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Search Engine Position Report

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally.

Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy create a search engine position report to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two,
the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions that you will see in your search engine postion report. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis.

Devise a search engine position report to chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings.

Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present!

People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things. It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your
website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely.

Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions using your search engine position report from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.

Christian Whiting is the publisher of Internet Profits. Dedicated to bringing you the best tips, tools, and resources to help you make more money with your online business. http://internetprofits.bushido.net

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Six Ways Into Yahoo

Yahoo was started in 1994 by two college students named David Filo and Jerry Yang. They started Yahoo as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Never did they imagine that their online ventures would turn into one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.

The Yahoo directory quickly gained popularity as the hot sport for finding
useful Web sites. In the fall of 1994, they had their first million-hit day, translating
to almost 100 thousand unique visitors. Today they are one of the top sites on the internet, receiving over 345 million visitors every month.

Through the years, Yahoo has gone through a number of face-lifts. You can see a visual history using the WayBack Machine. Yahoo has now expanded into one of the largest portals online, offering everything from shopping, video, and podcasts to finance, news, real estate,and personals.

Along with this expansion has come many additional opportunities for web masters to distribute their content. Many web masters today are constantly worried about their rankings in Yahoo. However, there are a number of other ways to get into Yahoo besides the Yahoo Search Engine.

In this article, we will discuss 6 ways that you can syndicate your content within the
Yahoo portal.

mobile site submission
podcast submission
product submission
Yahoo directory submission
media rss feeds
Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Mobile Site Submission

Yahoo, Google, and MSN now provide many options for the mobile browser. With cell-phones far out numbering computers, this user-base is one that is far too lucrative to pass up. It’s time we developed our sites for the communication revolution that we are living in and this means preparing our web sites to be easily viewable on very small screens.

Mobile web sites come in three flavors: xHTML, WML, or cHTML. To submit your mobile site for inclusion in Yahoo’s mobiles search index, simply enter the URL on their submission page. Only the top-level page is needed, the Yahoo Crawler will explore the rest of your site from there.

Podcast Submission

In 2005, the term “podcast” was declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American
Dictionary. According to Information Week podcast users are expected to reach 60 million by the year 2010. With these kind of numbers, it just makes sense to start implementing podcasting into your own marketing strategy.

Yahoo released their podcast directory in 2005 and is now one of the best places to submit your podcast and start picking up some extra subscribers. Simply go to http://podcasts.yahoo.com/publish to get started.

Product Submission

If you sell products, then they should defenitely be in the Yahoo shopping index
Yahoo’s merchants range from Dell to Amazon.com. This network puts you in front of millions of potential buyers. You pay only when a shopper clicks on a listing that takes them to your site. Your cost-per-click will vary depending on which category you are in. You can take a look at the pricing on their
rate card.

Media RSS Feed

The Internet is no longer a world of text. With increasing bandwith becoming rapidly available at affordable prices, audio, video, and other visual content is becoming increasingly popular.

As the variety of conent has increased online, Yahoo has been continually adapting. They now allow you to search specifically for audio and video within their search engine.

If you are looking to increase your web site’s traffic, creating audio and video content for your web site could be the answer. The competition among these new
forms of media are still in their infancy.To get your audio, video, and other visual content into Yahoo, you can submit it via a media RSS feed. Yes, I know, it sounds very technical, but it’s really not all that bad.

To start marketing with new media types, go to http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/mrss.

Yahoo Directory

The benefits of being listed in the Yahoo directory have been strongly debated among online marketers.

However, submitting your site to directories does provide you with a number
of benefits. One of the most important benefits is that they grow the number of quality
one-way links coming to your site, which is one of the most important ranking factors
in many search engines.

Unlike Yahoo’s search engine, their directory is maintained by human eiditors.
When submitting to the Yahoo directory, preparation is the key. Be sure to read their
guidelines before you get started.

So, what’s the catch? Yahoo! Directory Submit charges a recurring annual fee of US$299 for each directory listing that is submitted, so you will have to decide for yourself whether or not the hefty price tag is worth it.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo! Answers was launched on December 8, 2005. It is a community where anybody can ask and answer questions on a variety of topics. However, it is also an online community and social networking service. Questions range from the trivial, such as “When was kleenex invented?” to more serious ones like ” Where can I submit press releases on the web?”. Last month, Yahoo Answers reached 10 million answers posted.

Because this is such a large community, it is also one of the perfect mediums for delivering your marketing message. As an web master, you can establish yourself as an expert in almost any field by providing good answers to questions asked about topics related to your product or service.

Not only that, but you can also add more information about yourself or your company in your profile section. However, it is even more effective if you simply include a URL to your site in a resource box below your answers.

The key to using Yahoo Answers as a successful marketing medium is to
deliver quality content. If you do this, then people will certainly take notice.

Now that you know 6 additional ways into Yahoo, you should be able to start using
these techniques to gain an advantage over your competitors. There are so
many people who simply don’t put in the extra effort required to get exceptional
results.

