Story about simplify blog SEO and Blog Traffic

When we’re talking about how incresing blog traffic without Steeling Traffic from Search Engine,the interesting recommends is Submitting your blog to Blog Directory.Do you know how many blog directory in this world?
Let’s start with Google,push “blog directory” in search box and see the result.We have million Blog Directories and the next question is”How many days you finishing submit all of them?”…..one week or two week….and after finishing the submit,there are the effective way to push up your traffic….anyone garuntee this tactic.You may be waste your time on the small and abandoned blog directory.The submitting tactics is effective when you select the good blog directory.I’m coming to One webboard about SEO and SEM and they’re distributing the php program to member.This program is easy to install in web server and build the web directory in minutes.It’s means that we will find the large number of junk directory that waste your time and If we think all over the world build this directory ,I can’t count this number.So the good saying”Put the right man to the right job” for the best working may be state as”Put the right blog to the right blog directory”……Mat Siltala write the list of good directory on his article “10 most important things to look for when submitting to a directory “.This is a good article and you may be checked the directory before submitting

10 most important things to look for in a directory (when it comes to Google)

When starting a directory submission campaign, just don’t assume all directories are created equal. For those that are new to dir submissions, or (good reminders for you) old timers, I have compiled a list of what I believe are the 10 most important things to look for when submitting to a directory (at least as far as Google is concerned)

1. What is the age of the directory?
2. Is the page you are submitting to indexed?
3. Is the indexed result supplemental?
4. How many outbound links does the page you are submitting to have on it? (It is ideal with less then 20)
5. Is the link a “nofollow” link? (in other words can it help by not passing rank)
6. Is there a ton of pharmacy or casino sites in the listings? (If yes, stay away)
7. Does the directory really have a relevant cat/sub-category? (or option to create new sub-cat)
8. Does the submission have a review process? (or can anyone get in)
9. Does the site allow anchor text to deep pages (sub pages)?
10. Can you actually get traffic from the site?

If you can take your focus away from trying to build up “as many” links as you can through directory submission, and focus more on the quality of the directory you are getting in, and what that listing can do for your website, then you have won the battle. There are some people that cringe at the thought of paying 299$/year for a listing in the Yahoo! Directory, yet a listing in that directory can take your site to a whole new level that you never knew.

For 2007 make it your directory submission goal to focus on “quality of directories” rather then ‘quantity of directories”.

In My opinion,I agree with this last word…Good Quality directory is rather than Large amount of directories
Following this conclusion,I see the business model ,Why we don’t build the good directory and collect the fee for submitting

Read this article on 97floor.com

Today I put this words on Google”Increase Blog traffic”,we have 76,000 article that state this words.I am focusing on the first 100 results ,stop my glance on “Can You Increase Blog Traffic Without Posting?” and interesting on WITHOUT POSTING….and guess it may be the cool idea.

During The last few weeks,I have been doing some very interesting experiments here onCourt’s Internet Marketing School. The question in my mind is whether it’s the actual ‘posting’ on a blog that results in traffic and RSS subscribers. Most people out there are going to believe that posting more will result in more traffic to a blog, which will result in more RSS subscriptions.

I have the luxury of having quite a few of my own sites and also having clients whose sites I watch on a weekly basis. What has this led me to discover? In most cases, ‘posting’ on a blog actually has very little to do with the traffic that reaches the blog.

Why? Well, think about it. How many of your old blog posts actually bring residual traffic? Do they bring search traffic? When you get linked to from other sites, do those links produce continuous traffic or do they simply give you a short-lived burst?

I have had the luxury of being linked to by some of the most popular blogs on the web. I’ve been linked to multiple times by Problogger, John Chow, and most of the other big names in this industry.

If I look at yesterday’s stats, how much referral traffic did I get from those links? I got 2 visitors that came from ProBlogger.net, and 0 visitors from JohnChow.com. That honestly doesn’t compare well at all with the residual search traffic that I get from Google every day.

As you might have noticed, it’s been two weeks since I last posted on this site. What have I been up to? I’ve been creating some keyword-rich landing pages (as opposed to posts) and building links (among other things that you’ll find out about very soon…). What are the results? A healthy increase in daily search traffic and more than 200 new RSS subscribers.

