If you submit your web site to the search engines, submit your sitemap page instead of the home page. Sitemaps provide links to all important pages of your web site. This allows search engines to find all your pages and to index them easily.

If a search engine requires the submission of your main page, make sure that your main page links to your sitemap page.

Sitemaps allow you to use your most important key phrases in the description text of the links that point to your important pages. Many search engines rank those web pages higher that have links pointing to them containing the search term in the link text.

Many people can't find what they're looking for on a web site. If you provide a prominent link to your sitemap on every page of your web site, you can help your visitors to find what they're looking for.
A good structure for a sitemap is first a paragraph describing your company, your products and your philosophy, then a formatted list of your links, along with short descriptions for every link.

In summary, a sitemap helps visitors and search engines to find the most important pages of your web site. Don't miss the chance of improving your search engine rankings with such a simple tool.

2. Search engine news of the week
Google to provide blogging for free
"Google-owned Web log-creation site Blogger is eliminating its paid version and folding premium functions into its free service, bucking a trend toward making people pay for Web site extras.

The creation of Blogger Pro, which cost subscribers a yearly fee of $35, came about as a result of financial necessity, Blogger co-founder Evan Williams wrote in an e- mail to subscribers. Now that Google owns the service, that need has passed."

Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to find products or services on search engines) are the building block of any search engine marketing strategy.

It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else the remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows is a three-step process that goes over the process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating the ongoing performance of keyphrases for search engines.

1. Compiling a keyphrase list:

Usually, companies are sure that they already know their ideal keyphrases. Often, they are wrong.

This is typically because it is very hard to separate oneself from a business and look at it from the perspective of a potential customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a keyphrase list should not be, despite common practice, a strictly internal process.

Rather, it is best to ask everyone outside of your company for their input, especially your customers. People are often very surprised at the keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes dismayed to realize that an average customer doesn’t speak the same language that they do.

Only after you have put together a list of likely phrases from external sources do you add your own. As a last step, try to add variations, plurals, and derivatives of the phrases on your list.

2. Evaluating keyphrases:

Once you have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is time to evaluate each phrase to hone your list down to those most likely to bring you the highest amount of quality traffic.

Although many individuals will base their assessment of keyphrase value based only on popularity figures, there are really three vitally important aspects of each phrase to consider.

a) Popularity

By far the easiest of the three to judge is popularity, since it is not subjective. Software like WordTracker gives popularity figures of search phrases based upon actual search engine activity (it also gives additional keyphrase suggestions and variations).

Such tools allow you to assign a concrete popularity number to each phrase to use when comparing them. Obviously, the higher the number, the more traffic that can be expected (assuming you are able to obtain good search engine positions).

However, this number alone is not good enough reason to pursue any particular keyphrase, although keyphrase analysis too often stops here.

b) Specificity

This is more abstract than the sheer popularity number, but equally important. For example, let’s assume that you were able to obtain great rankings for the keyphrase "insurance companies" (a daunting prospect). Let’s also assume that you only deal with auto insurance.

Although "insurance companies" might have a much higher popularity figure than "auto insurance companies", the first keyphrase would also be comprised of people looking for life insurance, health insurance, and home insurance.

It is very likely that someone searching for a particular type of insurance will refine their search after seeing the disparate results returned from the phrase "insurance companies".

In the second, longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that a much higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what you offer- and the addition of the word "auto" will make it much easier to attain higher rankings, since the longer term will be less competitive.

c) Motivation of User

This factor, even more abstract than specificity, calls for an attempt to understand the motivation of a search engine user by simply analyzing his or her search phrase.

Assume, for example, that you were a real estate agent in Atlanta. Two of the keyphrases you are evaluating are "Atlanta real estate listings" and "Atlanta real estate agents".

Both phrases have very similar popularity numbers. They are also each fairly specific, and your services are very relevant to each. So which phrase is better? If you look into the likely motivation of the user, you will probably conclude that the second is superior.

While both phrases target people looking for real estate in Atlanta, you can infer from the second phrase that the searcher has moved beyond the point where they are browsing local homes or checking out prices in their neighborhood- they are looking for an agent, which implies that they are ready to act. Often, subtle distinctions between terms can make a large difference on the quality of the traffic they attract.

3. Evaluating Keyphrase Performance:

Until recently, judging the performance of individual keyphrases was a dicey proposition. Although it is possible to tell from your log traffic analysis how many visitors are getting to your site from each keyphrase (valuable information, but unfortunately not enough to do much with), it was very hard to decipher which phrases were bringing you the most quality traffic.

Recently, however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have been developed that allow you to judge the performance of each individual keyphrase based upon visitor behavior.

This new software makes it possible to periodically analyze which keyphrases are bringing your site the most valuable visitors- those who buy your products, fill out your contact form, download your demo, etc.

This type of data, rather than the sheer number of visitors from each search phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining your search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard and replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort toward the phrases that are delivering visitors that become customers. This kind of ongoing analysis is the final piece of the keyphrase puzzle, and allows you to continually target the most important phrases for your industry, even if they change over time.

Conclusion:

Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign. While high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal, high rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver poor results.

Integration of this keyphrase process into your overall search engine marketing strategy can dramatically improve your website performance (and thus your bottom line).

Article by:
Scott Buresh, Medium Blue Internet Marketing

Finding relevant keywords with Google

A good way to build your Web site is finding keywords that properly reflect the contents of your Web pages.

To obtain high rankings on search engines, you'll use the found keywords in the title, in the meta tags and in the body text of your Web pages.

