Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I am an Australian and I often use Google Australia, which provides the option of searching the global web or pages from Australia only. Most large countries have a similar option on their local Google site.

Running an international online business with the capability to service people from any country means that you want your site to perform well not only in local country specific results but also global results. You may not realise this but doing a standard Google search and leaving the “full web” option selected doesn’t necessarily give you your website’s true location in the Google global results. It gives you the global results given your location, in my case the global results for Australia.

For example, the results of doing a full web search if I am in my home city of Brisbane Australia will be different that a full web search when I am in Toronto Canada. Google gives results based on your location even when you are not stipulating a local result. You can click your local country only result button and get sites that are from your home country, usually determined by the domain name extension, for example .com.au for Australia, .ca for Canada, etc. or the IP address of your web hosting server, or you can click the web option and get global Internet results that vary depending on your computer’s location in the world (based on the IP of the computer you are using to access the Internet).

Think Global

If your business can service the world then you really can’t ignore the American marketplace, or if you are in the USA don’t forget about Europe, Asia and the rest. In my case Australia is a very small chunk of the world, and the USA market in particular has the potential to give me access to an audience ten times or more the size of Australia. Hence you need to know how well your site is performing in Google global search results and unfortunately simply ticking the “the web” option in Google when searching for Australia is misleading because your ranking will be different if it was someone in the USA doing the same search.

What I want to know is when someone in the USA does a Google search for one of my terms, how high is my website up in the search results? With this little trick you can figure it out.

The Code

All you need to do is add &gl=us to the URL at the end of the Google search query.

For example:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=sample+query&meta=&gl=us

This tells Google to spit out the results for the query based on US servers.

I can’t guarantee 100% conclusively that this works as I expect it does, but it definitely does something and you should try it yourself and see if your site shows up in a different place in the results. The “gl” stands for Geographic Location and of course you can interchange the last letters to test different country results around the world.

You may be quite surprised and likely disappointed when you see your website is performing in the search results in other countries. Of course if your rankings aren’t so good this equals opportunity as you can imagine if your ranking increased globally then your site is bound to get more traffic. I can vouch for this as the changes made to BetterEdit.com about a month ago, which were designed to tighten up the keyword focus, has really improved BetterEdit’s global position. Google search referred site traffic has almost doubled since then.

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In The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1 I covered the first four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques as explained by Brad Fallon. The first four methods were applicable to On-Page SEO, techniques you can manually apply to your website internally. The remaining four that I am about to discuss cover Off-Page SEO, which in my mind is a lot more difficult to control since you are dealing with external variables.

As I mentioned in part one, these techniques come from a special seminar recording that I received as part of my welcome package for joining Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club.

Off Page SEO

If you are at all familiar with search engine optimization you are probably more interested in Off-Page techniques. With a bit of study and practice you can quickly grasp the most important On-Page variables to play with on your website. There is always more you can do of course, but as long as we are talking 80/20 rules there are only a handful of really important On-Page things and most of them were covered in part one of this article series.

Off-Page SEO in my mind is more important than On-Page. You can get your On-Page content perfectly optimized but without any good Off-Page SEO your On-Page efforts are wasted. No website can be a success in natural search engine results unless there are links flowing into it. This is what Off-Page SEO is all about, getting good quality links coming through.

Quite frankly I don’t believe there are any consistent, easy and affordable ways to conduct Off-Page SEO, and that is why I was so interested to hear what Brad was going to cover in his presentation. To be honest I wasn’t blown away by his comments. It didn’t cover anything new to me but I have been reading about SEO for a number of years, including some of Brad’s other materials, but it did reaffirm what I currently practice in my own Off-Page SEO activities and it’s always good to be reminded of what is smart practice.

Let’s go through the final four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques so you can also do a mental check list and be certain you are following what the experts do.