Interesting, isn’t it?
  Read The Original Article on courtneytuttle.com…..Click to Article

Since this blog is all about giving writing tips for bloggers, I thought I would take a different angle and look at blogging from a perspective of those who don’t want to / can’t write.

Quite often we hear the mantra that a successful blogger needs to write good unique content. But, Is it possible to blog and develop a successful website without doing any writing?

Picture / Video Blog

If you are able to take interesting, unique pictures this can make a very attractive blog. I think to stand out, though your pictures would have to be of a particularly high standard, or offer something not found elsewhere. You will face alot of competition and it may not be so easy to monetize. However building a successful picture blog, gives you an opportunity to sell your own pictures.

See: Ursi’ blog for good example of photo / link blog

Cartoon / Comedy blog

This is a successful blog which offers humorous cartoons. By enabling others to use and embed the cartoon enables the blog to get lots of backlinks. I think this is an interesting point: offering free content is a good way to success on the internet. It is part of Wikipedia’s success, because people can freely copy the content, the site receives many link backs.

Use Material in the Public Domain.

There is an increasing amount of writen material which is free to copy under certain conditions. Sources of material to copy can be found at Wikipedia and ezine article sites. At Wikipedia the material is available under a GNU license, all you have to do is to acknowledge the source. This can be useful for building up pages. However, if you make a site out of duplicate material, you have to ask the question; Is this site offering anything new and useful? If it isn’t then it’s going to be difficult to make it a success. Also an additional factor to bear in mind is that Google and other search engines are discriminating against sites which are primarily duplicated content. Having said that I have pages on one site, from Wikipedia, which rank reasonably well. Yet, if the site was just duplication I doubt it would get any rankings.

Quotes / Poems

Quotes are a very popular internet search. Quotes about people, topics and subjects get a lot of hits. With regard to quotes and poems there is nothing you can do to make it unique (unless you comment on all the quotes). You can probably find some subject related to your blog. I have a short collection of quotes on writing. These quotes are actually quite useful for writing articles.

Links

Offering links to other sites and to the breaking news can be a helpful resource. Some sites have developed a reputation for being a very good link resource. However, to have a site solely dedicated to linking, would have to do it very well, or specilise in a certain niche. In a way links is the primary function of sites like Digg and Slashdot.

Get other people to write for you.

Successful sites are often able to attract guest bloggers or even regular contributors. This means you can spend alot of time doing other things and leave other writers to produce the content. Examples include lifehack and Blogging Tips. This option can be very good so long as:

1. you can get good writers.
2. To attract writers you will need to have a well established blog, with decent readership and page rank.

PART 4: Make your Web site easy to navigate and guide Web surfers through your pages

Last week, we’ve told you how to write good sales copy to convince Web surfers. This week, we’re telling you how to direct your visitors to the right (order) pages.

1. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)

2. Design navigation icons wisely (if you must use them)

3. Use descriptive text links

4. Guide your visitors through your site

Be sure that you customers can find what they’re looking for on your site and that they don’t have to search for it.

Make a test with a relative or a friend who is a bit unsure surfing the Web. Tell him or her to find out the price of your product or service. Look over his/her shoulder and find out how people can find ways you’ve never dreamt of.

Your Web site navigation should be easy to understand and it should be consistent throughout your whole Web page. If people cannot find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, they will leave your Web site.

PART 5: Checklist for an easy ordering process

When people have finally decided to purchase your product, you must make sure that your order page doesn’t drive them away. Statistics indicate that more than 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process.

Check if your potential customers can easily order the products or services on your Web site:

If you agree to all points, then your order pages won’t stay in the way when your visitors decide to purchase from you.

PART 3: How to write a good sales copy

Last week, we told you how to keep visitors on your site. This week, we’re telling you how to convince your visitors with a good sales copy.

As soon as people are on your Web site, you must convince them with a good sales copy. Always remember: People aren’t necessarily interested in your product or in your company. You have to fulfill their needs if you want to sell them something.

1. Know your product

2. What’s in for your customers?

3. Don’t mix up features and benefits

4. Be nice and trustworthy

5. Killer headlines will grab your visitors attention

6. This site will be gone tomorrow!

Not really. However, urgency sometimes helps to improve the performance of your sales copy. Make a special offer for the first 200 subscribers, add a special bonus if people purchase this month or until midnight.

