the target page. In other words, if the link points to a page about SEO, it will be more beneficial if it is on a page that is also about SEO.
3. Links embedded within text
The most powerful links are embedded within a block of high-quality, highly relevant text. Links should be part of a sentence, and that sentence should be part of a block of text of at least 300 words. Links that are not part of a sentence and are isolated from the page’s main body of text tend to be less beneficial to the target page.
4. PageRank
The whole point of Google PageRank is that it determines how much SEO benefit it can pass to other pages through its links. The higher the PageRank, the more beneficial the links will be.
5. The number of links on the source page
The link will be more beneficial to its target page if it is one of only two or three outgoing links on the page. In general, the more links there are on the page, the less benefit each one will pass to its respective target page. If there are hundreds of links on a page, their target pages will not get as much benefit.
1. Anchor text
For maximum benefit, inbound links should have anchor text that is totally relevant to the target page. If the anchor text of the link matches words within the h1 tag on the target page, the effect will be even more powerful.
2. Quality of the source page
Links will be more beneficial if they come from a page whose topic is highly relevant to the target page. In other words, if the link points to a page about SEO, it will be more beneficial if it is on a page that is also about SEO.
3. Links embedded within text
The most powerful links are embedded within a block of high-quality, highly relevant text. Links should be part of a sentence, and that sentence should be part of a block of text of at least 300 words. Links that are not part of a sentence and are isolated from the page’s main body of text tend to be less beneficial to the target page.
4. PageRank
The whole point of Google PageRank is that it determines how much SEO benefit it can pass to other pages through its links. The higher the PageRank, the more beneficial the links will be.
5. The number of links on the source page
The link will be more beneficial to its target page if it is one of only two or three outgoing links on the page. In general, the more links there are on the page, the less benefit each one will pass to its respective target page. If there are hundreds of links on a page, their target pages will not get as much benefit.
Latent semantic indexing
Latent semantic indexing is the process by which Google and other search engines infer what a pages is about based on words other than the page’s official keywords. In other words, search engines try to work out what a page is about by considering the latent semantic content of the text. The philosophy of this approach is that you could write a fantastic article about oranges without mentioning that keyword more than once or twice. Latent semantic indexing allows search engines to give that article the credit that it would not get if they only counted the number of occurrences of the keyword; ultimately, it is about improving the search results for the users.
For example, if the title of an article is "Weight" and the main body of the text keeps mentioning weight, search engines have to work out whether the article is about physics, dieting, or something else. To do this they look at the whole text and search for clues that will lead to disambiguation. In this case, if the article also mentions Isaac Newton and gravitational forces, search engines will decide that the article is about weight in the scientific sense of the word. The article will therefore be eligible to appear in search engine queries such as "weight mass and gravity." Conversely, if the article mentions calories, obesity and exercise, search engines will decide that the article is about weight in the health sense of the word.
How does understanding latent semantic indexing help us in SEO? It can help us write excellent copy, which is the heart and soul of SEO. Specifically, latent semantic indexing points us to the old mantra of SEO: write excellent copy. Do not use the same keywords again and again, as this is boring to your users, and search engines can tell that the copy is of low quality. Instead you should use a variety of synonyms of your keywords in addition to the keywords themselves, and you should make the article as comprehensive and deep as possible.
With latent semantic indexing, search engines are able to decide not just what the keywords of your articles are, but also how genuinely useful and authoritative the article is. If you’re writing an article about losing weight, mixing many instances of the keywords “lose weight” with a mass of trashy text will not win the approval of Google and other search engines. Conversely, if you make good use of the keywords that are related, such as calories, exercise, cardiovascular health, triglycerides, metabolic rate, micronutrients, micronutrients, etc, search engines are likely to deem your article useful and authoritative, giving it a higher ranking in the search engine results pages.
As you can see, there is a lot more to search engines than blindly accepting the official keywords you feed them. Google and other search engines have become very smart at inferring the objective quality and topic of a page of text, in their continuing effort to weed out run-of-the-mill scraper sites that pollute the Internet with their trashy, pirated content.
For example, if the title of an article is "Weight" and the main body of the text keeps mentioning weight, search engines have to work out whether the article is about physics, dieting, or something else. To do this they look at the whole text and search for clues that will lead to disambiguation. In this case, if the article also mentions Isaac Newton and gravitational forces, search engines will decide that the article is about weight in the scientific sense of the word. The article will therefore be eligible to appear in search engine queries such as "weight mass and gravity." Conversely, if the article mentions calories, obesity and exercise, search engines will decide that the article is about weight in the health sense of the word.
