Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7, is finally available for purchase and–amen–actually good enough to make even holdouts still clinging desperately to Windows XP want to upgrade after all these years. Albeit no revolution in desktop computing–it’s essentially a revamp of Vista that addresses owners’ most common complaints and tightens the user interface– make no bones about it–Windows 7 provides a welcome evolutionary step forward for the platform, significantly improving security, stability and everyday convenience.

Granted, some aspects may confuse. Cases in point: Multiple versions with negligible feature differences are offered, you have to manually backup and reinstall data to upgrade from Windows XP, and certain programs (including e-mail and calendar applications) must be downloaded separately from the OS. But these hiccups can’t detract from what is easily the most significant upgrade the hoary old software standby has seen in years.

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Debating taking the plunge? Here are 10 reasons why you’ll inevitably want to earmark room for it in your IT budget:

1. Lower system requirements
Unlike Windows Vista, which required significantly more memory and processing speed to power its graphical user interface, Windows 7 isn’t a system resource hog. As such, the same machines you now having running Vista should easily be able to accommodate the new OS, which in many cases loads programs and boots or shuts down faster. Less money spent on hardware upgrades translates into immediate cost savings, while a decrease in downtime twiddling your thumbs waiting for software to load provides a corresponding productivity boost. Furthermore, even a relatively slow 1GHz PC with 1GB of memory can run Windows 7 (though 2GB of RAM is recommended and 4GB for the 64-bit edition), making it suitable for installation on low-end netbook computers on up to high-end desktops.

2. Simpler navigation
A trio of improvements to the user front-end makes Windows 7 easier to navigate and multitask within than its predecessors. To begin with, using Aero Peek features, Windows 7 users can more easily view desktop contents by turning all open windows transparent. With Aero Shake, you also have the option to simply grab an active window and physically shake the mouse to minimize other panes cluttering up one’s monitor. Last, but not least, Aero Snap functions automatically resize windows to take up half the screen when they’re dragged to either side of your display.

3. Better multitasking
Borrowing a trick from Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system, Windows 7 now offers a more aesthetically pleasing, icon-based taskbar that lets you permanently pin and organize favorite programs on it. You can additionally point to icons to get thumbnail previews of open files and windows associated with each program, all accessible with a click. Everything’s displayed in as minimally intrusive a way possible as well, helping cut down on clutter and making it possible to keep track of everything that’s happening on your desktop. Jump lists for each piece of software, available when you right-click on the respective program, even let you immediately pull up recently opened files and documents–a major time-saver.

4. Greater stability
Unlike Windows Vista, most hardware and software is readily compatible with Windows 7 and will work right out of the box, with no need to download and install additional drivers. Happily, in instances where necessary, locating and adding these updates to your PC proves a relatively painless procedure.

5. Enhanced security
Instead of making you play watchdog and constantly click to approve program access, Windows 7 does away with the vast majority of Windows Vista’s nagging pop-ups. Users can now control the relative amount of prompts regarding system security they receive using an intuitive slider bar control, with alert messages minimized to avoid becoming a nuisance. In addition, the Internet Explorer 8 web browser is better-guarded against external threats. Purchase the Ultimate Edition ($219.99 upgrade), and you can further encrypt drives and data using BitLocker technology to protect sensitive files and even portable USB keys from unauthorized intrusion.

6. Multi-touch capabilities
If you have a compatible touch-screen PC or laptop, multi-touch physical gestures can now be used to navigate the operating system and pull up documents and data with a flick of a finger.

7. Simpler file organization
Libraries, which serve as all-purpose containers, allow you to conveniently catalogue photos, music, video and files in single locations, no matter where they live on your hard drive. Because of this, it’s a breeze to keep all materials related to the same work project organized in one readily retrievable location.

8. Optimized network setup
Brisk, painless network setup via new HomeGroup features makes it simple to share devices, documents and printers between other PCs running Windows 7 on a password-protected home network. Entrepreneurs who need to access a larger companywide network may need to upgrade to the Professional Edition ($199.99), which allows connectivity with more complex workplace servers.