7. End your sales copy by telling the reader what to do

Use the tips above to write as persuasively as you can, but remember not to deceive your customers in any way. You’d risk poor word of mouth, legal action, no repeat business and refund requests.

You know that a high ranking is very important to get high quality targeted traffic to your Web site. The more targeted your visitors are, the more you’ll sell on your site.

However, a high ranking alone is not enough. Many webmasters have the problem that their visitors don’t buy something on their site even if the way the visitors reached the site indicates that they’re interested in the products.

For that reason, we’re going to tell you in this article what you can do to improve the effectiveness of your Web site .

PART 1: The first 3 critical points - Make a good first impression, or your visitors will leave immediately

When Web surfers come to your site, it’s very important that you make a good first impression. Before a Web surfer starts reading the copy text on your Web page, your page must pass these three critical points:

1. Your Web page must load quickly

   Web surfers won’t wait for slow loading Web pages. If your Web pages don’t load as fast as is possible, a lot of Web surfers will go away before they have had a chance to take a look at your Web pages.

   Don’t forget that still the majority of Web surfers use a 28K/56K modem to surf the Internet. If your Web page is 120 KB big (including the images), then it takes 17 seconds to load the page. Would you wait so long?

2. Your Web site must look good

   Make sure that your Web site has a professional layout. People don’t want to purchase from a shady backyard business. It’s very important that your Web pages look perfect. Hire a professional Web designer if necessary.

   The same is valid for your link pages. If you want to exchange links with other sites, make sure that your link pages look attractive. A link on your link pages should be something other people want to have.

   Make your link pages accessible from your other Web pages and use a great layout for your link pages.

3. Don’t use automatically generated doorway pages

   Automatically created doorway pages might bring some visitors to your site. However, they’ll land on a Web page that was designed with search engines spiders in mind.

   Automatically created doorway pages usually look ugly to human Web surfers. Often, they consist of nothing more than a list of buzz-words. You won’t get good results with this method because human Web surfers will quickly close such a Web page.

If your Web site fails under one of these categories, Web surfers will leave your site before you even have the chance to tell them your marketing message.

PART 2: How to keep Web surfers on your site

Last week, we told you which three critical points your Web site must pass before Web surfers even consider taking a look at your Web page. This week, we’re telling you what you can do to keep these visitors on your site.

1. Come straight to the point

• • what you do
  • why people should stay on your site
  • what’s in for your visitors

• Your home page is the most important page on your site. It’s the very first page of your site and the page that people see first when they come to your site. Therefore, it’s important that your home page is interesting for your visitors.

  Every visitor wants to get a prompt answer to the question “what’s in it for me?”. On the first paragraph of your home page, you should tell your visitors the following:

  If you don’t answer these questions quickly enough, people will go away.

  Of course, every home page owner is convinced that they have the best product on earth and that everybody should buy it. Unfortunately, visitors don’t know that.

  If you don’t tell them the major benefits of your product, no one will take the time to dig into your site. Web surfers are a very impatient group.

2. Don’t annoy your visitors with animations they cannot see

3. Respect people’s time

4. Test with different Web browsers

5. Be consistent

Once Web surfers have decided not to go away on their first impulse, you have to keep them with a good sales copy.

Link popularity has become an important factor in the ranking algorithms of most search engines. If many quality Web sites link to your site, you’ll have a good position in the search engines.

9. Give testimonials

8. Awards for you and other sites

7. Participate in newsgroups and discussion forums

6. Provide a link directory

5. List your Web site with Yahoo

3. List your Web site in regional and industry-specific directories.

2. Write articles for your audience

1. Get reciprocal links from complementary sites

A high percentage of #1 ranked Web pages on Google don’t contain the queried search term in the body text or in the META tags. How can that be? The answer is: These top ranked Web pages have high link popularity and a good PageRank(tm).

In our new series we’re going to tell you how to obtain high link popularity and a good PageRank so that your Web pages get a high ranking on Google and other popular search engines.

Link Popularity is becoming the determining factor for successful Web sites.

