There have always been do-it-yourselfers succeeding at Web promotion and search engine optimization. In fact, many of the established businesses offering Web services today came from humble beginnings, perhaps nothing more than a college student with a laptop, an Internet connection, and too much free time. The Web evolves as the result of the innovation and experimentation of individuals. The sharing of knowledge. The do-it-yourself attitude.

As text link brokers and mass link networking decrease in value and use in social media increases, it becomes more important for companies to have an internal approach and awareness of search engine marketing. Don’t get me wrong; outsourcing to SEO firms is still a smart option. That said, making the most out of Web 2.0 usually requires some level of cooperation between SEO firm and site owner. You don’t need to be an expert to know the basics of good SEO practices, and that added knowledge will be a great advantage whether you’re working along side an SEO team, or promoting your own site in your spare time.

So if you’re on a “need to know” basis with SEO, the following points should illustrate what an overall plan should include:

1. Create Search Engine-Friendly Content

Unique Web content is your most valuable asset, and ensuring search engines can read it is crucial. Text embedded in images or Flash cannot be read, so make sure you use important keywords, headings, and hyperlinks in plain text form. Instead of using images as navigation links, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) makes it easy to format those links to look more like ‘buttons,’ thus creating powerful anchor text as well as making it visually appealing. Use heading tags properly and don’t try to hide keywords or text by making it the same color as the page background or shrinking it so it can’t be seen. Make sure the keywords you wish to rank high for are used frequently in the page copy but within reason.

Now that you’ve created good content, is it actually being crawled? Copy and paste a page’s URL into a search engine to see if it has been indexed. If you’ve just created the page, it may take a few days to show up. Aside from age, many factors can lead to webpages not being indexed by search engines, such as duplicate content (i.e., a printer-friendly version of a page might be indexed and the normal version not, or vice-versa); links generated by JavaScript instead of HTML; poor site architecture (i.e., using too many subdirectories); lengthy, dynamically generated URLs using special characters; and orphaned pages.

2. Choose Your Keywords Wisely

One of the first steps of SEO, this one needs to be done properly the first time or all your future efforts and promotion could end up being wasted. Start by writing down general terms that describe your products, services or Web content. Use keyword research services to investigate word and phrase variations. WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery, and the Google AdWords suggestion tool are good starting points. The goal is to find those niche phrases that your target market uses to find sites just like yours and optimize your site for them. If the phrases do not get enough use by searchers, your profits from ranking for them will be low. At the same time, stay away from general terms that are tougher to rank for (i.e., like “art,” “computers,” “business,” etc.) as a great portion of the traffic will be irrelevant and you’ll break the bank attaining such competitive phrases.

3. Get Others to Link to Your Site

In theory there are countless ways, some traditional and some quite innovative, to get other websites to link to yours. In practice, it can be easier said than done. Google defines a link as it pertains to rankings and SEO as a “vote” from one site to another. The more quality votes your site receives, the greater chance you have of ranking well. If a well-established site links to yours, that link carries more weight than one would from a mom & pop shop or less reputable page.

If your site has useful content and is doing something unique, you’re already ahead of much of the competition. People need a reason to link to your site, as very few will do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Trading links can work, but link exchange networks have decreased in value and won’t be of much use in competitive fields. Buying links, if you haven’t heard, is a big Google no-no. While entire articles could be written on this topic, here are a few popular methods of acquiring incoming links: 

• issuing company press releases with a link back to your site
• submitting to reputable business directories such as Yahoo! and Business.com
• be active on related blogs by commenting and exchanging ideas
• if you have clients with websites, ask if they would mind adding your link in a “partners” section
• participate in relevant forums and discussion boards with a link in your signature
• write and submit original articles to Web publications in your field with a link in your bio
• get involved in social media and bookmarking

4. Join the Social Media Revolution

The collaboration between Internet users and the development of online communities is at an all-time high. Social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Furl, Reddit, and Technorati offer users a way to store their favorite pages and media online, and share it with others. These services also provide a way to promote your own content or create a buzz over a product or service. Creating a MySpace page or Squidoo “lens” is also a way to network and share information.

However, if your goal is to generate sales then you must offer something without the promotional hype. The reality of social media is that popularity is based almost entirely on public interest. If your information or media isn’t unique or of interest to anyone, you cannot force success using social media communities.

The key to using social media and bookmarking sites to your advantage is to not be shy. Network with other users, bookmark and share useful content, create eye-catching titles for your entries, and tell your friends and co-workers to vote on content you have on these sites.

