Having your anchor text in the backlink set as your target key phrase, should make your site rank better for that key phrase, basically increasing its relevancy for that phrase. There is a theory that even a blank page can rank high on search engines if there is enough backlinks with the same anchor text linking to it.

An extreme version of this technique has been called a ‘Google Bomb’, ‘Link Bomb’, or ‘Google Washing’, which is basically when thousands of websites all link to one site, all using the same anchor text, so as to manipulate the search engine results. These days Google has changed a few things so that extreme versions are not as easy to create as they were back in the day. Google needs to deliver Relevant results to its customers, and if the results are incorrect, due to a Google bomb, it would have unhappy users, hence the change. For some information on famous Google Bombs, visit Wikipedia

Another important part of your link building efforts is getting websites with a high Google Pagerank to link to your website. Many of the link exchange pages on websites specify that they only exchange links with websites that have a high PR, or a Pagerank of at least 3 or 4, with the purpose of getting good quality inbound links to the website.

At the end of the day, if you are trying to get good rankings for your website, you will be wanting to get loads of backlinks, especially those with a high pagerank.

Now for the cool stuff!

When you are trying to get your website ranked above your competitors in the search engine results, its a great idea to see where their backlinks are coming from, what anchor text was used, and the pagerank of the site the backink is on.

I like to use a tool called Link Diagnosis, which allows you to put in a url, and get a list of all the backlinks pointing to that domain.

Creating a report showing the links to a website shows the Pagerank of the inbound links, the anchor text used, if each link is No-follow, how many outbound links are on that page, and the strength of that link! Awesome!

With this information you will be able to visit all the same high PR and quality sites linking to a competitor website, and see if its possible to add your own link there too, or even better, if you can get your link listed instead of the competitor website.

Using this method is a really easy way to find a great list of websites that you could possibly exchange links with, or event better, to build a one-way link to your site with.

I suggest you start with the websites that have a PR over 2 for best results. What I like about Link Diagnosis, is that you can arrange all the links displayed in order of Pagerank and link strength, as well as the fact that you can register as a member, and save your reports online, not to mention export them to a spreadsheet.

Another great website that I like to use is called Check Backlink (http://www.check-backlink.com), which offers a similar service. I like both these websites and use them both quite often. I find that although Check Backlink is not as comprehensive as Link Diagnosis, it is a fast way to do a quick check when doing research, while Link Diagnosis is a tad slow sometimes.

Need to build quality one-way backlinks FAST?

If you are looking to build quality backlinks fast, I can suggest http://www.textlinks.com, if you sign up for free, you can place 25 permanent links. Obviously it would be better to pay the $99 a month and be able to place 100 links per month, but I like the fact that you can sign up and test the system before buying. Even if you don’t purchase, your 25 links are permanent and will remain.

I have been trying to make a bit of money online for a while now, and am thrilled with this new website that allows you to instantly install a blog, ready for monetization, and has over 1000 templates to choose from!

This is a dream come true for people who dont have much experience with earning money online.

I thought I would share the info, obviously if you are a Pro, then you may prefer to do things the way you know how, but for newbies, this makes it so unbelievably easy to setup a website and start earning immediately, dont forget its free too!

The website is being run by the creators of the Thirty Day Challenge, a website that teaches you the basics of how to make money online for FREE! Their website is http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com. If you are new to internet marketing and making money online GO TO THIS SITE NOW, they will teach you all the basics 100% FREE of charge.

They have setup this awesome site called WordPress Direct, which has free and paid areas. (http://www.worpressdirect.com)

Simply put, Wordpress Direct will allow you to create SEO-Optimized, Content-Stuffed Websites Instantly!

No More Wasting Your Precious Time with Setup, Search Engine Optimization, or Maintaining Your Site . . . WordPressDirect has been designed to handle all the setup, SEO and maintenance functions for you.

The free area allows you to setup 3 fully functional sites, while the other pay areas let you do more.

Trust me, once you have tried this you will NEVER worry about finding wordpress hosting, templates etc ever again! Best of all is FREE for the basic version, awesome hey!

Do yourself a favour, go check it out, and start earning money asap.

There is NO obligation to buy anything, put down a deposit, or anything, its great!

A bit about the application…Its called the Visa Business Network, and is designed to help your business succeed.

Who is VISA?

