SEO Guide

1. Alexa Ranking Tool:

Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. Find out how your web site traffic stacks up against all your competitors! This is one of the most accurate freely available tools to find out how well your site ranks up against millions of other sites on the Web.

Remember:

"The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site."
Some examples are:
Traffic Rank for Yahoo.com : 1
Traffic Rank for msn.com : 3
Traffic Rank for google.com: 5
Traffic Rank for Rediffmail.com: 3,338
Traffic Rank for ebay.com : 8
Traffic Rank for amazon.com: 14
These rankings are generally consistent with the amount of traffic they have.

2. What is PageRank?

In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).
How many links you have from other web sites are the votes you get for your web site?

3. How is Page Rank Used?

Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.

Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar.

4. What is SEO and why is it so important?

It is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in Internet marketing, this also helps your site get the exposure it deserves and increase your website traffic instantly.

5. Site Maps?

Site maps are useful in at least two ways:

1. If a user types in a bad URL most websites return a really unhelpful “404 – page not found” error page. This can be discouraging. Why not configure your server to return a page that shows an error has been made, but also gives the site map? This can help the user enormously

2. Linking to a site map on each page increases the number of internal links in the site, spreading the PR out and protecting you against your vote “donations”

6. Your Link Popularity:

Utilization of the search engines is a very important aspect of marketing; they are usually the first means by which prospects can find your site. That's why link popularity is so essential. If the customers can't find your web site, you will not see any sales.

The term "Link popularity" refers to the ranking assigned to your web site by the search engines. It determines the position your page gets displayed on when people search for certain keywords in a search engine. I can already hear you screaming... "Cool, tell me how to get my link popular!"

7. Link Exchange?

Link Exchanging, is important because it can drive more visitors then search engines, once established. Directories ad valuable content for your customers/visitors, and this it improves your SEO.

8. Reciprocal links:

1. Reciprocal linking is another name for swapping links.
2. That’s a link from you to someone and a link from them to you.

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Top 10 Ways To Get People To Link To Your Web Site!

1. Offer other web sites free content to post on their web site. Include your link on all of your content. The content should relate to your web site because it will be in front of your target audience.

2. When you visit a web site you've enjoyed a lot, write a review for the site. Write about the benefits you gain from the web site. Tell them they can publish it on their web site if they link to your web site.

3. Allow other people to publish your e-zine on their web site. Include your web site's ad and link in each issue you publish. This may also help you increase the number of people that subscribe to your e-zine.

4. Market your web site as a free web book. Design your web site with a title page, table of contents, chapters, etc. Just allow other people to give away the web book by linking to your web site.

5.Give your visitors an instant article directory. Tell your visitors they can instantly add a free article directory to their web site by linking to yours. Just place your ad or banner ad on top of the article directory for your main web site.
6. Allow other web sites to use your discussion board for their web site visitors. Just have them link directly to the discussion board. Include your web site's ad or banner ad at the top of the discussion board.

7. Start a members only web site. Tell visitors what's in your members only site and what it costs to gain access. Offer them a free membership if, in exchange, they link to your web site.

8. Offer your visitors a free sign up to your affiliate program. Pay them commission to sell your products or services. Just give them an affiliate link to track their sales. People will link to your web site to make extra money.

9. Create your own award site for other web sites. Give the winners a graphic or text link to place on their web site when they win. This will link your web site to theirs and draw more traffic to your web site.

10. Are you an expert on a particular subject? Offer people free consulting via e-mail if, in exchange, they link to your site. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive.

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Link Popularity Service:

Link popularity is the actually the total number of web sites that linked to your site. There are two types of Links: One is Incoming links and other is Reciprocal links. Good link popularity can obviously increase traffic to your web site. An incoming link from a good PR site and with a good anchor text can drive traffic to your web site and also it increases the PR of your site as well. The Link Popularity is equal to votes for you web site. How many links you have from other web sites are the votes you get for your web site? If you have more quality, relevant incoming links to your page, the chances are more that the major search engines will rank your page.
Link Popularity Service, Link popularity is one of the biggest tools to improve your website ranking. And website promotion depends largely on this tool. For effective link popularity, you can also hire an online link popularity service from an internet marketing expert. The search engines consider a number of quality links on your website for calculating your page rank.
The higher number of inbound links on your websites ensures the higher link popularity for you. So to be among the top ten sites on a search engine results like Google, you have to have good link popularity. Link popularity can drastically be increased by adding a number of quality links to your websites.
The links indicate the popularity of your website. Apart from the number of links, the quality of links matters a lot. The quality links or the popular links in your website indicates greater link popularity for you. You can adopt a link popularity service to enhance the link popularity of your website.
An expert link popularity service ensures greater link popularity to you. They provide the quality links for your websites. The task is done in a professional manner by the service providers. You can find a number of link popularity service providers in your vicinity as well.
Your website will be able to receive good internet traffic via their expert services. Many times the internet traffic you receive is good in number but you are not able to get the desired popularity or the sales. The reason for this trouble is that you do not have the targeted link popularity.
Targeted link popularity ensures that the links on your website take the visitor to a desired place that is useful to him. It must not be the case that the visitor has clicked the link on a car selling website and he ends up reaching the cosmetic store.
So, the link building should always be strategic and with the quality links. The online link popularity services are quite adept in locating the useful links for you. They are proficient in giving you the links of some popular sites. And this readily diverts the targeted traffic to your websites. Suppose your website is a cloths shopping cart, the service provider will be linking you to the website of another website offering clothes.
Link popularity services focus very professionally on the reciprocal linking with your competitors. Reciprocal lining suggests that if you are mentioning a link on your website, the other website will also be mentioning your link on their site. This process is performed systematically by the link service providers. They find out the right sites for you and then send them request emails to add to your website(s).
You will get the reply from the other websites depending on the period of negotiations with them. You can add as many links as you want to your websites. The link popularity service is available for you at different prices. You can buy 25, 100 and even 200 links for your website. The charges for service depend on your requirements. No link is added to your website without your knowledge.
Thus, link popularity service is one of the biggest tools to improve your website ranking. And website promotion depends largely on this tool.

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What is PageRank?

In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).

How is Page Rank Used?

Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.
Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). But the Toolbar Page Rank only goes from 0 – 10 and seems to be something like a logarithmic scale:

Toolbar Page Rank
(log base 10)      Real Page Rank

0                0 - 10
1               100 - 1,000
2               1,000 - 10,000
3               10,000 - 100,000
4                  and so on...

We can’t know the exact details of the scale because, as we’ll see later, the maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its re-indexing! If we presume the scale is logarithmic (although there is only anecdotal evidence for this at the time of writing) then Google could simply give the highest actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the rest appropriately.

Also the toolbar sometimes guesses! The toolbar often shows me a Toolbar PR for pages I’ve only just uploaded and cannot possibly be in the index yet!

What seems to be happening is that the toolbar looks at the URL of the page the browser is displaying and strips off everything down the last “/” (i.e. it goes to the “parent” page in URL terms). If Google has a Toolbar PR for that parent then it subtracts 1 and shows that as the Toolbar PR for this page. If there’s no PR for the parent it goes to the parent’s page, but subtracting 2, and so on all the way up to the root of your site. If it can’t find a Toolbar PR to display in this way, that is if it doesn’t find a page with a real calculated PR, then the bar is greyed out.

Note that if the Toolbar is guessing in this way, the Actual PR of the page is 0 - though its PR will be calculated shortly after the Google spider first sees it.
PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it’s written in, or the text used in the anchor of a link!

Definitions:

I’ve started to use some technical terms and shorthand in this paper. Now’s as good a time as any to define all the terms I’ll use:

PR: Shorthand for PageRank: the actual, real, page rank for each page as calculated by Google. As we’ll see later this can range from 0.15 to billions.
Toolbar PR: The PageRank displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser. This ranges from 0 to 10.
Backlink: If page A links out to page B, then page B is said to have a “backlink” from page A.

So in short, PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is.

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Importance of SEO:

Up-to-date Content

Keep your site very content rich. Have a lot of pages.Update the site even twice a day if you have the time. Content is a golden word in SEO. If your content is Original then its a big plus. High ranking websites in google,yahoo and msn have a plethora of content.You can gain much on a poorly updated site.

No Spam and No Duplicates

Updating your site does not mean that you copy paste content from other sites.That will only push your rankings further down. Don't have any duplicate content. At the same time ,dont spam multiple content across the same website.

Clean URLs

Clean Search Engine Friendly URLs have always been known to help.
urls like domain.com/articles.php?id=344 are not bad.
But domain.com/articles/name-of-article/344.html is a great option.

Have the Web User in Mind

Build your website having the general layman who spends time on your website in mind. Having a site with good accessibility always has a good future.

No to excessive out bound links

Dont have too many links on a single page. Instead split your content into sections/categories. Too many outbound links are not good for SE rankings as well as visitors. It may look like a link farm or directory.

Never link to illegal sites

Linking to sites that are not doing lawfull stuff may get your site blacklisted.Stay away from such sites even though you might loose some bucks.

No spyware / adware

Never make your site a home for spyware and adware. Try to keep your site clean and easy to use.

No cloaking text/keyword stuffing

Never ever try to hide text in a webpage to a user, and show it to search engines.Search Engines are smart these days and are not text only anymore. They even give importanct to the graphical information on the site.