Many webmasters start with Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool, an excellent way to find keywords and keyword combinations for your Web site:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

In addition, some people recommend Wordtracker, a commercial tool to find keywords:
http://www.wordtracker.com

However, there are two additional keyword tools to find keywords and key phrases for your Web site - and both they are provided by Google.

The first one suggest keywords for your Google ads but you can also use it without placing ads on Google:
https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

Unfortunately, Google's Keyword Suggestion Tool doesn't reveal the number of searches for each keyword. You can only see that number when you set up a Google AdWords Select account.

The second Google tool for finding keywords is called "Google Sets" and it's located at http://labs1.google.com/sets .

The Google Sets tool is one of Google's technology ideas that isn't quite ready for prime time yet. However, it's a great way to find new keyword associations.

For example, imagine you'd sell school stationeries. Just go to http://labs1.google.com/sets and enter the three keywords "school", "pen" and "pencil" among each other (without the quotes). Then click the "Large Set" button.

As you can see, Google will find many more related keywords for you, for example "textbook", "paper" or "glue".

Now it's your turn. Enter common keywords of your Web page and discover which important keywords you've overlooked so far.

2. 19 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from getting top rankings on search engines - Part 16 of 19

Is your Web site not getting listed in search engines? Is your Web site listed but it's not getting top rankings? In our series we tell you the 19 common mistakes for low or no ranking and what you can do about it.

Reason #16: Your Web page URL contains special characters.

Most search engines have problems indexing Web pages when their URLs contain special characters. The following special characters are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers":

ampersand (&)
dollar sign ($)
equals sign (=)
percent sign (%)
question mark (?)
These characters are often found in dynamically generated Web pages. They signal the search engine crawler program that there could be an infinite loop of possibilities for that page. That's why they ignore Web page URLs with the above characters.

AltaVista and Lycos explain on their help pages why they cannot index such Web pages:

http://help.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_wellindexed
http://insite.lycos.com/searchservices/frequently_asked_questions.asp?b=n#10

HotBot recommends that you submit your dynamic Web pages with all parameters added onto the URL (for example, "www.site.com/articles/query.asp?article=83").

Google and Inktomi utilize crawler programs that are able to index dynamically generated Web pages, even those that use question marks.

So what can you do if you have dynamically generated Web pages with special characters? If you use the Apache Server, ASP, CGI/Perl or ColdFusion, the following Web page provides some solutions:
http://spider-food.net/dynamic-page-optimization-b.html

Query recent additions to Google

Do you want to know whether your Web site has been indexed by Google - yesterday, within the last seven days or within the last month?

GooFresh is a Web page that lets you query Google to retrieve pages that have been indexed recently:

http://www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml

The GooFresh tool uses an inofficial "daterange" command in its Google query.

For example, to find out if your Web site www.domain.com has been indexed within the last 7 days by Google, do the following:

Go to http://www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml
Enter in the "Query" field www.domain.com .
Choose "Last 7 Days" as the time period.
Click the "Get the Fresh Stuff!" button.
If you can find your Web site www.domain.com in the search results, your site has been indexed in the chosen time period.

We analyzed hundreds of page one results on Google to find out what it takes to get a high listing on Google.

Further information on how to improve your ranking on Google can be found under "3." in this newsletter (see below).

2. 19 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from getting top rankings on search engines - Part 12 of 19

Is your Web site not getting listed in search engines? Is your Web site listed but it's not getting top rankings? In our series we tell you the 19 common mistakes for low or no ranking and what you can do about it.

Reason #12: You don't allow robots to index your Web site.

Imagine you're a Internet marketing service company and you keep trying very hard to get a top ranking in the search engines for your customer.

Even after several weeks, the customer's Web site hasn't been listed in any search engine. Then you start to realize that the search engine spiders and robot programs cannot access the Web site because your customer blocks them (by mistake).

There are two ways to block search engine robots: a) with a simple text file in the root directory of the host server, or b) with a certain META tag in the Web pages.

a) Robots.txt

The host server might have a plain text file named "robots.txt" in the root directory. It contains rules for the search engine spiders. The rules in the robots.txt file follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a document designed to help Web administrators and authors of Web spiders agree on a way to navigate and catalog Web sites.

The content of the robots.txt file consists of two main commands: "User-agent" and "Disallow".

The User-agent command specifies the name of the robot for which the following commands should be applied to. You can set this to "*" to have the spidering commands applied to any robot.

The second command, "Disallow", specifies a partial URL that should not be indexed by the Web robot.

The text

---
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
---

tells all search engine spider programs to go away. If you find a text file called "robots.txt" in the root directory of the host server with the above content, you should delete it immediately. The text file says that no search engine is allowed to index your Web site.

Even if your robots.txt file don't contain the above commands, you should make sure that its syntax is correct. A robots.txt file with a faulty syntax also prevents search engine spiders to index your Web site.

To check the syntax of your robots.txt file, you can use this free tool (just enter your domain name www.domain.com): http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html

b) The META ROBOTS tag

There's a second way to stop search engine robot programs to index your Web site: the META ROBOTS tag. If you find the following HTML tag in your Web pages:

---
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">
---

you should replace it immediately with

---
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT"="index,follow">
---

If you want all search engine spiders to index all Web pages, you can also remove the META ROBOTS tag from your Web pages.

Further information about both ways to stop search engines to index your Web site can be found at:

- http://www.wdvl.com/Location/Search/Robots.html
- http://www.ebrandmanagement.com/whitepapers/robots2.htm

3. How to increase your ranking on Google
Google heavily relies on link popularity and the so-called PageRank algorithm when it ranks your Web site (further information about the PageRank algorithm at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html ).