1)  The best length for a search engine optimized page is 200 to 500 words. Source: www.morevisibility.com

2)  Each web page should be optimized for two or three keywords.

3)  Keywords should not be repeated more than four to six times per 350 words of content.

4)  The most important meta tag is the page title, which should be no more than six or seven words and should begin with the keywords you’re optimizing.

5)  22 percent of searches include four or more words. In January 2009 searches averaging five or more words increased 10 percent compared with searches conducted in 2008. Optimizing content for larger search strings is an increasing trend. Source: Hitwise

6)  Google robots like content-rich information such as newsletters, reports, articles, white papers, glossaries, FAQs, Blogs, press releases, tools (calculators, quizzes), how-to tips, case studies, guides and forums. Boost your rankings by bulking up your content.

7)  Fresh content is favored over outdated or unchanged information. Quick ways to add new content include testimonials, product reviews, blogs, or forums. Make new content is optimized as much as possible.

8)  High quality external links to your site help boost your organic ranking. Yahoo has the most well-known directory. Look for relevant directories and other websites with a PageRank and Alexa rank better than your own.

9)  Statistics show your website’s About Us page will be one of the most clicked on pages of the entire site. Spend plenty of time developing this page, providing substantial and credible information to reassure visitors they are buying from a reputable company or individual.

10) Tightly written web pages will have higher organic rankings than pages covering multiple topics. Create pages to cover only one topic, make it obvious to visitors that the page focuses on the specific topic and make sure search engines recognize the individual page is about the topic. Optimizing does not have to occur on a website-wide basis. Optimizing individual pages gives more opportunities for higher rankings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be complex and intricate, but don’t stress out by trying to do everything at once. Simply understand the basics, make a plan and begin with the SEO activities likely to have the greatest impact on your organic search results.

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In a study conducted by seomoz.org, 37 leaders in search engine optimization voted on factors negatively and positively impacting organic search engine rankings. There is a lot of mention made of ways to increase search engine rankings, but far less written about things consciously or inadvertently done to negatively impact rankings.

According to the experts, here are the top five things that prevent higher rankings or send your current rankings into the tank.

1. Duplicate content: The jury is out as to the extent duplicate content affects site rankings, but it can range from simply not getting indexed to a huge problem. Duplicate content along, may not impact rankings, but it could signal other bad behavior. Unique, high quality should be your goal if you’re serious about conducting business on the Internet.
2. Low quality links: Experts agree that a slew of poor quality links can hurt your rankings. Many of the link farms have been cleaned up, some have gone legitimate, but the fact is fewer high quality links will enhance your rankings quicker than a laundry list of low quality links.
3. Duplicate Titles and Meta Tags: Duplicate titles and Meta tags on every page of your site will suppress organic rankings. It discourages crawlers from continuing deeper into your site to index more pages. With this simple fix, you may see a boost in rankings.
4. Server is down: A website down for 48 consecutive hours will suffer with the search engines. A site frequently down for sporadic periods may also suffer, but “frequent” is the operative word. If your site is frequently down, it’s time to get a new hosting company!
5. Overused keywords: Sites excessively using keywords will either be ignored or suffer with lower rankings. Trying to trick the crawlers to rank you higher by purposefully stuffing content with keywords is not a winning strategy. Use keywords as often as they make sense for the reader.

Learn more about search engine optimization and Internet marketing at www.strategywriter.com. Sign up for a free newsletter of proven tips and techniques to increase web traffic and reach prospects.

The Internet allows you to gather an interesting depth of information to compare your online strategy to competitor strategies and to find new ideas to improve your site. When researching the competition, you may find yourself saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

From your research, start piecing together competitive strategies and determine the weaknesses and strengths of your site. Prioritize the weaknesses and improvements you can make right away to improve your organic search rankings. Just as important is to keep improving the strengths you already have to make sure your organic rankings don’t slip.

Identify your competition

First decide what competitors you’ll track online. Limiting your list to between five and seven competitors will keep the results focused and easier to analyze. Make sure you record your findings, then repeat the process every month or so to see how the rankings compare. Since search engine optimization (SEO) is an organic process, the results will vary over time. Your goal is to keep improving your rankings over the competition.