5. Links and PageRank

Brad mumbled this first point out but later it was clarified that he said links. Really his Off-Page SEO technique discussion was more of a gradual break down than a top 4 list, with each point flowing into the next (which you will see is mimicked in this article) so the first place to logically start is links.

Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Simple but true. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. Yes all the On-Page SEO techniques will influence the variables but the links will determine the strength of your web pages to compete for the top places in search engine results pages. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be. Nuff said.

PageRank

If you read my blog you should be well and truly familiar with PageRank. Most of my SEO posts are laden with the term but just in case you don’t know about PageRank head over and read this article to get yourself introduced to the topic - PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple - this is one of my most popular articles and it should answer your basic questions.

Brad Fallon did not do anything more than a basic introduction to PageRank but he did make one interesting comment that I think is worth repeating. He gave a typical scenario of a person conducting search engine marketing for a website (or a company hired to do so), which usually starts with submitting to directories and hunting around for link exchange partners. Not exactly the most effective means of SEO because you tend to get low quality and low PageRank incoming links.

Brad went on to note the perils of over optimizing, which often happens when techniques like low quality link exchanges and free directories are over used, generating thousands duplicate anchor text incoming links from sites with low PageRank. He stated that the search engines don’t reward these techniques well, but strangely enough these are often considered the foundations of SEO campaigning but don’t lead to great results.

What Is A Good SEO Plan?

A more sound search engine marketing strategy is all about quality over quantity. Get your site listed in the best directories - DMOZ (the open directory project) and Yahoo! - and then slowly, but consistently build incoming links from good relevant sites. This pattern is considered more natural and hence is rewarded with better organic search engine results. Yes it takes longer and you better be a patient bunny, but it will lead to better results in the long term. It’s all about spending your time finding the 20% of links that will give you the 80% of results.

Brad pointed out that 1000 low quality and low PageRank backlinks generated in a short period of time will not be nearly as good as a handful of high PageRank incoming links added over many months. The emphasis is on oh-na-tur-al. Don’t follow the crowd and exchange links with anybody and everyone that comes asking for a link (perhaps I should drop my link exchange practices for this blog?) and don’t spend all your time asking for links from any site you can find that is remotely relevant to yours.

How To Get High Quality Links

It can be especially difficult for a commercial site with no interesting content (for example, nothing but sales pages) to get quality incoming links. No self-respecting, high PageRank site will have a good reason (besides money) to link to a site that is just selling something. Okay yes Apple will probably have no problems getting quality links to its iPod pages but that’s obviously not a position most businesses enjoy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a full-proof method for gaining quality links other than what I have already written about before and what is repeated over and over again all over the Internet - Content is King. The better the content the better the backlinks. Of course you can’t expect quality backlinks to come immediately unless you are willing to buy them. You need to slowly build up an audience that will eventually lead you to enjoy some exposure in the eyes of the quality sites and quality backlinks will come. The best thing is that links from one popular site tends to give you exposure to the owners of other popular sites and momentum will build.

If you need a practical example of how to get high quality backlinks using content read the second part of this article - Smarter Online Marketing. This article explains how one of my blog articles enjoyed some major exposure around the web resulting in lots of links.

In the case of commercial sites the same rules hold true, content will bring in links and visitors. With a commercial site the secret sauce is great content that is tightly aligned with your target market. Whitepapers, articles, free reports, resources, anything and everything you can come up with that will bring your market to your site. If you have just launched a new site put together a whiz-bang whitepaper, it doesn’t have to be too long, just a few pages of really really good stuff and make it available on your site for free.

Once you have the resources on your site you just need to get out there and tell everyone. At the moment one of the best ways is to comment on blogs and forums where your target market congregate. As I mentioned above, if one popular site owner reads your whitepaper, thinks it’s great and tells her audience, your job may be done already. This alone may bring in hundreds of backlinks and definitely lots of real visitors. It’s not easy but good content will lead to good results - it’s almost guaranteed!