9. Less clutter
Don’t like all the so-called “bloatware”–useless applications that traditionally come installed on any new operating system or PC? You’ll be right at home here, as programs like Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, Movie Maker and Photo Gallery aren’t even included with installation except in cases where they’re pre-bundled by certain PC manufacturers. Instead, you choose to optionally download them for free from Microsoft. While some may balk at these typically preinstalled apps’ omission, for others, it’ll be seen as an effective way to cut down on unused programs that needlessly waste hard drive space and system memory.

10. Overall performance
Given its suite of welcome upgrades, Windows 7 is sure to inspire more third-party developer support than Windows Vista, and enjoy a larger business software library that takes advantage of its built-in features. As the system’s improvements significantly enhance users’ everyday work and online experience, it’s inevitable that your enterprise will want to take advantage of programs which natively support these updates. Even those who opt for just the basic Home Premium edition ($119.99 upgrade) and never buy another application will be able to appreciate extras like faster and more reliable desktop search functions and simpler document retrieval. Making it infinitely simpler to organize, store and navigate both your desktop and supported applications, more than a few entrepreneurs will find that Windows 7 has been well worth the wait.

In contrast to the original PageRank algorithm, TrustRank does not solely count the number of links that point to a website but it also considers the authority of a website.

TrustRank was meant to fight spam in the search results

The abstract of the publication shows that PageRank was meant as a way to fight web spam:

“Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam.

We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good [...]

Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.”

Today, all major search engines use some kind of TrustRank

Although Google does not use the official term, most professional search engine optimizers are quite sure that Google and all other major search engines use the same concept to improve the quality of their search results.

That means that it is not enough to get as many links as possible. It is also necessary that your website gets links from the right kind of websites and that search engines trust your site.

Trust

How to become a trusted website

There are a few things that you can do to show search engines that your website is trustworthy:

1. Get links from seed sites or from websites that are linked from seed sites

Seed sites are websites that are manually marked as trustworthy by the search engine owners. For example, if Apple.com has been chosen as a seed website by the search engine a link from Apple.com will have a positive effect on the TrustRank of your website.

If Apple.com links to website X, website X links to website Y and website Y links to your website then your website will still get a good TrustRank.

2. Get an old domain name with a good domain history

The older your domain is, the better. If your domain has been online for several years, this is a signal that the website owner is serious about the site and it’s less likely that the domain is used for spamming purposes.

Your domain name should not have changed the owner too often and it should not have been used for many different topics. Of course, it also should not have been used by spammers in the past.

3. Get links from related websites

Does your website get links from related websites and does it link to other related websites? Is your website a lonely island with no links from and to other websites or is it integrated in a network that deals with a special topic?

4. Don’t link to spam websites

You should not link to websites that are known spammers or to websites with dubious quality. If you link to such a website, you show search engines that you support them and that your own website should not be trusted too much.

5. Get many links from social networks

The more often your website is mentioned on social media websites, the more likely it is that your website is a trustworthy high quality website. The more votes your bookmarks on social media sites get, the better.

6. Offer good content and stay away from certain topics

It is not likely that a website that consists of only one page is an authority website. If your website has many pages that contain great content about a special topic then it is much easier to get a good TrustRank.

If your website deals with a special topic, then it’s likely that it never will get a high TrustRank. These topics are the topics for which you receive the most spam emails.

If search engines trust your website, it is much easier to get high rankings. If you want to find out if your website has all the elements that are needed to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines, analyze your website with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer.

If you have a website with optimized web pages, it is usually the quality of the links that make the difference. The following tips will help you to get better rankings than your competitors:

Step 1: Find out who your competitors are

Search for five of your main keywords on Google and write down the URLs of the websites that rank best across these keywords. These websites are your main competitors on Google.

Step 2: Check the anchor texts of these websites

The next step is to find out how many of the links to your competitors contain your target keywords. To do this, enter the URL of a competitor in IBP’s link manager (IBP > Link > Add sites > Find websites that link to your competitors).

IBP will find all web pages that link to your competitors and it will also show you the anchor texts that are used in the links. IBP enables you to sort the found websites by link text so that you can quickly see which link texts are used.

Required action: Your website should have more inbound links that contain your target keywords than the websites of your competitors.

Step 3: Check the PageRank spread of these websites

Although the official PageRank number that Google displays in its toolbar is a flawed metric, it can still help you to find out why some websites rank higher than others.