Find the bright ideas revealed in source code

Looking through a competitor’s source code feels devilishly fun the first time. Here in plain sight, you’ll peek into bits of your competitors’ online strategies. To reveal code, follow these steps:

• Find a competitive website and go to the home page.
• Right click on the page and then click on View Source or click on View on your toolbar and click Source. A box of HTML code will pop up and in there you can find the meta description and meta tags for the page. It’s a bit difficult to decipher at first, but if the page has this information, it will be in the first few lines of code. Meta description describes the web page and meta keyword tags are words and phrases the competitor has chosen as clues for search engines to determine a web page’s relevance and rank when a prospect conducts a keyword search.
• Do the same for one or two other pages, particularly those with a high search rank, to determine if your competition is optimizing individual pages and make note of the meta tags and descriptions used on each page.

Did any of your competitors use keywords that you surprised you? Were there keywords you hadn’t thought of that make sense for your site? How do they use the keywords in page content? Can you get a sense of how their online strategy differs from your strategy?

Review your own source code to see what improvements you can make to influence your organic ranking.

Compare page rank

In addition to how well a competitor ranks in search engine results, you can also find other website data from Google, Alexa or SearchStatus. For quick access, add the Google and Alexa toolbars on your computer to monitor your page rank information with your competitors.

• Install the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com/T6/intl/en/index.html. Once installed, you can modify the tools you want on the toolbar. The one you’re interested in for this exercise is PageRank.
• Install the Alexa toolbar at http://www.alexa.com. Alexa provides a wealth of information for sites including traffic trend data, inbound links, keywords, related links, and links to old versions of a site.
• Install SearchStatus for Firefox and Mozilla from www.quirk.biz/searchstatus. SearchStatus is a one-stop shopping toolbar allowing you to view Google PageRank, Alex data, indexed pages and more.

The information gathered from these toolbars is for comparative purposes, not for absolute information. Alexa traffic data accuracy is often suspect and Google PageRank is only an estimation based on several variables. It is conceivable to have a high PageRank, yet still have low traffic to your site.  For your competitive research, the absolute numbers are not as important as trending information over time and the discrepancy between your figures and those from competitive sites.

To learn more about search engine optimization and electronic marketing, visit www.strategywriter.com.

It pays to organize your emails

Managing email addresses is a critical element to your success. Most people keep randomly collected emails in their free email account or inbox without any thought to organizing how each name came to be on the list.

Think of your email list (or house list) as a valuable asset to protect at all costs!

If you’re serious about making money using your website, then get serious about email management. There’s no question list segmentation adds value to your business.

Here are some of the advantages to knowing how each name became part of your list: Continued Reading »

How to Monetize Your Blog and Website

Our readers are interested in one thing:  Making Money Online.  Learning all the tricks, tips, strategies and implementing them very quickly!  And the challenge is to shorten the speed of implementation:  The time from when you get an idea to the time you execute that idea.  That time has to be the shortest amount of time possible so you can go LIVE YOUR LIFE.  We’ve been working on our “speed of implementation” for years now (trying to get it down, automate it, or outsource it).

One of the most used methods to making money as an affiliate is:

Find a High-Converting Product in a Unknown Market

Setup a Blog (or 100 blogs)

Place Affiliate Products All Throughout the Blog and Display Ads Through Ad Networks!

I want to compile a complete list of ad networks for YOU so you can signup and start earning the most amount of money for your blog or website TODAY (like right now, right now)

• BuySellAds
• Link Worth
  
• Widget Bucks
• Clicksor
• Blog Ads
• Text Link Ads
• Turn
• Tribal Fusion
• Morning Falls
• Bidvertiser
• Adgenta
• AdKnowledge
• AVN Ads
• BlogHer Ads
• BrightAds from Kanoodle
• Banner Connect
• InterClick
• Casale Media
• Search Feed
• Ad Brite
• Text Link Brokers
• Value Click
• Yes Advertising
• Gorilla Nation
• Chitika’s MiniMalls
• Ad Pepper
• CrispAds
• Blue Lithium
• DoubleClick
• Fastclick
• Ad Smart
• Industry Brains
• Burst Media
• IntelliTXT
• Kontera
• OneMonkey
• Peak Click
• Pheedo
• RevenuePilot
• ClickBooth
• Commission Junction
• PepperJam
• Market Leverage
• Synervation Affiliate Network (Thanks Robin!)
  
• Amazon

Do you have any favorites that are not on the list?  Post your comment below!