How does understanding latent semantic indexing help us in SEO? It can help us write excellent copy, which is the heart and soul of SEO. Specifically, latent semantic indexing points us to the old mantra of SEO: write excellent copy. Do not use the same keywords again and again, as this is boring to your users, and search engines can tell that the copy is of low quality. Instead you should use a variety of synonyms of your keywords in addition to the keywords themselves, and you should make the article as comprehensive and deep as possible.
With latent semantic indexing, search engines are able to decide not just what the keywords of your articles are, but also how genuinely useful and authoritative the article is. If you’re writing an article about losing weight, mixing many instances of the keywords “lose weight” with a mass of trashy text will not win the approval of Google and other search engines. Conversely, if you make good use of the keywords that are related, such as calories, exercise, cardiovascular health, triglycerides, metabolic rate, micronutrients, micronutrients, etc, search engines are likely to deem your article useful and authoritative, giving it a higher ranking in the search engine results pages.
As you can see, there is a lot more to search engines than blindly accepting the official keywords you feed them. Google and other search engines have become very smart at inferring the objective quality and topic of a page of text, in their continuing effort to weed out run-of-the-mill scraper sites that pollute the Internet with their trashy, pirated content.
5 great ways to make money with your website or blog
If you have a website or blog there is really no excuse for not making good money from it – and you can do so without investing a penny. If you have some decent traffic you might even be able to quit your day job! Here are the top 5 ways to make money with your website or blog:
1. Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads is a link broker through which you can sell links on your website. The links are paid on a monthly basis, just like renting a house, so you will receive monthly payments. With Text Link Ads you can sell links and make good money with your website.
2. Google Adsense
Google Adsense will serve ads that are relevant to your content. This happens automatically – all you have to do is paste the Adsense code onto your page. Adsense is a Pay Per Click program: you make money when users click on the ads. Adsense can be an excellent money-maker.
3. Reviewme
With this program, people pay you to write a review of their website or product. The reviews don’t have to be positive, but must be at least 200 words long. How much you get paid depends on your website, but if you write well and have a decent website, this can be your biggest money-maker.
4. Bidvertiser
Like Google Adsense, but the minimum payout is $10, which is much lower than for Adsense, so small websites will get paid sooner.
5. AuctionAds
This is basically a massive eBay affiliate, and it works like this: since it is a huge collective of website owners like you, it gets a bigger revenue share from its eBay affiliate program than a website by itself would. The point is that you will make more money through AuctionAds than directly through eBay’s affiliate program.
1. Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads is a link broker through which you can sell links on your website. The links are paid on a monthly basis, just like renting a house, so you will receive monthly payments. With Text Link Ads you can sell links and make good money with your website.
2. Google Adsense
Google Adsense will serve ads that are relevant to your content. This happens automatically – all you have to do is paste the Adsense code onto your page. Adsense is a Pay Per Click program: you make money when users click on the ads. Adsense can be an excellent money-maker.
3. Reviewme
With this program, people pay you to write a review of their website or product. The reviews don’t have to be positive, but must be at least 200 words long. How much you get paid depends on your website, but if you write well and have a decent website, this can be your biggest money-maker.
4. Bidvertiser
Like Google Adsense, but the minimum payout is $10, which is much lower than for Adsense, so small websites will get paid sooner.
5. AuctionAds
This is basically a massive eBay affiliate, and it works like this: since it is a huge collective of website owners like you, it gets a bigger revenue share from its eBay affiliate program than a website by itself would. The point is that you will make more money through AuctionAds than directly through eBay’s affiliate program.
10 great ways to increase your website’s traffic
Here are 5 great ways to increase your website’s traffic:
1. Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads is a link broker through which you can buy one-way links from high-ranking websites. The links are one-way links without the rel=nofollow tag, so your website will get some PR benefit from the links you buy. This is a great way to get the all-important one-way links without having to wait years for a random webmaster to link to your website. Another cool thing about Text Link Ads is that they give you $100 in free links when you sign up for the first time! Collect your $100 in FREE Links .
2. Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) takes a little effort but its benefits are permanent and free. Read the definitive guide to search engine optimization and follow every step - an increase in free traffic from search engines is guaranteed.
3. Post in forums
Write useful posts and embed a link to your website within the post. You can also add the link to your signature. If you write quality posts, people will click on the links and find your website.
4. Add your URL to your business card and email signature
Simple but effective.
5. Google Adwords
This is Google’s advertising program. You choose your keywords and Google will serve the ads on relevant pages of participating websites. You buy a certain number of clicks at a price you make, and every time someone clicks on one of your ads, your money gets used up. This is a great way to get cheap, highly targeted traffic for your website.