Part 1: What exactly is link popularity?

Link popularity refers to the total number of links that a search engine has found for your Web page. The more Web sites link to your Web page, the higher the link popularity of your page. High link popularity contributes to a high search engine ranking.

Note that link popularity is measured only for single Web pages, not for the whole Web site. Your Web site can have several Web pages with different PageRank numbers.

The idea behind the link popularity concept is simple. The more other Web sites link to your Web site, the more important your site must be. Other sites wouldn’t link to your site if there wasn’t something interesting on your site or if your Web site didn’t contain any special content.

It’s nearly impossible to manipulate link popularity. Previous ranking algorithms that took META keywords or similar factors into account have been quickly abused to mislead the search engines. On the other side, it’s very difficult to manipulate the number of links that point to a site.

That’s why link popularity is now one of the most important factors for search engines when they rank a Web page.

However, you cannot get high link popularity by submitting your Web site to thousands of FFA (free for all) link pages. Not all links are considered equal by the search engines. It does matter who links to you and how they link to you.

You can find more information on this important fact in the next issue of our newsletter.

Recommended link popularity tools:

• Link Popularity Check (freeware):
  Checks and compares your link popularity.

• ARELIS (commercial)
  Helps you to improve the link popularity of your Web pages.

Part 2: Not all links are considered equal

As mentioned in the last issue of our newsletter, the more Web sites link to your Web site, the higher your link popularity.

However, not all links are equal. Some links count more than others. Links from important Web sites have a greater effect on your link popularity and your search engine rankings.

A link from www.Yahoo.com to your Web site has more weight than a link from a small private Web page. A link from a Web site with high link popularity is better than a link from an unknown Web site.

It’s also important that the Web site that’s linking to you has a similar topic as your Web site. Imagine that you sell shoes on your Web site. A link from another Web site that is all about shoes will count much more than a link from a Web site that links to all kind of Web sites.

Finally, it’s important how the link to your site looks like. For example, one of your important keywords might be “brown leather shoes”.

The link

Brown leather shoes

leads to much better search engine rankings for the keyword “brown leather shoes” than the following link

Smith and Partners

By the way, many people think that they can increase their link popularity by submitting their Web site address to FFA (free for all) link pages and link farms (Web sites that link to all kind of Web sites). This doesn’t work.

More and more search engines recognize FFA pages and link farms and choose to ignore these pages. Usually, submissions to FFA pages are a waste of time that only results in many spam email messages.

In addition, you should avoid services that promise you 2000 links to your site within a week or so. If they link to you at all, these 2000 links must be of poor quality or they don’t have a similar topic as your Web site.

Use common sense. Offers that sound too good to be true probably aren’t true.

Summary:

• try to get links from important Web sites
• try to get link texts that contain your important keywords
• don’t use FFA or link farm pages
• don’t use services that promise lots of links within days
• focus on quality links, not on quantity

Next week, we’re going to tell you how to find good potential link partners quickly and easily.

Recommended link popularity tools:

• Link Popularity Check (freeware)
  Checks and compares your link popularity.

• ARELIS (commercial)
  Helps you to improve the link popularity of your Web pages.

Part 3: How to find good potential link partners

As explained in the last issues of our newsletter, it’s important _who_ links to your site. Web sites that have a similar topic as your site are more important than Web sites with different topics.

In addition, if you can convince Web sites with a similar topic to link to your site, you’ll also get targeted traffic from these sites.

People who visit your topic partner sites are usually interested in what you have to offer. They are more likely to come to your site and to buy something. It’s the quality of the traffic that counts, not the quantity.

Unfortunately, both ways are very time-consuming and it’s hard to do it for many sites.

Instead of manually searching for good potential link partners, you could also use a software tool like ARELIS to save time .

ARELIS is a commercial tool that quickly finds sites that link to your competitors as well as other potential link partners. It presents the found sites in a clearly arranged list that can be sorted by different criteria. It even helps you to build link pages and to check for broken links.

You can download a demo version here .

In the next issue we’ll explain how to contact potential link partners so that you’ll get a positive reply.

In addition to ARELIS, we recommend the free link popularity tool ” Link Popularity Check “. It checks and compares your link popularity on different search engines.

