Hidden Ways to Get Into Google

Everyone is concerned about their Google rankings. An algorithm change or an update can often leave many a webmaster in tears.
However, I often like to sneak in through the back door. So today I'm going to reveal to you some of my Google secrets, because Google's Lab is much larger than you think.

Google Video
Google Video allows you to have your very own tv show on one of the largest search engines on the internet. This is a form of multimedia that is certainly gaining popularity online. Right now Google Video is in a growth stage and it's one of the perfect times to get in and be one of the first to brand yourself in a particular market. Videos are also a great selling point if you have a product that can be demonstrated. With Google Video, you can have your very own infomercial indexed in the search engines. Of course, you'll want to provide some great content too. To check out this new technology, go to http://video.google.com.

Google Base
Google Base was launched in November of 2005. Google base describes itself as "a place where you can add all types of information that we'll host and make searchable online". Now, if that isn't a webmaster's dream, I don't know what is.
Your item could be almost anything: your products, research papers, articles, press releases, etc. You can describe all of your items so that you can zone in on your targeted visitor.
Anyone with a Google account can use this service, so why not give it a try. Google base is the perfect way to get an additional audience for your content. To find out more about Google Base, visit http://base.google.com/base/about.html.

Google Local/Maps
Getting your products into Google Local can put your items in front of some serious buyers. People often go to Google Local looking for a specific item or service in a particular geographic area. So, if you own a small business, Google Local is the perfect opportunity to increase your reach without spending lots of advertising dollars.

Froogle
Froogle offers searchers a directory of products by category, a searchable index of online products, and the ability to narrow searches by price range. By putting your products into Froogle, you can get some very targeted, qualified traffic to your website.
So, how do you get into Froogle? Well, Google has already been actively searching the web for online product catalogs. For many online merchants, there's a good chance that Froogle already has some of your products listed.
However, one of the best ways to get into the Froogle directory is by providing them with a data feed that lists your products, descriptions, pricing, and URLs. This allows you to fully optimize your listings.
To get the most out of Froogle, you'll want to make your product description clear and enticing. Create titles that not only have targeted keywords, but also encourage the visitor to click-through to your site.
Once they are at your site, it is important to upsell and cross-sell. Otherwise you will be throwing potential profits down the drain. Make the most out of every Froogle referral by capturing their name and email address.
Now, onto a section of Google that you certainly won't want to miss out on.

Google Blog Search
This is one of the best ways to get some additional listings in Google. If you have a website, why not start a blog. By starting a blog, you can tap into a variety of blog search engines, including Google Blog search. This area of marketing is largely untapped, so it is the perfect time to get your particular niche grounded in these specialty search engines.
To get your blog listed you simply need to ping an updating service such as Weblogs.com. It's as simple as that. If you are using Wordpress, you can set it up to where your blog pings the major services every time you make a post.
You can even have multiple listings in the Google Blog Search because they list specific posts as well as entire blogs.

Google News
Want to get your article and even your picture into Google News? Well, it's really not that hard. The first step is to go to www.americanchronicle.com, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on the link that says "submit work". From there you can sign up to be a contributor.
If accepted as a contributor, you will then be able to submit articles along with your picture. Many of their articles are syndicated on Google News and will be available to the millions of searchers who go to Google News each and every day.
If you are looking to get your press release into Google News, that is simple as well. All you have to do is submit your press release to PRLeap.com. Using these techniques, you can get into Google News 100% free, while many other webmasters are paying to do so.
Now that you know about the many faces of Google, you will be able to use many of these tactics to your advantage. You see, there are so many people who just don't put in the extra effort required to get exceptional results. Luckily for you, this puts you at a great advantage over many of the webmasters online today.

About The Author
Promoting Webs- Developer, Designer and SEO Professional with Promote Your Websites offering website design, search engine optimization and PPC Management.

Google Search Engine Optimization Pitfalls

On Page Factors - Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?

So you have a website but where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one of the many common search engine optimization pitfalls when designing your site?
Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn't when it comes to the content on your website can have a crucial impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.
Here we highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking on Google and other search engines.

Optimizing for the Correct Keywords

Basically 'Get real' about what keywords you feel your website can be ranked for. If you have a ten page website in a highly competitive market then ranking naturally for the major terms will be close to impossible.
Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and how many other websites are targeting them. If you are lucky then you might even find a popular keyword that not many other websites are optimized for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.

Code Validation

If your html code is not valid, then this could make it very difficult or even impossible for a search engine to separate your page content from your code. If the search engine cannot see your content, then your page will obviously have no relevance.

Frames

Even though most, if not all, major search engines now index frames and even with the use of the NOFRAMES tag, you run the risk of your pages being displayed in the search engine results out of context. As each individual page is indexed separately, it is likely that your website visitors will not see your pages within your frame and will effectively be stuck on the page they arrive at.
On Page Factors - Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?
So you have a website but where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one of the many common search engine optimization pitfalls when designing your site?
Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn't when it comes to the content on your website can have a crucial impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.