If you’ve used IBP to find the web pages that link to your competitors ((IBP > Link > Add sites > Find websites that link to your competitors) then you also have the Google PageRank of each site that links to your competitors.

Click the PR column header in IBP to sort the found websites by PageRank to find out how many links from high PageRank pages your competitors get.

Required action: If your competitors have more inbound links from web pages with a high PageRank than your website then you should try to get more high PR links. IBP can help you with that.

Step 4: Check the top level domains of the inbound links

If you want to get high rankings on Google.com.au then it might be important to have many inbound links from .com.au websites.

Required action: If you target local Google versions (Google.com.au, Google.co.uk, etc.) then your website should have more inbound links from websites that use the corresponding top level domain than your competitors.

Step 5: Check the content of the linking pages

Google prefer’s websites that get links from related websites. If you sell shoes then a link from a fashion blog is much better than a link from a website about puppies.

Required action: Your website should have more inbound links from related websites than the websites of your competitors. IBP’s link builder can help you to find web pages and blogs that are related to your site.

While it is relatively easy to optimize the content of a website, it is more difficult to get good inbound links. A relatively easy way to get inbound links is to submit websites to Internet directories.

But do these Internet directory links still have value when it comes to search engine rankings? Can you increase the position of your website in Google’s search results by submitting your site to Internet directories?

directories

A case study

An internet marketer tested three pages that were orphaned within the normal navigation structure of the website. These three pages were created to provide valuable content to search engines.

The three pages were submitted to some high quality paid directories (Yahoo, BestOfTheWeb, Joe Ant) and free directories.

About 45 days after the paid directory links went live, the web pages had increased visibility on search engines. Visits and conversions also increased and the tracking of the marketer indicated that at least 50 percent of the results could be attributed to the directory links.

The final results that were attributed to the directory link building included:

* a lift of traffic to levels that other highly visible site pages receive within 90 days
* an increase in monthly conversions for the business line of 45 percent year-over-year

TIP OF THE DAY

Content is and always will be king. Google and other search engine algorithms are trying hard every day to mimic human search behavior. A human knows when a site is good - and most of the time that is because of the great content on that site... if it is a worthless site full of a bunch of ads they won’t be coming back if they can help it. Sure - you can trick them into coming back - but it won’t be of their own accord. Google is just like that - it is not easily tricked - it wants and rewards great content.

Trailing slashes and sub directories

A popular assumption is that Google prefers pages that are in the root directory of a website.

If an URL contains many trailing slashes (meaning the page is placed in a sub-sub-directory) then Google might not think that the page is important in relation to the other pages.

Although this statement is often repeated in SEO forums, it is probably not true.

The visibility of a web page counts, not its position

If a web page is linked throughout your website and if the page has inbound links then the web page will be indexed and ranked by Google without any problems.

Most web pages on today’s websites are created dynamically and the URL that is displayed in a web browser presents only a virtual site structure that is not really available on the server.

As there are no real folders on the server, search engines won’t find a valuable ranking signal if they look at things like presence or absence of directories.

What does this mean for your website?

If you want to show search engines that a page on your website is important, link to it from many other pages of your website so that it can easily be found.

A page that gets many links (both from your own website and from other websites) will get the attention that it deserves from Google’s indexing robot.

When you should care about the structure of your URLs

1. URL stripping can cause problems

Rumor has it that Google uses URL stripping to index web pages. That means that Google shortens the path to an URL to find new pages on a site. For example, “www.example.com/folder/keyword.htm” would be shortened to “www.example.com/folder/”.

If you use dynamically created URLs then you should make sure that all virtual folders return real web pages a “404 not found” pages. Otherwise, Google might think that you have many faulty pages and/or that your website has a low quality.

2. Shorter URLs can be better for your website visitors

Although most web surfers don’t pay attention to the URL in the browser address bar, shorter URLs can enhance the user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to remember and they can improve the direct type-in traffic.

3. Short URLs get more clicks

A search marketing study found out that web surfers clicked short URLs twice as often as long URLs in Google’s search results. Long URLs are cut off in Google search engine result pages. Web surfers cannot see where they are going to go and this can decrease the click-through rate.

