Adam Beazley’s Traffic & Promotion Blog

When designing a website to rank high in the search engines it is important that you take into consideration a few different factors. Below are a few of the most common and easily fixed mistakes that I see other marketers making when trying to optimize thier websites.

Use The Correct Tags
Use proper tags for headings, bold text, italic text, and lists – HTML has heading tags, bold tags, italic tags, and ordered and unordered lists for a reason and you should use them. Using CSS you can practically style them however you like, but actually using a heading tag for your headings, and bold tags for important text, will help allow search engines understand what text on a page is a heading or what is more important than the surrounding text. Simply applying a CSS style that makes text larger or bold doesn’t do that.

Put CSS and JavaScript in external files
Nearly every site nowadays uses CSS and JavaScript for something. While both are great for enhancing user experience, neither will help your search engine ranking if left on your page. One of the factors that search engines consider when ranking your site is the percentage of code relevant to the search term. CSS and JavaScript can take up hundreds of lines of code, minimizing the importance of your text and in turn hurting your ranking. By putting them in separate files and simply including them in your page by reference, you can reduce hundreds of lines down to one and increase the amount of code in the file that is relevant content.

Optimize your images
Search engine spiders can’t read text within an image. Adding ALT text to your image tag helps, but ideally you should remove all wording from the image and style it using CSS, adding the remaining portion of the image as a background image to the text. Here is a side-by-side comparison of two images that look the same in your browser, but much different to a search engine spider.

Minimize the use of tables in layouts
The debate about whether or not tables should be used in site design has been going on for years and there’s no end in site. I fall somewhere in the middle – there are certain circumstances (like organizing tabular data) where I think tables still make the most sense, but I also appreciate the SEO benefits of using CSS layouts. CSS layouts drastically reduce the amount of code in your site that isn’t content that the user sees. Just like moving CSS and JavaScript to an external file, the less on-page code that isn’t content, the better. Check out search engine friendly layouts for some free example layouts.

Validate your site
A site doesn’t have to be perfectly coded to rank high in the search engines (there are many, many other factors), but valid HTML will help ensure that search engines and browsers alike will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator or install this handy Firefox extension. Validating generally identifies areas of code that are redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

Conclusion
There are many factors that go into search engine optimization (aka. SEO), however they all start at the same place and that is the basic design and setup of the website. Of course the content on each page is the most important element of SEO but don’t let small web design mistakes ruin your good content.

Adam Beazley
Internet Marketing Consultant
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

• How To Make Sure That Your Websites Are Fully Crawlable By The Search Engines
• About Me
• Get Reciprocal Links FAST

By: Adam Beazley – The Web Marketeer
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

I was on a conference call with a “Marketing Guru” the other day and he was talking about search engine optimization. He mentioned that he got to talk to one of the top manager over at Google and got some good information. Basically the new Google algorithm now places much more importance on reciprocal links than one way back links.

After hearing this I thought that all of my work had been done in vein. Every day I work my but off submitting articles, submitting to link directories, posting in forums and many other methods all with the intention of building up back links. I was really quite bummed, but then I had an epiphany.

Eureka! all of my work has not NOT been done in vein because all of those back links are just sitting there waiting to be reciprocated. Do you see it? Has the light bulb gone off in your head yet?

Let me explain by using an example In the next sentence. Just the other day I submitted an article to Idea Marketers, which by the way is one of my favorite article marketing websites. Anyway, my article is hosted on their website and at the bottom they have a link pointing back to my website’s home page. The hypertext link says something like ‘make money with articles’ and it is in fact a live hyperlink that opens my page in a new window.

Now what I just did in the previous paragraph was to turn my once lonely one-way back link into a full fledge reciprocal link. I simply placed a link on my website (in my blog) pointing back to Idea Marketers.
Do you understand?
Do you see the potential here?

Im so excited about this discovery and its so easy. You don’t even have to write a blog spot about it or even link to the exact page that holds your article. All you really have to do is set up an extra links page on your website and link to other websites where your liks are stored.

Here is a quick and easy tutorial for getting reciprocal links from all of those lonely back links:

First you make a links page on your website. Here you will place links to other websites.

Next you should go and download the SEO Toolbar. Some antivirus programs may pick this toolbar up as adware, but I assure you it is not. It is a great little tool to get some good info about your website and track your results.

Now it’s time to populate your links page.
First put a link to all of the forums you regularly post to. You do NOT have to link to each of your posts, you will only need to link to the forum’s home page.
After that link to all of the sites that you know are hosting your articles, which should also have a link back to your website.
Now it’s time to use that toolbar and find other sites that are hosting your articles. Simply go to your website and press the “Get Data” button. This should return some results in the toolbar, which will show you how may back links are indexed in Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Simply click on each of those numbers and they will bring you to the corresponding search engine where you can see a list of sites which have your link on them. Just go down the list and copy the home URL’s and paste them in your links page.