6. Page Reputation

Back to the wisdom of Brad Fallon. Page Reputation is a relatively new concept in the eyes of the web public and has been gaining more and more credence as an important SEO consideration. In a nutshell reputation refers to the value of the sites linking to your site and the value of the links linking to the sites linking to your site. Confusing isn’t it!

Every website has a reputation value and incoming links determine that reputation, however it’s not about the number of incoming links but the quality and reputation of the sites that link. The reputation of a mainstream news site, for example CNN, is quite high and will have incoming links from other high reputation sites. If you get a link from CNN then your reputation will rise. Basically it’s measure of a site’s value based on the network of sites linking to that site going back multiple levels of the network.

That’s about as far as my understanding of the concept goes and in my mind ties right back in with the quality over quantity theory.

7. Anchor Text

Number three in the Off-Page SEO technique list is anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site and like your internal linking structure, your external link text is very important but often harder to manipulate. You don’t decide how people link to your site, all you can do is encourage people to link in a certain way.

This issue is all about your keywords. First you have to know what keywords you want people to use to link to your pages and then you need to figure out ways to make sure people use those keywords. For the basic link exchanges you usually communicate with the person providing you with a link and stipulate what anchor text to use. However most of the valuable links will come in response to you writing some good content and it will be quite random, the linking person won’t approach you to ask how they should link to you, they will just slap up a link as they feel appropriate.

In most cases people linking to your pages will use the title of your article, or part of the title, as the anchor text and as such you need to be extra careful when deciding how to name your articles. Yes usability and marketing comes first - you want to grab the attention of human beings with a tempting title, but if you can get some good keywords in there too you will be killing two birds with one stone. Other areas to consider are your name (now don’t go changing your name just for SEO!) and your website’s title as these are often used as anchor text.

I wouldn’t stress about external anchor text too much otherwise you can become bogged down in little details. Often the people linking to you will use completely random text that means absolutely nothing (for example - visit Entrepreneur’s Journey - click here - “click here” is not good anchor text) but at least will bring in human visitors. Just stay consciously aware of the importance of keywords in anchor text whenever you produce new content.

8. Link Popularity

Lastly Brad noted link popularity as the final point in his top 8 SEO technique list. Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality. This is purely how many incoming links there are to your website.

The one interesting point Brad mentioned in this section of his presentation was the difference between Google and Yahoo! regarding the top variables in their algorithms.

Google - 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRep
Yahoo! - 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity

Now I can’t verify that in any manner but it does make for some interesting discussion. This shows that Google cares more about quality and Yahoo! cares more about quantity, but I’m sure there is a lot more to it than that. I’ll leave it up to you to test this theory on your sites.

Link Relevancy and ‘Do Keywords In Domain Names Matter?’

Before I wrap this article up I want to make one comment regarding how relevant backlinks have to be and whether keywords in domain names matter. Brad made some interesting comments about these topics.

My assumption was that relevancy meant that the pages your incoming links come from should be relevant to a pretty high degree, for example, Entrepreneur’s Journey would appreciate links from business, marketing, SEO and entrepreneurship sites but universities, sports clubs and cooking sites would not be relevant. Brad stated that Google’s relevancy scope is quite wide, as wide as the top categories in the DMOZ directory. A site that on first inspection may not be relevant may actually in fact offer some relevancy even if the connection is obscure or drilled down (is every link from a blog relevant to a blog simply because they all belong in the “blog” category? I think not). It’s a hard thing to judge given that determining whether a result (say a search engine ranking increase) has a direct correlation to a single backlink is next to impossible.

What was really interesting and actually makes total sense is what Brad said about domain names. One of the age old questions in SEO is whether keywords in your domain name are important. Brad straight out said that the Google algorithms do not consider keywords in the domain name, however when people link to you they often use your domain name and if your keywords are in your domain name then the anchor text people use to link to you will contain your keywords. In a round about way, yes, keywords in domain names matter.