4. The URLs of your web pages can contain your keywords

The words that appear in the URL of a web page can influence the position of the web page for these words. For that reason, it can make sense to rewrite your URLs so that they include the keywords for which you want to have high rankings.

Let me give you the break down:

Question: Right Now, How Much is Google Loving Keywords in URL?

:: Lots Of Love said 97 respondents or 52%
:: Completely Loves Them said 41 respondents or 22%
:: No Change In Past Year said 36 respondents or 19%
:: Doesn’t Hate Them said 6 respondents or 3%
:: Other answer... said 3 respondents or 2%
:: Hates Them said 2 respondents or 1%

SEO is what you do specifically on your site to improve your Search Engine Position. If you do a search on Google for any search term you will be presented with a list of links. At the top of the page and along the right side will be PPC links where someone pays an amount per click to get positioned. With PPC the more you pay the better your position. Most people only glance at these listings. You don’t need SEO to get one of these positions, just lots of money.

The body of the page contains “organic” listings. These links are listed in the order that Google determined best fit your search, with the best match first. There are only 10 listings per page, most people will only look at the 1st page, maybe the 2nd. So your site needs to be listed within the top 10 and at the worst within the top 20 for any useful exposure. With SEO you will be adjusting your site code so that your site will rank highly. This can be a daunting process as there may be thousands of sites competing for the same top listing. A trick is to aim your pages at less popular search terms to get higher placement. It is better to be on page one for a term that gets 1,000 searches per month than to be on page three for a search term that gets millions of visits.

SEO Basic 2: Your web site must be search engine friendly. The search engines send out “spiders” or “bots” cataloging web pages they come across. If the search engine has trouble getting through to your pages it will either rank your page poorly, or skip your site all together. Making your site Search Engine Friendly means having the code easily accessible, no errors in the code, and guiding the search engine through your site.

Try to steer away from complicated coding when possible. Check your site for coding errors. This is fairly easy to do with web programs like Dreamweaver which do this for you automatically. Plan on having text based navigation on every page. This is usually placed at the bottom of the pages. You may also want to have a “Site Map” page with easy to follow text based links to all of your important pages. Search Engines will look for a Site Map and will use that to navigate a site if available.

SEO Basic 3: The Most Important SEO Aspect is Keywords. Keywords are the terms you type into a search engine to find interesting web sites. You need to know what search terms people are likely to use to find your site, then use those terms as your Keywords. Make a list of the keyword combinations you can think of that you would use to find your site. Try them all on a search engine and see the results.

You need to see how these search terms perform on the web and what other search terms could be used. A great free tool to help with this research is available at Google:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You type in a search term, then you are given a list of similar search terms, how often they were searched and some advertiser comparison figures. You can quickly find additional keywords and to see how well they perform. A good idea is to optimize your site for a less frequently used keyword combinations so that you can achieve a higher placement. The Google Keyword Tool will help you figure this out.

We are going to look at 7 Basics of SEO below. These aren’t the only things you want to know about SEO, but are the areas you should learn first. Some topics will only take you a minute, some will take a little longer, and others will become an ongoing process. But after reading through this list you should have a good handle on where to start and where to proceed next.

SEO Basic 1: Let’s start off with a definition. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the process by which you Optimize your web site so that it is positioned well in the search engines. This is not the same thing as designing a site so that it attracts customers and entices them to buy.

SEO is what you do specifically on your site to improve your Search Engine Position. If you do a search on Google for any search term you will be presented with a list of links. At the top of the page and along the right side will be PPC links where someone pays an amount per click to get positioned. With PPC the more you pay the better your position. Most people only glance at these listings. You don’t need SEO to get one of these positions, just lots of money.

Top Positions in the Web’s Largest Article Directory

The body of the page contains “organic” listings. These links are listed in the order that Google determined best fit your search, with the best match first. There are only 10 listings per page, most people will only look at the 1st page, maybe the 2nd. So your site needs to be listed within the top 10 and at the worst within the top 20 for any useful exposure. With SEO you will be adjusting your site code so that your site will rank highly. This can be a daunting process as there may be thousands of sites competing for the same top listing. A trick is to aim your pages at less popular search terms to get higher placement. It is better to be on page one for a term that gets 1,000 searches per month than to be on page three for a search term that gets millions of visits.