Visa Inc. operates the world’s largest retail electronic payments network providing processing services and payment product platforms. This includes consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments, which are offered under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink and PLUS brands. Visa enjoys unsurpassed acceptance around the world, and Visa/PLUS is one of the world’s largest global ATM networks, offering cash access in local currency in more than 170 countries.

If you havent seen a VISA logo, then you have been living under a rock somewhere for many years!

Why add this application?

Connect with other small business owners, learn ways to manage your business more efficiently, and grow by reaching the millions of potential customers on Facebook.

It’s free to join and easy to use. Sign up now to redeem your $100 in targeted Facebook advertising, and start connecting.

Use The Visa Business Network to:

GROW: With over 80 million users, Facebook is a great place to build your business. When you join the network, you get $100 to create targeted advertising and reach potential customers on Facebook.

CONNECT: The Visa Business Network connects you with other small businesses. Share ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge with people going through the same things you are.

MANAGE: The Resource Center features exclusive content that gives you great ways to help you manage your business. Take advantage of articles, videos, and tips from top small business sources.

SO…you sold yet? You want that free $100 credit on Facebook?

Here, add this application and enjoy

http://apps.facebook.com/visabusiness

I have discovered a great little site called http://Ping.fm, its really cool for updating many of your social networks with one posting!

Check out the website, it is still in Beta phase, if you need to sign in with a Beta code, you can use “landofping” as your code, which will allow you to complete the signup process.

Networks that it will update for you are:

1. Bebo
2. Blogger
3. Facebook
4. hi5
5. Jaiku
6. LinkedIn
7. LiveJournal
8. Mashable
9. MySpace
10. Plurk
11. Pownce
12. Tumblr
13. Twitter
14. Xanga

You are able to post to specific services by grouping, such as bloggin, micro-blogging and status updates.

You are also able to get a “ping this” code for your blogs etc, so that visitors to your site can share over all their social platforms they have setup.

I am still new to the system, but so far am impressed!

When I say the ‘fittest’ sites appear at the top of the search engine rankings, I mean the ones that are normally working the hardest at it. How do you excercise your website you might ask, well, here are some things you could do to increase its fitness:

• Edit / add content on your website regularly – search engines as well as real people will visit more regularly if the content is fresh.
• Refine your coding, make it clean, fast loading, and web standards compliant – nobody likes a slow clunky website
• Keep your site design and coding up-to-date with the website trends and ideas – again, keep it fresh
• Target specific key words and phrases with each new page, and tweak it on pages that are not ranking too well
• Run a newsletter that can be sent out to a subscriber base, publish it on your website as a new page too, combine it with an RSS feed if you can.
• Market the website on social networks, forums, blogs, newsgroups etc – flat out tell people about the site
• Run competitions, polls etc on your site, get the visitors involved and interacting with the site
• Build the brand, associate your website with speed, service, prices, value, whatever you can, so visitors return to your site and tell their friends about it.

It is way easier to get and keep an ‘active’ website in a good ranking position on search engines because like people, fitter is better. Just as in the human body, if you neglect your website, it will suffer, slow down, and generally fade into a sad soggy, floppy mess that nobody finds attractive! The top sites normally have been designed in a way that is appealing to the visitor as well as search engines. These days your design needs to be done twice, once on the visual side of the site, the part that the visitor sees, and again in the coding of the site. Both of these need to be maintained, toned, and updated, so that they dont become boring, obsolete, and uninteresting.

Just like there are those horrible people who never have to excercise, and still look great, there are horrible websites that seem to do well on search engines even though they just dont deserve to be there. It all comes down to conversion of visitor to customer, sometimes a site may rank well, but not convert anywhere near as many visitors to customers as a competitor website that ranks further down on search engine results. This is why your site must focus on the visitor and their experience on your website, just as much as the search engines, and their perception of your website.

The bottom line is that you will find it much easier to rank high in search engines if your site is well toned and excersised regularly. Like with most excercise, quick fixes are short lived and not worth it in the long run. Often you will end up in a worse position than when you started, and in the case of your website, may have to outlay large amounts to get your website and its reputation ‘fixed’.

It makes far more sense to set a goal and steadily work toward it, continuously making improvements with the end result in mind. In the long run, your site will rank better, and you will find it easier and easier to outrank competitor websites.

