Site Maps: A Force to be Reckoned WithWritten by Kristy Meghreblian
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To make your site map most appealing to both search engine robots and human visitors, be sure to include descriptive text along with page URLs and links. Be sure to use your targeted keywords in that text. Remember not to be too repetitive with your keyword phrases, though, or you may be penalized. When you make it easy for people to navigate your site, they will find what they are looking for and will most likely be a repeat visitor. Likewise, when your site is easily navigable by search engine spiders, you increase your chances of being favorably listed in their search results. So, if creating a site map isn’t part of your current search engine optimization strategy, maybe it’s time you thought about adding this beneficial -- and fairly simple -- tool to your repertoire. For an example of Submit Today’s site map, go to: http://www.submittoday.com/site_map.htm.
As Submit Today’s copywriter and editor, Kristy Meghreblian has written online content for many successful companies, including Monster.com. She has successfully combined her excellence in journalism with the delicate art of keyword density as it relates to search engine optimization. As a result, she has helped many Submit Today clients achieve top ranking. Submit Today is a leading search engine optimization, submission and ranking company located in Naples, Florida.
| | How Can Search Engines Help You with Your Business?Written by Dmitry Antonoff, Irina Ponomareva
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Rule 3: Play fair Do not get involved in unfair games with search engines. If you feel that your method is obviously deceptive, do not use it. Here are just some of widespread methods used by unscrupulous webmasters. Spam Let's assume that site owner wishes to make a page very relevant to a certain key phrase. The most obvious course to take is to include this phrase into a page copy as many times as possible. When it starts looking unnatural (that is, keyword density value becomes excessive), it will be regarded as a kind of spam (so-called keyword damping). This page will look odd both for human visitors and for search engines. Consequently, any WWW user will hardly wish to return to this page after having visited it just once, and search engines will be likely to penalise spam by reducing page's ranking. Using colours to hide multiple keywords, as a kind of spam Some web masters in their vain hope to deceive search engines go a step further. They make part of body copy, which is intended only for search engines, invisible (that is, of a colour identical or just a shade different from background color), or tiny enough to be indistinguishable (i.e., 1 or 2 pixels high). Modern search engines have become smart enough to detect such tricks, so we wouldn't advise you to use these methods. You might even win for a short time, but lose afterwards, because some search engines penalise spammers by excluding their web sites from their databases. Link farms Many site owners unite in so called link farms in order to artificially increase link popularity value. These are nothing but networks where everyone links to everyone else, concentrating on quantity of links and disregarding their quality. Their efficiency is very low. First, a page can deliver just a small part of its value to every page it links to within farm. If it contains too many links, this part will be worthless. Second, a page that contains links, just links, and nothing else but links, cannot be very authoritative for quite natural reasons. Besides, modern search engines analyse link quality in terms of web site relevancy, ranking link highly if it leads to a site devoted to similar issues. So, when you are looking for link exchange partners, choose those whose business is similar to yours. The sites of your partners, or web portals devoted to your business issues, are ideal for this. Cloaking This is a widespread technology that aims to deceive search engines . The point is, all known spidering robots recognised by their IP addresses or host names are redirected to a page that is specially polished to meet search engines' requirements, but is unreadable to a human being. In order to detect cloakers, spiders often come from fake IP addresses and under fictitious names. Also, users' feedback is collected, and if people too often find that a page's real content doesn't match its declared description, page is revised by search engine owners’ staff and runs risk of being penalised. Rule 4: Your site must be interesting Increasing number of pages included on your site, and quality of information you place on those pages, increases probability of getting good links to your pages. Interesting articles, and actual news concerning your business, will attract visitors' attention, and your site will be well-known and spoken of. If you gain a good reputation on Internet, your commercial success will be almost certain, and site will promote itself. Good site structure is also very important. If your site is created with basic usability requirements in mind, and is categorised well, users will enjoy visiting it. Every page should be easily accessed from home page, and plain text links are preferred. Thus, a search engine robot will experience no difficulties whilst spidering your site content, following links that lead from one page to another. As you can see, merely having a website or running a company does not guarantee success. The demands of promotion, catering for conditions of your web site or brand recognition, popularity and attracting still more clients must be of prime importance. We have introduced you to majority of tools used for promotion of your business on Internet. These tools apply technologies that facilitate searching for desired resources. Evidently, website owners can be discouraged by multiplicity of web searching algorithms as this demands search engine optimisation and comprehensive spadework. So if you don’t think you can cope with this job, it is probably worth seeking a qualified Internet promoter or an Internet promotion company in order to gain good results at affordable costs. You will surely stand high in directories and search engines results and therefore increase traffic and number of potential clients your business has access to. ________________________________________ * Before HTTP protocol was invented (around 1989-1991) Internet was just a huge network consisting of FTP servers, and was used as a means of file exchange. There were no websites at all. first search engines mentioned in article ran via FTP and similar protocols. Only after Tim Burners-Lee had created HTTP protocol, did we get World Wide Web, and Internet acquired its actual shape. http://gsdtc.org/labhist.htm http://ieee.cincinnati.fuse.net/reiman/03_2000.html ** The first search robots that supported HTTP.
Dmitry Antonoff, 28. I've been with Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, as a marketer and an SEO consuntant, since May 2003. I specialise in website promotion, and copywriting. I'm eager to share my experience with the Internet community. Irina, Ponomareva, 32. I joined Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, on March 2003. I've been working as a web master, a developer, and an SEO specialist ever since.
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