SEO Basic 2: Your web site must be search engine friendly. The search engines send out “spiders” or “bots” cataloging web pages they come across. If the search engine has trouble getting through to your pages it will either rank your page poorly, or skip your site all together. Making your site Search Engine Friendly means having the code easily accessible, no errors in the code, and guiding the search engine through your site.

Try to steer away from complicated coding when possible. Check your site for coding errors. This is fairly easy to do with web programs like Dreamweaver which do this for you automatically. Plan on having text based navigation on every page. This is usually placed at the bottom of the pages. You may also want to have a “Site Map” page with easy to follow text based links to all of your important pages. Search Engines will look for a Site Map and will use that to navigate a site if available.

SEO Basic 3: The Most Important SEO Aspect is Keywords. Keywords are the terms you type into a search engine to find interesting web sites. You need to know what search terms people are likely to use to find your site, then use those terms as your Keywords. Make a list of the keyword combinations you can think of that you would use to find your site. Try them all on a search engine and see the results.

You need to see how these search terms perform on the web and what other search terms could be used. A great free tool to help with this research is available at Google:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You type in a search term, then you are given a list of similar search terms, how often they were searched and some advertiser comparison figures. You can quickly find additional keywords and to see how well they perform. A good idea is to optimize your site for a less frequently used keyword combinations so that you can achieve a higher placement. The Google Keyword Tool will help you figure this out.

Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!

Focus on keyword groups with 3 or 4 keywords. Many times keywords will overlap, so you can focus on a longer keyword combination and cover many other combinations at the same time. For instance, if you are designing a page to sell Photoshop Training, you can optimize for this keyword phrase “Adobe Photoshop Training Video”. This will not only give you optimized performance for this keyword combination but also for these other keywords and combinations as well:

Adobe
Photoshop
Training
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop Training
Adobe Photoshop Training
Photoshop Training Video

So try to come up with a multiple keyword combination that will contain several other keyword combinations as well.

Once you know what keywords you want to use you are ready to place those keywords on your page. The main places you want to use the keywords are:

In the meta title of the page
In the meta description of the page
In the first sentence on the page
In all of the image alt tags
In links to and from the page
Well represented in the body text of the page

Make sure you Pick the right keywords, and make sure they cover more than 5% of the word usage on the page. An easy way to get more keywords onto a page is by using lists such as:

We carry:
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Educators
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Students
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Business

Keep in mind that your page text should still be user friendly. If you use your keywords too frequently or in strange ways on your page, it may rank better in the search engines, but it will drive away visitors. Who wants to read a poorly written page?

SEO Basic 4: Don’t try anything funny. There are lots of “tricky” things you can do to cram more keywords into a page without annoying your visitors. The problem is that the search engines know about these tricks and will penalize your site if you use them. So don’t do any of the following or you may find your web site disappear completely from the search engine listings.

White letters on white background, or any other similar text coloring trick. Even using a very light gray text on a white background, or very dark gray text on a black background can get you bumped from the search engines.

Don’t repeat your keyword over and over again. People used to do things like this at the top or bottom of their pages: Photoshop Photoshop Photoshop. This worked in the early days of search engine optimization, but no longer. You should also not try this trick in alt tags, image names, links or other places in your code. The search engines will spot this and you will be penalized.

Don’t put keywords into comment tags. Also don’t put keywords in hidden form fields. The search engines will spot these and mark you down accordingly.

Even though putting keywords into image names and alt tags is a great idea, don’t think that you can just create a bunch of clear gif images sized at 1×1 and fill those with keywords. The search engines are very good at spotting tricks like this as well.

So use your keywords appropriately, don’t try to sneak one past the search engines and you should do just fine. Just keep in mind, if you think that you need to hide the keywords to trick the search engine you can rest assured that they have already thought of that and will do their best to devalue your site accordingly if you use these “black hat” tricks.

SEO Basic 5: All pages should have links to other pages. The main search engines like links. They like outside sites linking into yours, but they also like links within your site going to other pages. So in this case having more pages can be useful. Also since you now have all these pages that you are linking to it gives you a great place to use some more keywords. Make sure that your links include your keywords.