Conclusion

There you have it, the top 8 search engine optimization techniques as presented by Brad Fallon, one of the web’s most respected search engine marketers, along with lots of additional commentary thrown in from yours truly. For some people there won’t have been much new material but what these two articles do provide is a solid list of the 80/20 variables that you should work on if your organic search engine results are business critical. For solopreneurs with little time on you hands knowing what the key two-to-three things you need to worry about makes for efficient business.

A few people have emailed me questioning the validity of Brad Fallon and I can say one thing only - Jay Abraham would not have selected him as the presenter on search engine optimization if he wasn’t the real deal. If you don’t have any confidence in Jay Abraham then perhaps you need to start studying business and marketing.

Take care everyone,

Yaro Starak
Search Engine Marketer

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I joined Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club to get my copy of the Definitive Guide To Google AdWords at the discounted rate, however I’ve started to realize there is a lot more value in it than just the AdWords eBook, which I guess makes sense since Perry wants people to stay subscribed to his club, so he must keep dishing out good stuff.

Just this morning I had a listen to one of the CDs you receive when you first join the club. This one was with Brad Fallon, the search engine optimization (SEO) expert. It formed the third part of the Jay Abraham’s Power To Profits seminar series that was completed earlier this year with Perry, Brad and Ken McCarthy. You get this CD, titled “The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization“, when you first join Perry’s club, along with the two other CDs that make up the seminar.

Who Is Brad Fallon?

You have probably noticed Brad Fallon’s name, his free e-course and SEO product, Stomping The Search Engines, pop up in the yellow boxes on this blog lately. This is because I know Brad is the real deal after reading his material and listening to his audio and I feel confident recommending him to you as one of a handful of SEO experts that I trust. Much of my understanding of SEO, in particular about sitemaps, has come from Brad. He also has the credentials to back up his products, having grown his business My Wedding Favours from brand new in January 2004 to about $700,000 per month operation 15 months later, mostly thanks to his position in the search engines (his site is number one for most of his key phrases, including “wedding favors“).

As a result of his success with his online store he went on to teach others how to get great results in natural search engine rankings. The audio CD I just listened to had some fantastic materials on the 80/20 of SEO activities we should all be doing. Brad’s skills have come from testing things on his websites and research - lots of real life testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps more importantly he knows what might be sound SEO practice but falls into the 80% of activities that only have 20% impact on your search engine performance, so shouldn’t be prioritized, and the 20% of activities that have the greatest impact that you need to devote most of your time to.

The 80/20 Rule For Search Engine Marketing

When I say 80/20, I mean the 20% of activities that account for the 80% of results you get. In this case it’s the 20% of things you should spend the most time regarding optimizing your website to get the 80% of results in search engines. Wasting time with the other 80% that produces 20% of the results is obviously not a good idea. If you are at all familiar with this principle, and you will be if you read my blog regularly since I reference to it a lot, then you know that the 80/20 equation is not a strict mathematical rule but definitely is something that every business should heed.

There are very few variables in any organisation that account for the majority of results. When I say variables I mean anything from people, marketing methods, customers, infrastructure, systems, suppliers, products, pricing points, seasons - anything and everything, can usually fit nicely into a 80/20 relationship. In this case I am discussing the 80/20 of search engine optimization techniques - these are the activities that you should spend the majority of your time on.

The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques

I’m going to list the top 8 techniques that Brad discussed in the seminar. Bear in mind that I’m only going to briefly review them since it wouldn’t be fair to Brad, Perry or any of the guys selling this stuff if I simply reposted all their materials. The fact is I couldn’t do it anyway, it would take a 50 page post to cover everything Brad discussed in the audio CD. If you are interested in having a listen to this CD I suggest you try Perry’s Renaissance Club.

Brad broke down his top 8 list into two categories - On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (usually talking about incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page since you can action these items immediately and test results.

On-Page SEO

1. Title Tags

If you are at all familiar with SEO then I’m sure you would have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven time and time again, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in natural (organic) search results.