Those of you who suddenly feel the urge to tone your bodies and get fitter, visit hot body training for some tips

By visiting the profile pages of MyBlogLog members, you can increase traffic to your own blog, as well as make a few good contacts and friends at the same time! One way is to add members as contacts if they have similar type blogs or interests to you. That member will see they have been added as a contact, and will visit your profile to see who exactly you are, and possibly your blog. By strategically adding members as contacts, who are well known, or have popular blogs, you can get offspin traffic from members visiting their profile page, who see your avatar as a recent visitor, or in the messages area. This is a common ‘trick’, and there is a restriction on the amount of contacts you can add in one day, which is 15, so by choosing 15 good contacts a day, leaving a message on their profile page, and visiting their blogs, it is possible to get some nice offspin traffic.

Browse or search through MyBlogLog, and join a couple of interesting communities that are similar to your own blogging interests. On the profile page of the community, your avatar will be displayed as a recently joined member. Your avatar is what other members of the community will click to see your profile, and possibly then click through to read your blog. You can also leave an inspiring message, and even your url on the community page, or the profile page of another member. It is surprising how many visitors you can get just by leaving a positive, good message, on a members profile page. The member will normally visit your page, possibly leave a return message, and will more often than not also visit your blog.

It has to be said also that you can get loads of traffic just by having an interesting looking avatar. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so just by having a great looking avatar, maybe a beautiful picture, something funny, your company logo etc, you can inspire members to click to see your profile. This works for MyBlogLog members, as well as other non members to a particular blog that is displaying your avatar.

What I also like about MyBlogLog is the tracking available. You are able to add snippets of code to your blog which allow Mybloglog to track the statistics, so that from your profile page, you can see how many visitors your blog has got over the last few days, the traffic source of the visitors, what pages they visited on your blog, and what links they clicked. This information is only available to the profile owner, so members visiting your blog cant access your blog stats.

If you have a blog, do yourself a favour, and join Mybloglog, add the widgets, join some communites, and possible make some great business contacts. The social networking, and the great resources of blogs and communities alone are reason enough to become a member, and expand your blogging horizons.

What actually happens with google alerts, is that you input a key phrase that you are interested in, every time google finds new web pages relating to that phrase, you get an email, with the address of the websites. Simply put, Its an email alert that google has found another page related to your key phrase that you chose in the google alerts control panel.

Using Google Alerts to keep track of your competition websites, and build links to your own website

Do a google search for your primary key phrase that you are trying to rank for, and make a note of the top ten websites in the results. Now go to Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts), and put each of those web addresses in as items you would like to be alerted on. Now every time one of these websites is added to another directory, links page, search engine, blog etc and google finds it, you will get an email.

This information is like gold, and you should immediately visit the offending website, and see if you can get your own site listed there too. It might have been a link exchange, or a paid placement etc, but sometimes its a blog talking about the competition website. Blogs are great because 90% of the time, there is an option to comment on the article, and this is when you strike!

Leave an excellent comment on the page, I mean make it worth its weight in gold, be constructive, informative, witty, etc, pull out all the stops, and of course, leave your website link. Even be so bold as to say how much you like the competition website, and why you like it. All this will make people interested in you, and your website link. It will also ensure that your comment is not removed, because the admin of the blog will love great comments to the articles. This works especially if the blog actually belongs to your competitor! So in theory its entirely possible for you to get your main competitors website to actually have links to yours!

Whats also great, is that normally if you visit the websites as soon as you receive your google alert, if its a blog article, there normally arent any other comments yet, so you get to be the first one to comment on the article, and so your website link is going to have the most visibility out of all the comments. Yeah baby!

Now comes an even cooler part, share the blog page! Thats right, most blogs have those buttons to share the posting on digg/delicious/newsvine etc. Click the button and post the page to as many places as you are a member. This will allow others to find the posting, and in turn, your link and comment. If its a competitors blog and you are reluctant to share it, get over yourself! The blog still has a link to your site, and the world should know about it!

Use Google Alerts to get web content

Go to Google Alerts and input your main phrase that you are trying to rank high for. Now everytime google finds new sites related to that phrase you get your notification. Normally it lists a lot of news pages and blogs talking about your key phrase. So immediately you benefit by keeping on top of the latest breaking news about your target phrase. Visit all these news sites, and harvest the information to use on your own site, to increase your status as an authority website for that phrase. Free content, cool!