Part 4: How to contact potential link partners

In part 3, we told you how to find good potential link partners. When you’ve found such high quality sites, it’s important that you use the right words to contact the webmasters of these sites.

If you want them to link to your Web site, you have to be personal and politely. Emails like the following usually do NOT work:

—snip—
Subject: Let’s trade links

Hi!

I’ve found your site and I think we could link to each
other. That will increase your search engine ranking and
mine, too.

Best,

Paul
—snip—

Many webmasters consider sending such messages as spamming. It’s much more effective to use personalized email messages. They’ll improve the chances of your link request message being read and acted upon favorably.

If you want positive feedback, you must convince the webmaster that you’ve really visited the Web site and that you know what the site is about.

Try to convince them that your Web site is related to their site and make it easy for potential link partners to link back to your site.

Here’s an example:

—snip—
Subject: Axandra.com and CheckYourLinkPopularity.com

Dear Peter,

I found your CheckYourLinkPopularity.com site recently and
like it very much. I think the straight-to-the-point web
site design is perfect for the freeware tool you’re
offering.

I’ve placed a link to your site at
http://www.Axandra.com/recommended-sites

I’ve noticed that you link to other Web sites that are
related to your freeware tool. We offer a Web site promotion
tool that also focuses on link popularity
(http://www.Axandra.com/arelis/index.htm).

It’d be great if you also placed a link to our Web site. If
you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me
by email or phone at 123-456-7890.

Best regards,

Johannes Selbach, CEO
http://www.Axandra.com

PS. Visit “http://www.Axandra.com/link-to-us.htm” for ready
made HTML code.
—snip—

As you can see, we’ve already linked to the other site before asking them for a reciprocal link. If you’ve already linked to a site, the webmaster is much more likely to answer your request.

This sounds like a very time consuming task. Fortunately, there are tools that help you with that. If you use ARELIS, a software program to manage reciprocal links, you can quickly visit and contact potential link partners.

ARELIS lets you preview a Web site and offers a built-in email client that helps you to contact potential link partners quickly and easily. You can use email templates that use variables so that you can create email messages
very quickly. For example, ARELIS can automatically insert the name and the URL of potential link partners as well as many other variables.

However, ARELIS is not a spamming tool because it only lists relevant Web sites and you must visit every Web site before contacting it. Just how a serious webmaster would do it and what brings the best results.

In addition, ARELIS automatically creates and manages your link pages for you so that you can quickly add, edit and remove link partners from your Web pages.

You can download a free demo version here:
http://www.Axandra.com/arelis/download.htm

Next week, we’ll discuss what you can do to increase the success of your linking campaign.

In addition to ARELIS, we recommend the free link popularity tool ” Link Popularity Check“. It checks and compares your link popularity on different search engines.

Part 5: How to increase the success of your campaign

Until now, you’ve learned how to locate good potential link partners. In addition, you know which Web sites and services you should avoid if you want to obtain a good and long lasting link popularity.

You’ve also learned how to contact potential link partner sites and that a personal approach gets much better results than mass emailing sites.

Here are a few other important tips to increase the success of your linking campaign:

1. Link to potential link partners first before you ask them to link to you.

   Tell potential link partners that you’ve linked to their site and tell them where they can find the link on your site. If you link to other Web sites first, more webmasters are willing to add a link back to your site.

   If you think that this is too much work, consider using a tool like ARELIS to manage your link pages.

   With ARELIS, you can quickly add new link partners to your site and you can also quickly remove them if they don’t want to link back to your site. Building link pages in the design of your Web site requires only a single mouse click in ARELIS.

   ARELIS also checks if your link partners still link back to you and automatically removes them from your link pages if they don’t link back to you anymore.

2. Offer a “Link to us” page on your Web site.

   Make it easy for other people to link to your site. Offer a “Link to us” page on your site that contains sample HTML code that your link partners can copy and paste into their own Web sites. The easier it is for your link partners to link to your site, the more likely they’re going to link to you.

   Here’s an example of a “Link to us” page.

   On this Web page, there are three ready made HTML snippets at the end of the page that link partners can insert on their own link pages.