Here we highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking on Google and other search engines.
Optimizing for the Correct Keywords
Basically 'Get real' about what keywords you feel your website can be ranked for. If you have a ten page website in a highly competitive market then ranking naturally for the major terms will be close to impossible.
Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and how many other websites are targeting them. If you are lucky then you might even find a popular keyword that not many other websites are optimized for. Alternatively a good tool for this job is Wordtracker from Rivergold Associates Ltd.
Code Validation
If your html code is not valid, then this could make it very difficult or even impossible for a search engine to separate your page content from your code. If the search engine cannot see your content, then your page will obviously have no relevance.
Frames
Even though most, if not all, major search engines now index frames and even with the use of the NOFRAMES tag, you run the risk of your pages being displayed in the search engine results out of context. As each individual page is indexed separately, it is likely that your website visitors will not see your pages within your frame and will effectively be stuck on the page they arrive at.
If you must use frames then create a 'Home' link on each of your individual content pages and point the link at your frameset index page.

JavaScript Navigation

If you use JavaScript to control your website navigation, then search engine spiders may have problems crawling your site. If you must use JavaScript, then there are two options available to you:

• Use the NOSCRIPT tag to replicate the JavaScript link in standard HTML.
  
• Replicate your JavaScript links as standard HTML links in the footer of your page.

Flash Content Currently only Google can index Macromedia Flash files, how much or how little content they see is open to debate. So until search engine technology is able to handle your .swf as standard it would be advisable to avoid the use of these.

Again if you must use Flash then offer a standard HTML alternative within NOEMBED tags.

Dynamic URLs

Although Google and Yahoo are able to crawl complicated URLs it is still advisable to keep your URLs simple and avoid the use of long query strings. Do not include session IDs in the URL as these can either create a 'spider trap' where the spider indexes the page over and over again or, at worst, your pages will not get indexed at all.

If you do need to include parameters in the URL, then limit them to two and the number of characters per parameter to ten or less.
The best SEO solution for dynamic URLs is to use Mod-rewrite or Multiviews on Apache.

No Sitemap

A sitemap is the search engine optimization tool of choice to ensure every page within your website is indexed by all search engines. You should link to your site map from, at least, your homepage but preferably from every page on your website.

If your website contains hundreds of pages then split the sitemap into several categorized maps and link these all together. Try and keep the number of links per page on a sitemap to less than 100.

Excessive Links

Excessive links on a given page (Google recommends having no more than 100) can lower its relevance and, although it does not result in a ban, this does nothing for your search engine optimization strategy.

Be Careful Who You Link To

As you have no control over who links to your website, incoming links will not harm your rank. However, outbound links from your website to 'bad neighbourhoods' like link farms will harm your ranking.
As a rule ensure as many of your outbound links as possible link to websites that are topical to your field of business.

About The Author

Promoting Webs- Developer, Designer and SEO Professional with Promote Your Websites offering website design, search engine optimization and PPC Management.

Secrets To Increasing Web Traffic

It is no accident that some web sites have thousand or even millions of hits every day while others seem to be camouflaged with no visitors clicking on their sites. In general, there are 3 major areas of Internet marketing strategies.
Have a product or service that is in demand. The more unique and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the profits.

1. Have a product or service that is in demand. The more unique and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the profits.
2. Create a site that sells. A website sells product by design. It presents the product / service, builds trust, and then closes the sale. If people don't trust you, they won't buy from you. It doesn't matter how many people you attract to your website if they get turned off by an unattractive presentation or a half-built website.
3. Draw a stream of potential buyers to your site. You can obtain first page rankings on search pages without using tricks. If you build highly optimized, search engine friendly web pages, you can score well on several different keywords or keyword phrases. This is called search engine optimization.

Let’s start by looking at what doesn’t work:

1. Banner Ads: Click thru rates have now dropped to just 0.3%. This is not a cost effective traffic builder for your site. Banner ads that are tied to keyword phrases are more effective.
2. Exchange Banner Ads or links. The downside is that you work hard to attract a targeted customer to your site and they end up leaving before you can close the sale. The upside is that links pointing back to your site improves your ranking with many search engines. My suggestion is that if you want to add links, do this on a separate links page.
3. E-mail marketing: This is one of the most disliked forms of internet advertising. It violates one of the basic rules of the Internet…NEVER SPAM. The bottom line is that email marketing doesn’t work.
4. Classified ad services: “Free for all” classified ad sites have popped up all over the web. This is how they work…first you sign up and receive your own classified ad site. Then you allow visitors to post their ads for free. In exchange, you get to send them your spam. The issue is that you are not dealing with targeted customers and you end up with zero results.