Your site will quickly become the authority on that phrase if every time there is breaking news on that subject, your site has a page about it. So harvest all the news information, re-write it, and make it your own. Then publish the page on your website, and of course share it with social bookmarking sites. This works well if your website has products for sale, and one of your phrases is a brand name or product name. Your site can have the most up to date information about that product or brand at all times if you keep track of things with google alerts! Remember, the most relevant sites for a key phrase are at the top of page one on google!

Of course like above, visit all the blogs, and post comments about each article, again, you will probably be the first to comment and leave your link. Remember to make the comment really good. Dont do a one-liner, make it a work of art, a really good post that you can be proud of. Lastly, dont forget to share the page!

Use Google Alerts to track when Google indexes your pages

Another nifty way to use Google Alerts, is to put a random line of text onto each of your pages when you publish them, eg: asdlkhsofieknhewioughsoeighjsoefjoief.

Go then to the Google Alerts control panel, and put that line of text in as an item you would like to get email alerts on. Do this every time you create a new web page. Now you can use Google Alerts to track when your pages get indexed by Google. As soon as google finds your page, you get an email, now you pretty much know for certain, that your page is indexed in Google, and should be able to be found in the search results.

If you cant seem to find your page when doing searches for the key phrase you are targeting with that page, you can make changes to the code or content, use a new random string of text, then upload the changes.

Go back to Google Alerts, and replace the old text string with the new one, and wait for your email alert!

Most of our clients are SMME, we deal directly with the owners of the company, and get to know them on a personal level. Unfortunately, every time I talk to clients about website maketing, they all ask about getting listed on so called ‘thousands’ of search engines. It seems that almost all of them have at some point in time received some spam email promising their site on thousands of search engines within 24 hours or a similar type offer. Worse still are the ones who have been ‘educated’ by friends and / or family, who think they know what they are talking about. Most of these guys have all been brainwashed by people and companies wanting to make a quick buck.

The reality is that people do use search engines to find things on the web, that much is true. What they DON’T do, is use all these thousands of search engines as much as people would have you believe. The fact is that almost all good search engine traffic woldwide comes from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the most popular search engines on the web. These engines being the most popular engines, leads you to believe that the others are NOT all that popular, and therefore dont get as much traffic, let alone traffic that uses their services. Of the web traffic these engines do get, you have to ask yourself, what is the percentage of their visitors that will be trying to find YOUR website or services / products? Why would a visitor to these other engines websites use them to search and NOT use Google, Yahoo, or MSN?

Dont get me wrong, there are some other engines that do have satisfied and loyal customers, and most of the time they keep their place in the market by being language, region, theme or subject specific, in order to hold onto their loyal users, but not many.

Some of these engines supliment some or all of their search results, by re-branding the results from the big 3 under their own name. Many times you will find that you can get identical results when searching for something in Google, and other search engine X. One such website that gets results from multiple locations, and has a great following of loyal users, is the site www.Dogpile.com, which lists the top results of each of the engines in its results.

So definately the big 3, Google, Yahoo and MSN are the most important engines to be listed. The next place your website MUST be listed in, is the DMOZ directory. Thousands of other websites get directory results from DMOZ, the most important web directory on the web. Get your website listed in those four locations, and the chances are that your site will be ‘findable’ in most of these thousands of other search engines already anyway.

If you get listed in all these thousands of small independant engines, your link is not listed for any given length of time on a specific page, and is only able to be found via a search. So the only traffic you will receive from that engine, is as with any engine, from visitors using the search facililty. So you once again need to ask yourself, what sort of visitor traffic is the engine getting? Of that traffic, how many people will be looking for my site/products/services? I am not saying it wont hurt to submit your site there, but would you get a good return on investment (ROI) from paying some company to list your site in all of these ‘thousands of engines’, when the big 3 are clearly dominating in traffic and searches? Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am concerned, the short answer, is a huge NO!

So what happens if you dont care, and are willing to spend the money with one of these companies to get listed on ‘thousands of engines’?