   With the snippets at hand, your link partners don’t have to think about how to link to your site. A “Link to us” page also indicates that you’re willing to exchange links. That means that other webmasters will approach you through that page.

3. Make your link pages easy to find.

   Don’t be surprised that no one wants to link to you if your link back to their site is hidden somewhere in your site and cannot be found by the average Web surfer.

   Make it easy for your visitors to find your links page. If you’re afraid of losing visitors, you can open the links to other Web sites in a new window.

Conclusion

Building a good link popularity requires some work but the results will pay for it. Link popularity is already the most important factor for search engines to rank Web sites.

The sooner you start with your linking campaign, the better the results for your business.

Professional webmaster tools like ARELIS can help you in your linking campaign. They get very good results with little work.

Recommended link popularity tools:

• Link Popularity Check (freeware)
  Checks and compares your link popularity.

• ARELIS (commercial)
  Helps you to improve the link popularity of your Web pages.

Many webmasters have the problem that their Web site is not listed in search engines at all. There can be a variety of reasons that your Web site doesn’t show up on search engines.

Reason #13: Your Web pages require a full-fledged browser.

When search engines crawl the Web to find new Web pages, they use special software for it, called “spiders”, “robots” or “crawlers”.

These crawler programs don’t have the functionality of full-fledged Web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

In fact, search engine robot programs look at your Web pages like a text browser does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in graphic images but they can read text descriptions.

This means that search engine spider programs are not able to use Web browser technology to access your site. If your Web pages require Flash, DHTML, cookies, JavaScript, Java or passwords to access the page, then search engine spiders might not be able to index your Web site.

Therefore, it might be a good idea to test your Web pages with very old versions of Web browser applications or with the software program “Lynx”, a text-only browser.

Lynx is available for download here . Here’s an online version of Lynx that allows you test your Web pages with a text-only browser quickly and easily: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html .

“Simulation of a search engine spider”, see how search engines see your Web site:
http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi

Reason #14: Search engines could not resolve your DNS name.

There’s a mistake that novice users often do. They register a domain name (for example, www.my-great-site.com), and they immediately submit the Web site URL to the search engines.

Then they wonder why the search engines didn’t index their site. The answer is, they weren’t able to do it.

It takes approximately 2-4 days until a domain name becomes active. All Internet access providers must update their records (DNS tables) to reflect new site locations. The process of updating DNS tables is called propagation.

Search engines must also update their DNS tables and until then, the new domain name www.my-great-site.com doesn’t work.

So when you register a new domain name, you must wait about 48-72 hours until you can submit the domain name to the search engines.

If you’re interested in other factors that might prevent your Web site from getting top rankings on search engines, visit our newsletter archive:

http://www.free-seo-news.com/index.htm

Reason #15: Your Web site has a low link popularity.

Link popularity is becoming _the_ determining factor for a top search engine ranking.

Link popularity means the number of Web sites linking to your site. However, the quality of links is more important than the quantity of links. For instance, if the New York Times links to your site, their single link might count a lot more than 30 links from your friends’ personal homepage.

By now, all top search engines use link popularity in their ranking formulas: AltaVista, Inktomi, MSN Search, HotBot. For Google, it’s even the most important factor in ranking sites.

The idea behind link popularity is that other Web sites will link to your site only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So if many Web sites link to your site, search engines come to the conclusion that your site must be very popular and deserves a high ranking.

As Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview: “…a page that is pointed to by many other sites is important. In other words, external approval raises a page’s ranking.”

Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will the most important search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you.

In addition, as more sites link to you, the odds increase that search engine spider programs will encounter your site more regularly so that it’s less likely that they drop your site from their index.

What’s the link popularity of your site?

The freeware Windows program Link Popularity Check tells you the link popularity of your Web site is and compares it with competitor sites.

Link Popularity Check is a classic freeware application: it has no nag screens, it doesn’t change the system registry, it makes no unauthorized connections to the Internet and it comes with a hands-free uninstaller.

Download Link Popularity Check (freeware).

How to improve the link popularity of your Web site:

You can search the search engines for Web sites that are related to your business, find the webmaster’s contact information and then solicit a reciprocal link. Do this every day and your link popularity will climb steadily but slowly. And it’s very time-consuming.