6. Trade links with other quality websites
Classic but still-valid way of obtaining limited (but often very high-quality) traffic.
7. Press releases
Go to PRWeb and buy a press release package. The press release will include your links.
8. Craigslist
Well-written, search engine-optimized posts on Craigslist tend to appear at the top of Google’s search results and can get you a lot of traffic.
9. Social networking
Tell your friends about your website, set up a MySpace profile for your business and link to your website, add your articles to Digg and other social bookmarking websites.
10. Submit to quality directories
dmoz used to be the directory to submit to, but now that it is (un)officially dead, Yahoo is the next best.
1. Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads is a link broker through which you can buy one-way links from high-ranking websites. The links are one-way links without the rel=nofollow tag, so your website will get some PR benefit from the links you buy. This is a great way to get the all-important one-way links without having to wait years for a random webmaster to link to your website. Another cool thing about Text Link Ads is that they give you $100 in free links when you sign up for the first time! Collect your $100 in FREE Links .
2. Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) takes a little effort but its benefits are permanent and free. Read the definitive guide to search engine optimization and follow every step - an increase in free traffic from search engines is guaranteed.
3. Post in forums
Write useful posts and embed a link to your website within the post. You can also add the link to your signature. If you write quality posts, people will click on the links and find your website.
4. Add your URL to your business card and email signature
Simple but effective.
5. Google Adwords
This is Google’s advertising program. You choose your keywords and Google will serve the ads on relevant pages of participating websites. You buy a certain number of clicks at a price you make, and every time someone clicks on one of your ads, your money gets used up. This is a great way to get cheap, highly targeted traffic for your website.
6. Trade links with other quality websites
Classic but still-valid way of obtaining limited (but often very high-quality) traffic.
7. Press releases
Go to PRWeb and buy a press release package. The press release will include your links.
8. Craigslist
Well-written, search engine-optimized posts on Craigslist tend to appear at the top of Google’s search results and can get you a lot of traffic.
9. Social networking
Tell your friends about your website, set up a MySpace profile for your business and link to your website, add your articles to Digg and other social bookmarking websites.
10. Submit to quality directories
dmoz used to be the directory to submit to, but now that it is (un)officially dead, Yahoo is the next best.
What is .htaccess ?
Deny for access to all folders:
#deny all access
deny from all
Deny for access to all folders and some ip address allowed:
#deny all access
deny from all
allow from 10.0.0.1 # unique ip address
allow from 192.168.0.0/24 # ip
Deny for access to any file:
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Folder listing:
You must write this texts if you wan list all files on the any folder:
Options +Indexes +MultiViews +FollowSymlinks
IndexOptions FancyIndexing
autoindex must be installed. 
Hiding files:
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Satisfy All
Private 404 error page:
ErrorDocument 404 /errors/notfound.html
Deny for the hotlink:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([-a-z0-9]+\.)?yoursite\.com[NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(zip|mp3|avi|wmv|mpg|mpeg)$ http://www.yoursite.com/img/nohotlink.gif [R,NC,L]
Deny for bad bots:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BlackWidow [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Bot\ mailto:craftbot@yahoo.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ChinaClaw [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Custo [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^DISCo [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Download\ Demon [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^eCatch [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EirGrabber [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailSiphon [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailWolf [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Express\ WebPictures [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ExtractorPro [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EyeNetIE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FlashGet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetRight [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetWeb! [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go!Zilla [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go-Ahead-Got-It [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GrabNet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Grafula [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HMView [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} HTTrack [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image\ Stripper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image\ Sucker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy\ Library [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^InterGET [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Internet\ Ninja [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JetCar [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JOC\ Web\ Spider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^larbin [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^LeechFTP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mass\ Downloader [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MIDown\ tool [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mister\ PiX [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Navroad [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NearSite [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetAnts [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Net\ Vampire [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetZIP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Octopus [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline\ Explorer [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline\ Navigator [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^PageGrabber [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Papa\ Foto [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pavuk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pcBrowser [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^RealDownload [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ReGet [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SiteSnagger [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SmartDownload [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperHTTP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Surfbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^tAkeOut [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Teleport\ Pro [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^VoidEYE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web\ Image\ Collector [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web\ Sucker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebAuto [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebCopier [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebFetch [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebGo\ IS [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebLeacher [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebReaper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebSauger [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website\ eXtractor [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website\ Quester [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebStripper [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebWhacker [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebZIP [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Wget [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Widow [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WWWOFFLE [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon\ WebSpider [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus
RewriteRule .* - [F]
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