Are you sitting pretty, making so much money through your website that you dont know what to do with all of it? Well, not necissarily! You might have just paid to be listed on tons of these ‘engines’, but that doesnt mean you are going to get any more traffic than you are already getting. Just because your site is indexed, does NOT mean you will be listed on the first page of results on that engine. There are NO guarantees to where your site will be placed in the regular search results on any given search engine, by any web marketing company on the web.

The fact is that your website still needs to be optimized for search phrases that you would like to be ranked high for, before you see the results of being indexed in any search engine, and that goes for the big 3 too. With each real search engine having its own unique formula that it uses to judge where your site should be listed in search results for a key word or phrase, its going to be hard to optimize a website to be number one for all of the big 3 engines at the same time.

So you have ask yourself again, why pay to have your site submitted to thousands of search engines, with no guarantee of placement, and no guarantee of traffic? I don’t get it, maybe I am missing something?

till next time – F

There is no magic way to instantly get to number 1 on Google’s regular results overnight, using a highly competitive or popular key phrase for any length of time. Let me explain why I think this, I may be wrong, but this is how I understand it, and I am open to correction.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and other good Search Engines all have a top secret formula that they use to calculate the results for search topics. That formula is constantly being improved upon, changing results from time to time, and differs from engine to engine, as they all try to be better than the other. All these big search engines have one thing in common, they want to deliver RELEVANT RESULTS to your search term. The all compete against each other to deliver the most relevant results, so sometimes you get similar results across all the big search engines, but similarly you can and do very often get completely different ones.

All these search engines pay your site a visit every so often, to check for changes. If you have a high page rank, they like to come back more often than if you dont, but generally they visit around once a month or so. Every time a spider comes to ‘check’ your site, it is re-evaluated against the current formula the search engine is using. This is when your site will either move up or down in the search results against your competition websites. The interesting thing to note, is that while this is happening to your site, its also happening to your competition’s websites, but not necessarily at the same time. Each search engine doesnt visit everyones sites at exactly the same time, or at the same frequency, so while your site may move down two places today for a specific search term, your main opposition site might move down five places for the same term tomorrow. If you can imagine a magician shuffling a deck of cards, and each card representing the top sites in the results of a search engine, you will realize that your site and your competition’s websites all move up and down on a constant basis.

Search engines are clever! Remember that! Their mission is to deliver the most relevant results at that specific time. These results are influenced by the formula the engine uses, and some, like Google, are a bit too clever, the formula is dynamic, and changes from person to person. If I search for a specific term on google.com, I will get relevant results according to what google thinks I want to find. These results could be completely different from the results for exactly the same search term on google.com, but from a user sitting in Germany, the UK, or the USA. With this in mind, you have to then conclude, that all your checking and optimizing etc is more than likely for your own local search results. If your website is targeting the search results of web surfers in a foreign country, you have to rank high on their results, and not necissarily on the same results locally. So not only do you have to ask yourself “who is your target audience”, but “where is your target audience” too. Now you can understand why many websites offer their visitors a choice of language to view the site in. This is one way of targeting the same audience, possibly in a different county, or using a different language, effectively increasing the web footprint of the website. You can understand then that its quite possible that the german version of a website, will more than likely rank better in google.de, than the english version of the same site. Now think about where your site lists in google.com as opposed to yahoo.com, or msn.co.uk!

So if the formula for search results is extremely complex, and delivers ever changing results for the same search terms, influenced by many elements such as ip address and location, links, domain age, and search trends, to name a few, you will understand why it is not easy to get to position 1 all that easily, UNLESS, your site is the most relevant for that search term.

This brings you right back to the basics of website building, information. What information is on your website? Is your website an authority on its content? Old school marketing always asked “who is your target audience”, many people have forgotten this when building their websites, but this, combined with relevant information is key to having a website, and having a website that WORKS. If your site offers original, relevant information specific to your target market’s search phrases, then you are half way there. Just don’t forget about your competition’s website, if you think they are not all sitting around trying to figure out how to beat your site in search engine rankings, you are sorely mistaken!

I think if you want to get ranked well, you need to really deliver when it comes to your content, target market and your target key phrases you want to be found for. If your site can pass all the ‘checks’ needed, to be ranked at the top of search results, then you have done well. One thing almost every site that ranks high on google has is GREAT CONTENT, have that on your site, and you WILL do well. Dont forget to put yourself into the shoes of your web visitor, be objective and take a hard look at your site, ask yourself a few questions like:

• would you as a customer be satisfied with the information on your site?
• Would you come back to the site for more?
• Is it good enough that you want to refer it to a friend?
• Is it that informative that you would want to bookmark it?