Brad gave an excellent example of how he played with slight changes to the title tag of his Wedding Favors home page causing a dramatic change to his search engine result page (SERP) placement. He was sitting at number 2 on Google and was testing methods to get his site into number 1. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results. His results were often quite dramatic, dropping to number 9, then completely gone, and finally finding the combination of title tag phrases that resulted in a number one ranking. He now owns the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo!.

During this process Brad recommended that you optimize for only two to three key phrases per page. The keyphrases that start the title tag (the ones on the left) have the most power, so should be selected very carefully. His example was interesting because it showed how his three key phrases for his homepage were adjusted to create a number one ranking for all three of his phrases (Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors). It wasn’t very complicated, just moving words around and seeing what happened. Not rocket science, just practical testing. I have since added an entry to my ‘to-do’ list for BetterEdit.com to start testing title phrases again.

2. Keyword Density

Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. There is no strict rule or percentage to aim for but Brad offered a very sound practice to determine what works - copy what your competitors do. Search for your key phrases, the phrases you want to show up for in the search engines and see what the current top result site’s keyword density is.

To do this Brad gave away this fantastic little gem of a resource - go to this website - www.Ranks.nl and use it to test out the keyword density of your competitors pages and your pages. See how the number one site handles their keyword density - how often in title tags, heading tags, alt tags, body content and other areas of their site certain keyword phrases appear and then copy their techniques. Once you have your on-page keyword density equal or better than your competitors then all you have to do is worry about your off-page SEO to beat them (and test test test!).

3. Site Structure

Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. Brad didn’t talk too much about this and I know why - he’d need a full seminar just to explain all the different things you can work on! However I think there is one really important thing to mention regarding site structure and I know Brad would agree with me - it’s your sitemap - whether you have one to begin with and how you structure it. My suggestion is you do Brad’s free e-course that covers a lot on site structure and in particular sitemaps. It’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

4. Internal Links

You have to remember that Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take great care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The beauty of this technique is that you can control it, it’s an on-page technique that in lets you add backlinks to your own pages (What is a backlink and why should you care? Read this - The Backlink FAQ and this - Monitoring Your Backlinks - How Popular Is Your Website?).

The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. Make use of a footer by linking to all your most important pages using the appropriate anchor text keyword phrase (especially your sitemap) and make sure your navigation structure links with keywords, not just blanket statements like “click here”.

Two words of warning with this - don’t forget about usability and don’t over optimize. Brad mentioned that Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. Afterall your goal with all this SEO is to get humans to your site and there is no point if they can’t figure out how to navigate to what they want because your linking text is all the same or poorly labeled.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization in Part 2

That’s it for the on-page SEO tips. In part two of this series I’ll go through the final 4 tips Brad Fallon mentioned regarding off-page SEO and then you will have a complete picture of the top 8 most important search engine optimization factors. Part two will be posted in the next couple of days.

Part 2 is now available - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

Yaro Starak

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This is a problem I’ve never had to deal with yet watching a few friends recently start new websites has made me realize that getting a brand new site to be discovered (indexed, listed) by the search engines can be a difficult task. In my case since I’ve been operating online for so long whenever I launch a new site I simply link to if from my existing sites knowing in confidence that Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search will quickly index the site. But what do you do to get a site indexed if you have no existing portfolio of sites already established to take advantage of?

How Do Search Engines Work?

First you must understand how exactly the search engines find websites and index content. In order for your website to show up in a search result your pages must exist in the search engine’s index. Each search engine has an absolutely massive index (let’s not talk about comparing index sizes, it’s like a search engine mid-life crisis joke waiting to happen) and it’s constantly updated every minute of every day. The search engines have what are called bots or crawlers or spiders, basically computers that ‘pretend’ to be browsers surfing the web devouring content like hungry monsters. There job is to make sure the search engines have the most up to date index of webpages possible so that when a person uses a search engine they get the most relevant response available. Obviously it’s a lot more complicated than that but I’m into simple explanations and that’s really all you need to know.