But, and this could have been in section 4 above, don’t create “doorway pages” that redirect you to another page. It used to be common SEO practice to create lots of doorway pages, each one stuffed with specific keywords, all of which would redirect the visitor to the actual page they were looking for. This would give your site lots of pages, with lots of internal links and would allow you to tightly optimize these doorway pages for specific keywords, but the search engines have gotten wise to this trick and now penalize the use of redirect pages. So don’t use redirects unless you absolutely need to and never use doorway pages.

SEO Basic 6: Only optimize a page for one or two keyword groups. More than that just dilutes your keyword ratio. The search engines will analyze your web page to determine which words are used as keywords. They do this by looking at the title, the description, the page heading and the words used on the page. They then determine how relevant your keywords are to your page. So, if you try to use too many different keywords on a page, it will only bring down the percentage of any individual keyword or group for that page. It is better to optimize for a larger keyword group as discussed above than to try to optimize a page for a lot of individual keywords that can’t be easily used in one sentence. If you need to have a page optimized for several different, unrelated keywords you are better off creating several different pages and re-writing the body text on each page to match the keywords you are optimizing for. This will make each page relevant for the specific keyword and will get a better placement in the search engines.

SEO Basic 7: Be patient. Even with a perfectly optimized web site it can take several months for it to rise in the search engine standings. I usually recommend waiting at least 90 days and up to 6 months to see how well a web page is doing in the search engines. Also, even though you have gone to great lengths to target a specific keyword or keyword combination keep in mind that the search engines aren’t required to agree with you. So when checking your standings look at several different search terms that you discovered in your research and see how well your page is placing. Hopefully you will find that your chosen keywords are getting your page listed the way you want, showing that your SEO has worked properly.

If you find that your page is ranking better for a different keyword, you should examine your page code to see why and make adjustments as needed. Maybe your page is placing higher for a keyword combination you weren’t focusing on, but it is still a good combination for your goals. This gives you an ideal opportunity to go with that new combination to achieve even higher placing.

So, get started right now on your SEO. The longer you wait, the longer it will be before your web site is showing well up in the search engines.

You need to constantly work on it, fine-tune it, discard methods that are not working and implement new ones.

The following 6 methods are simple to implement and can be done for free by you today.

1. Email Marketing

Your first step should be to send an email to your existing clients announcing the existence of your website. You should also ask your customers to forward your email onto their friends, family and colleagues.

Learn how to improve the Google ranking of your website today. We give you a range of simple SEO techniques (with examples) that anyone can use to boost their organic Google ranking.
Download the Free Guide Now

Think Web Pages, not Websites

If you are starting a new business and don’t have any customers yet, send an email to people you know who may be interested in your offer.

Remember to email your clients every time you make changes, add new offers or features to your website to remind them to come back.

The next step could be to send your announcement to an opt-in email list. Opt-in email lists contain people or businesses who have requested to receive information about certain topic(s). There are many companies who can provide you with these lists.

Under no circumstance should you EVER send unsolicited email (spam) to people you either don’t know or who have not requested to receive your information.

2. Search Engines & Directories

Submit your website to as many search engines and directories as you can. (A search engine is a searchable database of websites collected by a computer program (called a crawler, robot or spider). When you enter a keyword, the search engine looks for keywords in its database, and any relevant records are displayed.)

Currently there are thousands of search engines and directories on the internet. Some of the main ones include Google, Yahoo, MSN. When submitting your website to the search engines, you can either do it manually by going to the search engine website and adding your URL (website address) or you can employ the services of a Search Engine Submission company, who will do it for you.

Search engines try to rank sites that contain good content higher, so you need keywords and phrases on your pages that best describe your service and products. For example, if you are a florist, use words such as “florist, online florist, virtual florist, wedding florist, florist in Sydney, florist on line, flowers, floral, bouquets, floral arrangements etc.” as many times as possible to ensure high search engine ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching use Google’s Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.

Once you decide on your keywords, use them in:

(a) Your website’s domain name

(b) The title of your page - This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window.

(c) The heading of your home page.

(d) The first paragraph of your home page.

(e) Meta tags - Keywords, description.