Once your site has killer content, and you can begin to market your site online, to boost your google rankings.

DIY Website optimization

Meta Tags

For some people, this is the beginning and the end of SEO. As far as they are concerned, as long as they have a META keywords and description, they are set, and the page is ‘optimised’ – Wrong! Firstly, META tags are not as important as some people think, google for instance doesnt really do much with them other than acknowledge their existence. Engines like Yahoo on the other hand, as well as some META search engines will put much more importance on them.

Personally I still use them so that I cover all the bases, but there is a correct and an incorrect way to use them. Firstly, always have keywords and a description that is applicable to the content on that specific page. Each page on your site must have its own set of different keywords as well as description and dont forget the title tag either.

Now there is something that you have to remember, search engines are extrememly clever animals, and if you want to rank high, you need to make sure your site is relevant for the search term. Think about it, how long do you think people would use google if all the top results were websites that had nothing to do with the search term? Google and other search engine’s bread and butter, relies on being able to deliver relevant results to the customer. With this in mind, DONT think you can trick your way into the top ten. Rather do it right first time, and target a couple of specific phrases you would like to rank high for. Why only a couple, well, you want your page to have relevant content, if you target more phrases, its cant really be very relevant for all of them at the same time. Why phrases you ask, because then you are targetting a specific search term. Chances are, if someone is searching for exactly that specific term, you want them for a customer. Single keywords could help, but think how broad they are. Potentially you are now trying to fight for position with thousands more websites around the web. Essentially its like niche marketing for your business, you are targetting a niche group of web surfers out there, who want sites about that specific term. Thats targeted traffic, thats what you want coming to your site. The conversion from visitor to customer is way higher if the traffic is more targetted in the first place.

I have used my hosting website as an example below. I was targeting the keyphrases “linux website hosting” as the main key phrase I wanted to use to bring in traffic. This phrase has worked very well for me here on Google.co.za. Please note that I cant put the tag names in properly on this blog because I get errors, so I have substituted the < and > tags for { and }

{head}
{title}Linux website hosting – fast, reliable, affordable linux web hosting{/title}
{meta name=”keywords” content=”linux website hosting, linux web host, hosting, web hosting, website hosting, affordable, cheap, fast, reliable, web, host, website, website host, linux hosting, linux, reliable website host, free domain, business, email” /}
{meta name=”description” content=”Linux website hosting specialisits providing affordable, reliable, fast and feature rich linux website hosting. ” /}
{meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ /}
{META name=”verify-v1″ content=”03v8mbl1JZd7vD+fttVw5MrT3oj+UZqYZDYI/HlGZpU=” /}
{meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, all” /}
{meta name=”language” content=”en” /}
{meta name=”rating” content=”GENERAL” /}
{meta name=”distribution” content=”GLOBAL” /}
{meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 Days” /}
{meta name=”author” content=”Francois Harris – francois@sa-nethost.com”
{meta http-equiv=”reply-to” content=”info@sa-nethost.com” /}

The title tag of your website is extremely important and hold quite a bit of clout with the search engines, so dont waste this prime space for your domain name or business name, rather use it to target the keyphrase you want to be found for. In the title tag for your website, try to put your primary keyphrase in the beginning, followed by a few relevant words to make the whole thing make sense. Notice how I put the primary keyphrase in the beginning and the end of the title tag.

{title}Linux website hosting – fast, reliable, affordable linux web hosting{/title}

Take your primary and seconday key phrases, and use them first and second in your keywords meta tag, separated by a comma. Following them, a few extra relevant keywords to the site, and again your area or city name if you are targeting that traffic. Dont go mental on the keywords!!! There is a theory that the more keywords you have, then the less importance there is for all of them, as the relevance is spread between all of them, using less apparently gives the ones you do use more ‘power’, not sure on this but hey,its not gonna hurt. You also dont want the search engines to think you are spamming them with loads of keywords either. Keep it to about 15 or 20 keywords in total to be safe, and dont repeat keywords. One other thing, is that every one of the keywords I have used, IS actually in the text on that page, giving each one of the keywords more relevance.