Voila, you are done! You have now created valuable reciprocal links from all of your less valuable back links.
Its really just that simple!

Have fun with it!

Adam Beazley – The Web Marketeer
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

PS: If you want to get your articles published on a lot of sights very quickly check THIS out!

• The Art of Linking
• How To Make Money With Articles
• 2 Basic Online Marketing StrategiesTo Make Money w/ Affiliate Programs

• Design With SEO in Mind
• IBP - The Real Thing or Just Fluff
• Pay Per Call, The New Pay Per Click (PPC)

Linking is one of the key ingredients to getting targeted traffic to your website while also increasing your page rank and popularity. Linking is a process of attaining direct links from other websites back to your own. Linking comes in two basic forms, reciprocal and non-reciprocal links. In this article I will begin with non-reciprocal linking methods as they are the easiest to start with as a beginner.

Marketers use a variety of different methods to achieve non-reciprocal links back to their websites. One of the most used and prominent methods for beginners is submitting to link directories.  There are hundreds of link non-reciprocal link directories out there that webmasters can submit their websites to. Most are set-up similar to http://www.dmoz.com/ which is one of the largest and most used link directories around. If this interests you, I have put together a large list which you can access through my blog in the ‘Free Stuff’ section.

Another method of gaining direct non-reciprocal links to your website is by posting in forums with your website URL as your signature tag. If done correctly you can get a huge amount of targeted traffic from this method. It is recommended that you choose forums which have similar topics to that of your website. The actual content within your post has everything to do with the amount of traffic which comes from that post. What I mean is that you need to seriously answer the posted question and sound as knowledgeable about the topic as you can, without actively advertising your website. People will recognize you as an authority and check out your signature tag. Another positive outcome of answering post is that most public forums get spidered by Google and other search engines and your ‘good’ answer can be shown as a search result for similar queries.

Article Syndication is another method of creating non-reciprocating links which point back to your website. In the publishing world, webmasters are always seeking out quality content, filled with keywords that pertain to their website. This is where you as the author come in; if you write a great article, it could be picked up by numerous webmasters who will post it on their websites. This article will have an author bio box attached to it, where you will have you name and website URL along with a disclaimer stating that the article is free to use as long as the bio box stays in tact. This is common courtesy among webmasters and your link will be visible on a website within an article that presents you as an authority on a particular subject. This will result in good quality traffic coming from interested readers who now trust you because to just gave them a great read full of golden nuggets.

Now I am going to talk about reciprocal linking which is a great form of creating targeted traffic. Unlike submitting to link directories, reciprocal linking is a lot more work. This work of course has its rewards in targeted pre-sold traffic. When I say pre-sold I am referring to the state of mind of the individual clicking on your link from another site of like content. Think about how you find websites how often do you just Google and click on the first site you see and that website is exact thing you are looking for. Never, you find a site which leads you to another site which leads you to another and so on, until you find exactly what you are looking for. Also, throughout that process of searching websites you have been educated and gradually pushed to make a purchase. That is why I say the traffic is pre-sold, in other words you have high quality, ready to buy visitors which is exactly what you want.

With all of that in mind you must be picky about which websites you share a reciprocal link with. Ideally you will want to find websites with very similar content and a much higher Page Rank than you have.

You can find out a websites page rank by using the ‘Google bar’ or by entering the website URL here: http://pr.blogflux.com/  Once you find your target website you will need to craft a good email and ask for a reciprocal link. Now keep in mind that you will need to not only ask politely, but have something to offer, weather it be a free e-book, some scripts, a featured article. You have to make the offer so enticing that the webmaster won’t mind manually adding you to his/her link page. You will also need to include a direct link to your own link page where you entered that websites link. Be sure to have their link up and ready before sending the email as they will check for your reciprocal link. Also, be sure that your link page is one click away from your home page, meaning that the visitor should only have to click one button/link on your home page to get to your link page.

Anything you can do to make your link page better, do it, it will help you get that reciprocal link that you are after. I would suggest that you post articles or live RSS feeds to your link page to add content and make it more search engine friendly. You can also use scripts which allow other visitors to make comments about the links that you have listed, this will make your link page that much more desirable. The main thing to remember when asking for a reciprocal link is to put yourself in that webmasters shoes, and think what would I want in exchange for a link to a lower ranked website. He/she has the upper hand, so you need to make a convincing argument.

Linking is a crucial part of any search engine optimization campaign. Even though it is not the end all answer for getting a top ranking, these processes can and will get you quality targeted traffic, which is what you’re really after anyway, right? So find a good list of link directories like the one found on my blog and get to work.

Adam Beazley
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com/pips.html

• 2 Basic Online Marketing StrategiesTo Make Money w/ Affiliate Programs
• How To Make Sure That Your Websites Are Fully Crawlable By The Search Engines
• My Links