(f) Titles of your graphics.

While it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords, you may be penalized or even banned by some search engines.

If this all seems too overwhelming, you can employ the services of a Search Engine optimization company, who will make your website’s content more search engine friendly to make it rank higher.

3. Link Exchanges

Find websites whose business complements yours and add their website to your links/resource page. Then contact the company and ask for a reciprocal link. For example if you are a wedding dress designer, you could contact businesses that sell wedding cakes, jewellery, flowers and also venues, celebrants etc. By doing this your website will become a valuable resource for your visitors, since it will provide information they need. They may return to your site over and over to find more information.

On the other hand, you will have visitors coming to your website when they follow a link from your link partners.

Results in search engines are determined by the material you have presented on your site and by other off-page factors such as how many other sites link to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site from relevant websites, the higher your site will rank.

If you need help with this task, you can employ the services of a Link Exchange Company. They are generally inexpensive and can save you hours of time.

4. Email Signature

Every email you send should have an email “signature.” This is text that is automatically attached to the bottom of your email message. This text can be used to publicize your business. You can include your name, business name, email address, street or postal address, website details, phone number, fax number, company slogan, description of your company and its products/services. You can set up different signatures for different purposes.

To set up your signature using Outlook Express:

Step 1: Select Tools > Options from the menu bar.

Step 2: Click “Signatures” .

Step 3: Make sure that you select “Add signatures to all outgoing messages” - within the “Signature settings” section. It is up to you whether you would like your signature to appear in “replies” and “forwards”

Step 4: Click “New” (you can change the name from “Signature #1″ by clicking “Rename”) - within “Signature” section:

Step 5: Type in the text that you would like to appear at the end of your email messages - in “Edit signature” section:

Step 6: If you’re happy with this, click “Apply” and “OK”.

5. Office Stationery & Merchandising Materials

It is extremely important that your website is included on ALL your office stationery so that customers can see it over and over again. That way they are more likely to remember it. If you’ve just had your letterheads printed, you can always add your website address on your wordprocessor, when printing your correspondence. For brochures, business cards etc, consider having small labels printed up. Your office stationery should include not only your website address, but also your email. Consider adding your details to:

• Letterheads
• Business Cards
• Flyers
• Brochures
• Labels
• Packaging
• Merchandise bags
• Catalogs
• Invoices
• Fax headers
• Display units

6. Set up a Blog

A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. Blogs are typically updated daily or weekly and can easily be managed by you. They provide a way for you to communicate with your customers directly, give you an increased presence on major search engines, allow you to stay ahead of your competition and so much more.

You can easily publish the following information in your blog: Articles, Media releases, Industry news, Surveys - so you can get feedback from your customers, Testimonials, Product reviews, Interviews, Case studies, Links to complementary businesses, Frequently asked questions and problem resolutions, Inspirational quotes, Research findings, etc.

Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines, like Yahoo! and Google. If you use Blogger(Google’s Blogging Tool), every message you post creates a new page on Google so in a very short time you could have a lot of pages pointing to your website, bringing you lots of new visitors.

Don’t be scared to try some of these marketing methods - you have nothing to lose!

When the spider visits your website it only sees the code of the site. To see the code of your website (or ours), try clicking your right mouse button and selecting “View Source”.

If your websites code is badly written, then it makes it very hard for the Google bot to understand it and Google will have no choice but to list you badly.

The following guidelines will help you to start seeing results in the search engines. Your first step is simply choosing the right keywords.

Choosing the Right Keywords

Often times, people make the mistake of optimizing for very general keywords like used cars or online marketing. Although these terms get lots of traffïc, it is very unlikely that you will be able to rank highly for them. Then, even if you do, this type of traffïc produces very low conversion rates because they are not targeted prospects.

For example, if you are selling hiking backpacks, it would be much more beneficial for you to target the phrase ‘hiking backpacks’ rather than the extremely competitive keyword ‘backpacks’. It would be even better to target the phrase ‘camelbak commander’. This is a specific type of backpack and therefore will attract more buyers than searchers.

In fact, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, 28 percent of searchers will type a product name into a search engine. Nine percent type in a brand name and 5 percent type in company names.