Your goal is to get the little spider to come visit your site and index every page of content so as to maximize your search engine results page performance. In order for a spider to crawl the web and visit your site there must be an incoming link pointing to it. So what’s the best way to accomplish this? Read on…

Submit Your Site To Directories

One of the paths of least resistance to get an incoming link is to use a directory. Directories exist to simply list websites, usually broken down by category. All you need to do is fill out a form and depending on whether submissions are manually or automatically approved, your link will show up in the directory with a period of time, usually 24 hours.

The problem with directories is they are essentially link farms, no content and lots of outbound links. Consequently they usually have very little clout in the search engines and since your link is sitting in amongst possibly thousands of other links the little search engine spiders may never find your site.

In order to maximise your chance of success using this technique choose some of the higher profile directories. If you read this post - Free Traffic From Free Directories - you will find a link to a solid listing of reputable directories that you can submit your site to.

Comment In Blogs, Forums, Bulletin Boards And Newsgroups

This strategy is a delicate one. You don’t ever want to SPAM - purposely post just to mention your website without contributing anything of value. Even if you think you are contributing something of value by linking to your site chances are your post will be deleted since people generally have a thing against self promotion, no matter how valuable your self promotion may be (or you think it may be).

The best way to go about this is to have a signature file (most forums have a function for this) that allows a few lines of self promotion to be included at the end of your posts. Enter the community, get involved in the discussion and contribute. Now obviously you will have more knowledge to draw from if you pick communities based on topics you are familiar with and preferably are relevant to your site. Not only do you improve your chance of search engine spiders finding your site, you might get some real humans clicking your signature and visiting your site as a bonus (this is in fact a good general online marketing strategy to get more traffic to your site - I use it regularly).

A note about blog commenting - thanks to the NoFollow tag which many blogs have on by default, your comments will not be followed by the Google spider. Read this article - Trackbacking Lies - How rel=”nofollow” Stops Spreading the Love - for information about - for information about the NoFollow tag.

A better strategy with blogs, albeit a more labor intensive one, is to set up a blog yourself and start writing up good content. Head to some similar blogs talking about similar topics to your market, join in the conversation by posting relevant comments and you may find some other bloggers will link back to your blog. Most blog commenting systems allow commenters to make their name clickable to a website (my blog does this) so people will read your comment and then click your name to visit your website. When they come visiting and they find some good interesting content they may link to you in a blog post. If a popular enough blog links to you that will be all it takes to get the search engine spiders to find your site. Mission complete.

Press Release Distribution

This technique is easy enough to implement but faces the same issues as directories because so many people make use of it you may get lost in the crowd. You can go to a site like PRWeb, submit your press release about the news of your new website launch and they will publish it for journalists to make use of. A good press release may even circulate all over the Internet but at worst you will be at least published on PRWeb (there are others PR sites out there - try a search for “press release distribution” or similar).

I won’t go into too much detail about how to write a good press release, that’s whole article in itself, just remember to cover the who, what, when, where and why and try to come up with an interesting human interest angle. Note that this strategy is also a very good general marketing promotion technique so it might be worth doing simply for the experience and testing anyway.

Google Sitemaps

For the more technically savvy out there Google provides a sitemap submission system that gives you the tools to directly communicate with Google to let the search engine know when your site updates and ensure your entire site is indexed. This is only available for Google.

Manual Submission

Most search engines provide a facility to submit your site manually. Now while this may end getting your site indexed it really is just about a useless activity and could even slow down the process of becoming indexed. Remember that search engines rely on links to find, and more importantly, to evaluate sites (read my articles on search engine optimization if this is a new concept to you). Get yourself one relevant quality incoming link and that will do a lot more to get your site indexed quickly than manual submission ever could.