These four points are a general guideline to follow for SEO. Search engine optimization experts and firms are a good outsourcing option in competitive markets, while the DIY attitude can yield great results for website owners with smaller marketing budgets. If you’re in the latter group, hopefully this helps get you started.

John Metzler has held executive positions in the search engine marketing industry since 2001. He is the Founder of FreshPromo, a Canadian-based SEO firm, and updates his SEO Commentary blog regularly.

The majority of searches worldwide are conducted on three major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

The goal of the search engines is to provide the most relevant information to its users. It’s in the best interest of the search engines to be relevant because if the information returned is not, the Web user will use a different search engine. This is the primary way that Google has become the number 1 search engine. They have stressed quality of searches over anything else.

Even with their main revenue source, AdWords, they have constantly changed the parameters that advertisers must follow in order to get the highest ranked ad and the lowest price per click. They have risked alienating their advertisers in order to make sure that people who search for a topic or click on an ad are brought to the most relevant webpage first and foremost.

How Anyone Can Improve His Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are basic ways that a webpage can be “optimized”: 

• Be “keyword rich” with your keywords listed many times throughout your site
  
• Have your main keywords in bold a few times
  
• Use META tags to to bring attention to the highly relevant keywords, title, and description of your site (an understanding of HTML coding helps)

PageRank is a series of algorithms that was invented in 1998 and is constantly evolving.

….Google’s description of PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes or links a page receives; it also analyzes the pages that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.

PageRank (from here on I will refer to it as PR) works on a scale from 0-10, with 0 being lowest and 10 being highest. The higher your PR is, the more authoritative your site is, or at least it has more sites linking to it than another page that is ranked lower.

Each website that links to you will give you “credit” for being associated with a website with PR (if they have any) and vice versa. The higher the PR of the website that links to you, the more importance Google gives to it.

Most websites have the highest PR on their homepage because that’s where the majority of their incoming links point to. A common theme is that a website will have a high PR on their homepage, but low or no PR on most of their internal pages. It is also important to have links to other pages on your site, called “deep links.” Google really likes this too and rewards you with a good PR.

How do I get onto the first page of Google?

No offense, but if I knew that I’d be rich! Seriously, there are ways to greatly improve your chances:

1. Content is King — If your website doesn’t have quality information that is highly relevant to the keywords associated with the site, you will not get a good PR.
   
2. Incoming Links — Google highly ranks pages that have many “one-way” incoming links to the page. This usually means that other sites or blogs also find the information you present relevant.
   
3. Authority — This refers to how important your website is rated from other search engines. Plus the PR of sites linking to you is extremely important.

If you would like to get higher search engine rankings, I suggest you start to learn about how to optimize your content and how to get quality links to your site.

A word about incoming links: A link is a link is not always true.

• Try to get incoming links from high PR sites even if you must pay for them. They are worth the money.
  
• Visit forums related to your site and post comments with your Web address.
  
• Contact related sites, usually by email, and ask to link with them. You will be asked to include their link on your site as well.
  
• Link brokers. Sometimes a pain but they can provide you with many more links in a shorter time than you can ever do it yourself.

Good luck!

Steve DiGioia is a proud daddy that’s always on the lookout for a good work-at-home business opportunity. He too has been “scammed” a few times in the past so he designed a website, My Work at Home Daddy, that reviews work-from-home programs and get-rich-quick scams.

There is nothing better than unique content — “content is king” as many people say. Why do the search engines, especially Google, love unique content? Here’s why:

Information is at the Heart of the Internet

Although you can do a lot of cool things on the Internet, like find old friends and even word processing and spreadsheets, the core of the Internet, when you strip away all these fancy things, is information. Someone goes to a search engine and types in what they are looking for. Hopefully somebody else out there has the answer.

Even in 20 years time, people will still use the Internet for information. There may be unique inventions and, who knows, we could be “Web 10.0″ by then, but the Internet and communication is still information-based and always will be. If you have some unique information that can’t be found anywhere, then the search engines will help you reach those people looking for it.

Duplicate Content Gets Punished

If you create a whole website from copied articles then the search engines will punish you. You will end up in the “supplementary results” and no one will ever find your site. It’s OK to publish small excerpts and quote other sites. Search engines know that people will talk about and analyze other sites.

It’s even OK to use syndicated articles from websites. As long as your entire site is not just copied articles then this is also fine.

Chris Smith makes money on the Internet from websites and articles. It’s easy when you know how. Learn his secrets today at Profits With Chris.

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate
3. External Links to Low Quality Sites
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Data
5. Participation in Link Schemes or Selling Links

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site