The more targeted your keyword phrase, the more likely they are to buy. A person who types in ‘backpacks’ may be looking for school backpacks or snowboard backpacks. This lends to useless, un-targeted traffïc.

However, a person that searches for a specific brand of backpacks knows exactly what they want and they are much further along in the buying process.

Once you have determined the best possible keyword phrases to target, you must nöw optimize your page for those specific keywords.

Optimize Your Page for Targeted Keywords

There are many factors that will determine how your web pages rank. However, one of the most important ones is that of a good title. The title tag appears at the very top of the head section. The words in the title tag will appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP).

Your title tag should contain targeted keyword phrases that reflect the copy on the page. The most important keywords should appear near the beginning of the title tag, You must also keep in mind that this should be a compelling title that would attract searchers to want to know more.

Your title tag should focus on your primary keyword, but it should also deliver a message. Use your title to mention benefits, make an attention-grabbing statement, ask a compelling question, or anything else that would set you apart from all of the other pages competing against you. Your title should include the main keyword you are targeting on that page as well as entice visitors to clíck on your link.

Following the title tag are your Meta description and Meta keyword tags.

You have probably heard that meta tags are dead and for the most part that is true. However, you should still include them in your web site because they allow you to control the description of your listing in some of the search engines.

Your meta description can make the difference in someone clicking on your link or choosing your competitor.

The meta description tag should be used for marketing purposes, enticing people to clíck on your link as opposed to one of the other 9 search results.

Meta keywords tags are a different story. Google pays absolutely no attention to this tag: a result of spammers. As for the rest of the search engines, meta keywords may be taken into account, but they are still of very little importance.

I would advise that you use this tag for misspellings, technical acronyms and synonyms. Using this technique, you may be able to bring in some additional traffïc for people looking for related, but less popular keywords.

Creating Quality Content

Next, you will want to focus on the visible content of your page. Many people online today are creating content that is written specifically for the search engines. However, I would advise you to optimize your content for your readers. Your readers are the most important.

To rank for your targeted keyword phrases, you must include them within your copy, but you must first ensure that your content is appealing to your visitors. After you do this, you can then weave your keywords into your copy.

You’ll especially want to have your targeted keyword phrase in the very first paragraph of your text.

Some other places you will want to include your keywords are in the image alt attributes and within your heading tags. Place all of your subtitles into header tags with your targeted keyword phrases.

Internal Linking

Creating quality content for your visitors is crucial. However, proper navigation and site structure can be just as important.

The search engines cannot fully index your site if it is not properly linked together.

Every single page on your web site should be no more than 2 clicks away from the homepage.

Before you create your site, decide on which internal pages are the most important in terms of ranking. Once you have gathered 15-20 of your most important pages, you will need to place them at the side and bottom navigation of each one of your web pages. This will ensure that the most possible pagerank is transferred to those pages.

Each of these links should contain descriptive anchor text, preferably targeted keyword phrases that you are wanting to rank highly for. You should nevër make your web site visitors guess what’s on the other end with a link that says, ‘clíck here’. Be as descriptive as possible and your visitors will thank-you.

One of the best ways to structure your site is through the use of hub pages. This is very similar to hubs on a spoke. At the center is your homepage. On the homepage, you have a link to each of the hub pages. The hub pages are basically small site maps that are built into the navigation. Each hub includes a set of information on a particular keyword or phrase. This is often referred to as content layering. You can layer your site through the use of sub-folders.

Inbound Links

Once you have finished optimizing all of the on-page factors, you must focus on some crucial off-page factors.

To have a truly successful search engine optimization campaign, you have to go beyond on-page factors. Your overall link popularity is a crucial ranking factor.

Some of the best techniques for getting quality in-bound links are syndicating articles, exchanging RSS feeds, submitting your web site to directories, syndicating your podcast, sending out press releases, and simply having a link-worthy site.

When you have a site that is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will start naturally linking to you. You have probably heard that content is king on the internet. However, this is simply not true. QUALITY content is the true king.

In review, keep in mind that the most important places to use your researched keyword phrases are in your title tags, the visible body of your text, and in onsite and offsite links.

Successful SEO takes time. If you continually put all of these strategies into action, you will begin to see the benefits in due time.