For those who are constantly looking to improve, now is the time to
latch onto some of the most popular developments in internet marketing. Podcasting,
blogging, mobile search, and video have yet to see their peaks.

Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News
newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com

This article may be freely distributed without modification provided that the copyright notice and author information remain intact.

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How Search Engine Optimization Could Help You in Your Internet Business

Search engines are the first things Internet surfers look for when they are searching for goods or services. Where your website appears to the visitors in their search results is of utmost importance. The objective of all Internet marketers is to ensure that their URLs appear right at the top of the first page or at least the first 50th position because visitors would tend to click only on the most prominent URLs.

This boils down to “Search Engine Optimization,” commonly referred to as “SEO” and it is also the holy grail of web design. There are many ways to optimize your site so that search engines will list your site higher in their rankings.

First and foremost, it is the “keyword”. Keywords are the foundation on which the entire search engine system works. If a top ranking site suddenly drops drastically, it may mean that certain content of the website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders and crawlers. Very often certain particular keyword or phrase has been ineffective due to fierce competition. For beginners, it is advisable to start with keywords which are not too competitive to at least get some traffic going first.

Hence, search engine optimization refers to the development of the right keyword strategies to ensure good ranking of your website. The most effective advertising technique online today is good placement in the search engines.

First thing you have to do is to choose your keywords wisely. There are a number of good sites that could help you select the right keywords (or phrases). One example of such free sites is http://inventory.overture.com. What you need to do is to enter your main site name and they would suggest the keywords in the order of search popularity.

Fill these keywords in the metatags first. As you would find in most good websites by clicking “View” and then “Source” within your web browser, the metatag description and keywords are always placed right at the top before the title and anything else. (Metatags are hidden HTML directions for Web browsers or search engines. They include important information such as the title of each page, relevant keywords describing site content and the description of the site that shows up when a search engine returns a search. Make sure your metatags accurately describe your content)

Also, ensure that your page title and your first page header use at least some of the same keywords. Bear in mind that the least amount of words you place in your title, the higher the weightage Google would give to each of your keywords thus improving your ranking. Keywords should be carefully distributed through your well-written and edited text as well. However, do not over do it by sprinkling these keywords repeatedly over your page which would look funny and awkward to human eyes. If this happens, major search engines would treat this as search engine spam and you would not rank well.

As we have heard it so many times before, “Content is King”. Any websites relevant information to a specific niche is what Search Engines are looking for. The more content you have on your website, the greater would be your chances of enjoying a decent search engine ranking. After all, it is information that draws more and more people to the Internet every day.

Thousands of authors are giving away articles for free reprint, and these articles cover just about any subjects you could think of.

Search engine spiders move from site to site across the Internet by following hyperlinks. If your sites are linked to more high-quality and high-trafficked sites (i.e. websites with high Google Page Rank), you would be held at high regards by the search engines too. It is highly recommended that you register your site with well-known directories such as Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), Google.com and the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org).

Search engine campaign and all the other necessary actions are to be carried out to increase your rankings.

The question is how to ensure that your prominence would continue. Therefore there must be a workable strategy to allow you to monitor and control your search engines positions.
The way search engines rank websites is not fixed and continue to change with time. Hence a top ranking website today could drop to the bottom of the page or even lost in subsequent pages. It is therefore advisable to create a system that could monitor your positions at least on a monthly basis.

Make an effort to now your competitor’s position against yours because their rise could lead to your drop. You can view their html codes as mentioned above. Do the necessary correction wherever applicable to improve your website to increase your position in search results based on the most popular search engines. (Some websites give information on the latest most popular list as this list is dynamic and keeps changing. For webmasters, the major search engines are the most important places to be listed, because they can potentially generate so much traffic)

If your search engine positions have suddenly dropped, search engines spiders may have found some problems with your website. Sometimes when you have changed the code, the spider may become confused and consequently drop your positions. If a spider happens to crawl at your website when it is down for changes, you could end up disappearing from a search engine index entirely. At times, a search engine may change its formula, and suddenly all websites come up as irrelevant as mentioned earlier above. If that search engine is a current favorite like Google, your position in other search engines could also suffer due to the domino effect.

The idea behind ranking high in search engine such as Google is to analyze top ranking websites and find out what they are doing as regards keywords and do exactly those things plus the extra which they have overlooked.

Search engine marketing campaign must be treated as a good medium to long-term investment because it entails a lot of effort and financial commitment.

Copyright© 2005 John Woon
http://www.johnwoon.com

About The Author: John Woon (Sung-Liang Woon) is a Latex Consultant with about 30 years of experience.

1) Multiple Internet business opportunity SECRETS: http://easyhomebiz.blogspot.com

2) Hypertension and the Heart: http://hypertension2.blogspot.com

3) Diabetics’ Valuable ONE-STOP Guide: http://diabetics-guide.blogspot.com

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