Reliable Web Host<

Get a webhost which has more than 99.5% uptime. Its a total waste if you have a fantastic website but its not online

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About The Author:
The author is a regular contributor to Halfvalue where more information about SEO like Insider Seo & Ppc,and other more accessories is available.

10 Ways You Can Increase Website Traffic!

Fortunately, there are more ways than one to increase website traffic. And the good news is that you can do things to increase website traffic totally free of cost! It can be done and here are 10 ways to do it:
1. Submit to Search Engines: This is the first step towards increasing your website traffic. Don't wait for the search engines to find your site. Go ahead and submit it to them voluntarily. Submitting a sitemap would be better - this will encourage the search engines to examine your site more often. Visits by the Search Engine Spiders are a key way to increase website traffic.
2. Link Exchange: The search engines count inbound links when ranking your website. Look for free link exchange programs. You can increase website traffic by including relevant links to your site - so seek out sites with similar or complementary products/services. You can also use free blogs as lead generation tools to help increase website traffic. When you make a post on a blog, include a link to your site URL, using anchor text. Blogs are a direct means to increase website traffic for free! Free classified ads that allow links to your URL are also good ways to increase website traffic.
3. Article Marketing: A relatively new but powerful (and free!) traffic booster. Publish articles on Ezine and Article Directories. Articles create interest in your website as you are seen as an expert. Having links to your URL utilizing anchor text increases your number of relevant inbound links.
4. "Tell a Friend" Scripts: Include a "tells a friend" script on your website. This will enable your customers to pass your website (and links) around. You'd be amazed at how well this works. Someone finds your site interesting, passes it to a friend, so on, and so on. You get the picture. This directly helps increase website traffic, and you build your customer base! A favorite technique of Internet business owners and it's free!
5. Hold a Contest: Use your website's auto responder as a means to hold a contest of some type. For example, if they sign up for your newsletter, they get a chance to win free e-books
Or one months' worth of web hosting (or one of your products). Again, this is an excellent way to increase website traffic and build your opt-in list, all at the same time!
6. Press Releases: This is one of the most overlooked ways to increase website traffic. The subject can be as simple as announcing a new product that you offer, or a new hire that you've made. As long as it's newsworthy, you can distribute your press release to the online press release companies and have it picked up by the major search engine's news categories (for example, Yahoo! News). Do you know how many people read these things? Thousands! An excellent way to increase you website traffic. Totally free!
7. Affiliate Program: Do you sell a product or e-book? Then you need to create an affiliate program. This is how it works: you offer to permit sale of your product on other Internet owners' websites, in exchange for giving them a portion of the sale (say, 35%). Do you realize how many websites that you can have your products on using this method? There are many Internet business owners that simply sell other people's products (we call these Super Affiliates). This way, you sell more products and increase website traffic absolutely free of cost! You do have to promote your affiliate program and product, which brings us to the next method, which is....
8. Get A ClickBank Account: Clickbank is the largest product directory on the Internet today. Additionally, Clickbank will set up and manage your affiliate program for you. They will also manage sales and any returns. You don't do a thing! Both your product and affiliate program are listed in the Clickbank directory. People looking for the product you offer find your website and wham! You've just taken a major step toward getting an immediate increase in website traffic! And, it only takes 5 minutes to sign up!
9. Joint Venture: You can team up with a company that sells similar or complementary products and services. Your website link is then advertised on that company's site and vice versa. This results in directing traffic from their site to yours. All you have to do is contact the company that you are interested in via email, with a proposal. This technique works amazingly well. You increase website traffic, and most importantly, it is both relevant and targeted, increasing your ability to make a sale!
10. Use Ebay: Stop passing up Ebay! Ebay is less intimidating than it looks, and it is easy for beginners to get started. In fact, Ebay was practically made for the Internet business owner who wants to increase website traffic. You can set up an Ebay store, of course linking back to your website. Including clever sales copy and pictures of your products/services increases your chances of customers clicking through and making a purchase. You can sell ANYTHING on eBay - this is no exaggeration. Go to ebay.com and you'll see what I'm talking about!

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What is SEO and why is it so important?

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimizing and refers to a set of good practices that teach you how to improve your website so that it would be easily tracked, indexed and ranked by search engines. Getting your site indexed by Google and other major search engines will help you attract visitors and increase traffic.
It is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.
Basic SEO Tips:
1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags.
2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.
3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.
4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.
5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag
6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. A good rule of thumb is if your pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not link to it.
7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans.
8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.
9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.
10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.
So in this way Search Engine Optimization, is important, and helps to bring more visitors and Link Exchanging, is important because it can drive more visitors then search engines, once established. Directories ad valuable content for your customers/visitors, and this it improves your SEO.

Visit us:
halfvalue.com
halfvalue.co.uk
lookbookstores.com

About The Author:
The author is a regular contributor to halfvalue.com where more information about Link Exchange and other accessories is available.