Some search engines offer a form of paid inclusion service that will speed up the process of getting your site indexed. Personally I think this is a waste of money. It might get you in the door but it won’t have you ranking highly for any search terms. It’s like opening a door to let you join the end of a very long queue. In order to advance up the queue you need to get incoming links. Incoming links will also open that door for you for free, so paid inclusion is really a waste of money and time. Focus on incoming links.

Link Loving And Paying For Links (Link Prostitution?)

Link love is a relatively easy thing to be on the receiving end of. You have probably heard of the favor bank, the social currency of our world. You can open an account with almost anyone by making a deposit by simply doing them a favor. Maybe you’re really good at graphic design so you can create a logo, or perhaps you’re an accountant so you can offer tax advice, or a lawyer could look over a contract or, well you get the picture. You can then make a withdrawal by asking for a link to your website. Favor currency flows quite freely and can easily be accrued by doing good deeds.

If you don’t feel like using the favor bank you can always try the other currency, cold hard cash, and buy some text link ads on other sites. A $50 link on a prominent site for a month should do the trick to get your site indexed. This is the rich man’s answer though and really should not be applied if your goal is only to get indexed, there are so many free ways to do it it’s hard to justify spending the cash. However if it forms part of an overall online marketing strategy that you intend to put into place anyway you may as well start spending straight away and kill two birds with one stone.

It’s All Part Of The Online Marketing Process

I’ve only barely scratched the surface of the many ways you can get your site indexed. Really it’s one of the easiest tasks, so don’t stress about it for too long. If you have the intention of putting into place smart online marketing practices and learn as you implement, then the initial indexing step will not concern you. The overall search engine optimization process takes a lot longer and you will quickly realise that just getting into the index is the very start of a long hard push, trying to raise your website from the very bottom of the index to the top result pages for your key terms.

Yaro Starak
Search Engine Optimizer

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I’ve been following a discussion over at the SEOChat Forums about an experiment with meta tags that, while far from conclusive, is demonstrating a situation where meta tags don’t matter, at least where search engine optimization is concerned.

Meta Tags are most commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page’s content. They are placed in between the <head></head> tags and look like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, business, marketing, etc"/>

If you do a “view source” command from your browser (right click on a webpage in the Internet Explorer browser) and look at the code you may find the above tag at the top, full of keywords relevant to the page you are looking at.

In the early days of pre-Google search meta tag keywords were reasonably powerful tools for search engine optimization, and combined with the keywords within a page made up the main driving forces that dictated how high up a page would show up in search results. Back then the search engines were quite primitive by today’s standards and often you would have companies paying the prominent search engines to make sure their websites showed up high in results for certain keywords. Google of course equalized the playing field somewhat but the legacy of meta tags lives on and you will see countless articles still instructing webmasters of the importance of meta tag keywords. This quite frankly, is dated information.

The reality nowadays is that meta tag keywords are considered far from crucial for good SEO and if abused can even be bad for it. The argument circling around SEO circles is that meta keywords are akin to keyword stuffing, a “black hat” SEO technique where websites are “stuffed” full of keywords and hidden, either with code or by using a text color the same as the background color. Of course this is frowned upon and if found out the website will be banned from Google. Meta keywords, while not quite as insidious as keyword stuffing, is similar in the sense that keywords are “stuffed” into the code of a page, hence search engines do not give much, if any weighting to them. Most of the major search engines ignore them altogether.

Should you be using meta tag keywords at all?

Yes and no. It definitely should not be prioritized and if you have other, better SEO things to do worry about don’t spend time on your meta keywords. If you insist on using meta keywords use them sparingly, only a handful, about 10 maximum, and keep them very relevant to the page content. Less is more in this case.

Meta keywords are a legacy of web 1.0 and are slowly being phased out completely. Your title tags, heading tags and content play a much more important role and really if you have time to spare to work on SEO you should be writing great new content that people will link to, not cramming your pages with redundant keywords.

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