Search Engines

Search engines are a great source for new customers. Existing customers already know you and usually they usually don’t arrive thru searches. Since visitors find you by entering in search terms, they are new customers. These visitors are targeted…they create the search that finds your keywords. Since they found you, they are motivated and much more likely to buy. Properly targeted search engine traffic results in sales that could have gone to your competitors…and this goes to your bottom line.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

This is a very important part of web page optimization. You need to understand how your customer thinks. People who use a search engine are looking for the product and its features. Remember, 3-4 word keyword phrases attract buyers, 1-2 word keyword phrases attract browsers.
Create a list of keyword based on common names, combining words into compound words, common misspellings, looking at competitor key words. Stay away from company name and brand names as keywords. Select keywords based on recent actual search usages. This information is available from the Internet.
In picking the best traffic building keywords you will want to end-up with 80% specific keywords or keyword phrases and 20% general keywords / phrases. Eliminate words that are unlikely to be used. Choose approximately 16 specific keywords / phrases and 4 general ones. Make sure that the words cover your entire product line.

Spiders on the Web

Search engine spiders are programs that follow links on web sites, gathering data for search engine indexes. The spider, robot or crawler goes to a web site and follows hyperlinks throughout the site. The spider reads the meta tags on the web pages. Meta tags are tags that appear in HTML at the top of each web page; these tags tell the spiders what's on the page in a fashion that is easy for them to index. The robot reads these tags and compares them to the content on the page. The better the tags add up with the actual content of the page the higher the spider will rank the page's TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS. When the spider finds material in the tags that does not reflect the actual content of the page, it will give the page a low ranking or will not index the page at all.

Design your site to be spider friendly

The Meta Tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed.

1. Constructing your Meta TITLE tag. All your most important key phrases should be in the TITLE tag. Browsers only display the first few words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So while the first sentence of your title tag should be readable by people the rest can be just a list of key phrases.
2. The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web page. You've already written one for the TITLE tag! So just edit that to make it human readable (and perhaps a little shorter).
3. Meta Keywords tag. Enter your key phrases in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a key phrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times.
4. The first paragraph of your page should repeat and expand upon everything in your title and description meta tags. You need to have all those key phrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind.

Don’t put up spam pages

You clearly want to have your important key phrases on your page more than once, because this is what gives the search engines a clue as to what your page is really about. However, you don't want your key phrases to appear too many times. This might make the search engines think your page is a spam page trying to rank highly for a particular phrase and will not list them.

RSACI Rating

Say that someone visits your page... but they can't! Their browser blocks it, saying that it's "not appropriate". This is probably because you haven't installed rating tags on your site. It's pretty simple to do, and it means that a lot more people will be able to access your site. See The Internet Content Rating Association at http://www.icra.org/ for more information.

Paying for hits

Pay-per-click is another way to increase the traffic to your website. Pay-per-click providers are simply a search engine where you can bid for the top positions for various search keywords.
Even if you have done everything right and you have a perfectly optimized web site for search engines and you have traffic flowing to your site, you can quickly lose your potential customer with a poorly designed website.

10 ways to design an annoying site that drives traffic away.

1. Have useless or just plain bad content.
2. Make your pages over 50K so the pages load real slow.
3. Disable the back button so people can’t leave the site.
4. Place blinking text and moving or spinning graphics to distract the reader from the other really bad stuff on your site.
5. Don’t proof read what you do and have plenty of spelling and grammar “misteaks”
6. Put in music…and make it really loud.
7. Make your text unreadable by putting light blue printing over a medium blue 3D wallpaper or similar background.
8. Put your entire site on one…long…long…long page.
9. Clutter up your site and make it confusing so no one can figure out exactly what you are up to.
10. Have plenty of pointless graphics or clipart for no real reason.

SEO With Google Sitemaps

What is a Google Sitemap?

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google's mind - and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website's page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site's content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the "About Us" page, or the company's press releases.
As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.
That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.
So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website.
2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website.

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly "optimized", and many of the people who couldn't care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.
Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company's address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.
You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don't even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.
That's because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn't have to be "broken" for a robot to have trouble crawling it's pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.
You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn't have this feature, then it's always nice to get it for free from Google.
But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!
Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as "http", "www", and "com" - terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.
When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website's copy to make it more focused on your core competency.
If, on the other hand your inbound links don't contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.
Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don't know why.
Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google's discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn't want to give the sp@ammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

How Do You Get Started with Google Site Maps?

The first thing you must do is obtain a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account, then you are all set. If not, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page.
Building your sitemap file is pretty easy to do if you are familiar with XML, and if you aren't you can always use a third-party tool such as the ones that are listed on Google's website. Google also has a "Sitemap Generator" that you can download and install on your server, but unless you are fairly adept at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick to the third-party tools.

At any rate, once you have your Google Account and your Sitemap file built, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:

1. Log into your account
2. Type your website's URL into the "Add Site" box and click on "OK"
3. Click on the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding, and add your sitemap file to your account.

Google Sitemaps - An Excellent SEO Tool

Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what's important, what's new, and what changes often. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how the search engines (especially Google) view your website.
Using this information you can dramatically improve the position of your website and quickly clear up any issues Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to gauge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so you can better focus your time and energy on activities that bring you the most success.

About The Author

Not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with doing business with Google. Everyone is profiting from Google, find out how you can too! Click-here: Promote Your Websites © 2006 Promoting Webs.