{meta name=”keywords” content=”linux website hosting, linux web host, hosting, web hosting, website hosting, affordable, cheap, fast, reliable, web, host, website, website host, linux hosting, linux, reliable website host, free domain, business, email” /}

Try to put your primary and secondary key phrases right in the beginning of your description, while still making sure it makes sense to read. Try if possible to strategically place some of your other keywords into the description too, but dont make it too long either. Keep it short and sweet, while using your main key phrases, and you should be fine. In the example below, I again used my primary phrase twice, once in the beginning, and once in the end of the description.

{meta name=”description” content=”Linux website hosting specialisits providing affordable, reliable, fast and feature rich linux website hosting. ” /}

There are a couple of other meta tags that can be put into the code now, and they are as follows:

{meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ /} A good website editor like dreamweaver will do this one for you
{META name=”verify-v1″ content=”03v8mbl1JZd7vD+fttVw5MrT3oj+UZqYZDYI/HlGZpU=” /} – My google webmaster tools varification number
{meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, all” /} – This tells the search engine spiders to follow all the links on the website
{meta name=”language” content=”en” /} – Its an english website
{meta name=”rating” content=”GENERAL” /} – with a general rating
{meta name=”distribution” content=”GLOBAL” /} – Has global distribution
{meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 Days” /} – Please come back and check for changes every 7 days!
{meta name=”author” content=”Francois Harris – francois@sa-nethost.com” /} I am the author
{meta http-equiv=”reply-to” content=”info@sa-nethost.com” /}

Now for your website content! I assume you have a decent amount of information on your page, at least 300 words worth. Now is where you make use of some of the other html tags to target your primary keyphrase.

Lets start with the heading of the page. Use the {h1} tag to create your heading. This tag is the biggest size of the standard html header tags, and holds the most weight of all of them. Put your primary keyphrase into here, this should be easy and make sense as the page text and the primary keyphrase are relevant to each other.

Next start your website text, be sure to put your primary keyphrase somewhere in the first paragraph, make it bold too, to give it some more prominence. Carry on with the rest of your web page text, without going mad on your primary phrase. You dont want search engines to think you are ‘page stuffing’ the keyword.

If you have any images that you use in the page text, make sure to put the ALT tag onto the image, with the description of the image, which could include your primary keyphrase again. EG:

{img src=”images/pic01.gif” alt=”Small business Linux Website hosting” width=”600″ height=”93″ border=”0″ /}
Notice how I try to make all the places where the keyphase is placed, as natural looking as possible.

Finish off the page, by placing your primary phrase in the last paragraph, and this time make it italics to emphasise it.

Remember, if you get the traffic, your information on your page needs to be able to convert a visitor into a customer. So really think about what you are going to put onto your page. Do research, look what your competition is saying, but most of all make it relevant.

Your page has now gone through its first phase of optimization. Something to remember is that the more text you have on the page, the less relevance or prominence your primary keyphrase might have. So if you have loads of writing, strategically place your keyphrase into the text a few times where it can fit without sounding stupid. You can now upload your page, and wait for it to get indexed. I personally dont believe in submiting your site directly to Google, it should get found by itself fairly quickly, if you use any of the strategies listed below.

An important note: SEO is only one piece in the puzzle to getting ranked high and getting loads of traffic to your site. If you are targeting a niche keyphrase where there is not much competition, you could rank high very quickly. Most sitest though would have to move onto the next phase of marketing, while constantly monitoring the traffic statistics and SERPS for the specific page.

Other marketing strategies to use to while monitoring your page are:

Add your website to google analytics and webmaster tools
Submit a sitemap of your site to google
Submit your site to website directories, especially DMOZ
Social networking websites are great to promote your site
3 way link exchanges with sites of a similar target market or website genre. (three way links: Site A links to B which links to C which links to A) Much more powerful than a recipricol link exchange.
Newsletter publishing, a great way to promote your website.
Signatures in email and forum posts, a nice way to leave your mark wherever you give your input
Hardcopy marketing – business cards, posters, flyers, adverts etc with your web details. People still tend to keep business cards etc on desks, fridges, notice boards and more around the world

Make sure to do this for all your pages, as each page will have different information, and can target a different key phrase. If you have 10 pages, each optimized and targeting a specific phrase, you effectively have 10 great avenues to get to your site from search engines alone.