That’s why we created ARELIS, which automates most of the time-consuming tasks. Read the interesting comparison of the old-fashioned way of improving link popularity versus ARELIS , the new way.

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://us.altavista.com/help/search/faq_web#13
• 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

Reason #17: Your Web site has a slow host server.

Search engine crawler programs that index Web pages don’t have much time. There are approximately 2-4 billion Web pages all over the world and search engines want to index all of them.

So if the host server of your Web site has a slow connection to the Internet, you may experience that your Web site will not be indexed by the major search engines at all.

AltaVista and Google specifically mention the problem on their Web sites.

AltaVista: “If a site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex, it might time out before the crawler can index all the text.”

Found at:
http://help.Altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_wellindexed

Google: “Your site may not have been reachable when we tried to crawl it because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, we retry multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be listed in our current index.”

Found at:
http://www.Google.com/webmasters/2.html#A3

You may also want to limit the size of your homepage to less than 60K. It’d also benefit the still numerous users that connect to the Internet with a slow modem. For even the casual Internet user, the performance of a Web site can make the difference between pleasure and frustration.

How you can test the speed of your server:
http://web-hosting.candidinfo.com/site-response-speed.asp

Reason #18: Do you use the right keywords? It’s important that you use the keywords on which you want to be found in the right places on your Web pages.

Imagine your Web site sells garden flowers. Your HTML source might look like this:

—

—

Some search engines (AltaVista, Inktomi) index the META Keywords tag, some (Google, AllTheWeb/FAST) don’t.

For the search engines that index the META Keywords tag, it’s important that you actually use the keywords of your META Keywords tag on your Web pages.

Some search engines nowadays consider it spam if the keywords of your META Keywords tag don’t appear in the body text on your page.

Of course, you know that the most important thing for a good search engine listing is content on your Web site. Search engines need text, text and even more text to index your Web site.

For example, if you sell cars, have articles about cars on your Web site. If you offer package holidays, provide some tourist information about your destinations. Build this content and optimize the text for your target search terms.

In other words, make sure that the content on your Web pages contains the keywords that are important for your site.

And don’t forget to use only those words in your META Keywords tag that appear on your Web page.

Reason #19: Have you waited long enough?

The Internet is growing rapidly. According to a study of the NEC Research Institute, most search engines need about 6 months to index a Web site.

Source: NUA Internet Surveys
http://www.nua.com/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905355013&rel=true

The data was collected when there were by far fewer Web sites than today. With todays number of Web sites, it might take even longer (although many search engines have also improved their equipment).

That means that your Web site submissions may need up to half a year until they appear in search engine listings.

The result of the study shows that it’s important that you submit your Web pages the right way, right from the start. When search engines need six months to index your Web site, you should make sure that they’ll index your pages correctly.

No one can guarantee a good search engine ranking. However, if you don’t make the mistakes which we outlined in our 19-part series, a good ranking is much more likely.

from http://www.free-seo-news.com/search-engine-ranking-3.htm

Many webmasters have the problem that their Web site is not listed in search engines at all. There can be a variety of reasons that your Web site doesn’t show up on search engines.

Reason #7: Your Web pages are created dynamically.

Databases and dynamically generated Web pages are great tools to manage the contents of big Web sites. Imagine you’d have to manage the Web site contents of the New York Times without databases…

Unfortunately, dynamically generated Web pages can be a nightmare for search engine spiders because the pages don’t actually exist until they are requested. A search engine spider is not going to be able to select all necessary variables on the submit page.

The exceptions are the spider programs from Google and Inktomi. They are able to index Web pages that are dynamically generated, even those that use question marks and query strings.

On the other side, AltaVista isn’t able to index dynamically generated Web pages, and here’s why:

http://help.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_wellindexed

If you create dynamic Web pages with the help of Active
Server Pages (ASP), ColdFusion, CGI, Perl or the Apache
Server, then the following Web page offers good avice:

http://spider-food.net/dynamic-page-optimization-b.html

Reason #8: You have moved your site to a new server.

Every time you move a Web site to a Web hosting company, or when you change the domain name, the IP/DNS address of your domain name changes. While people see URLs (www.yourdomain.com), search engines often only see IP addresses.

This means that you need to re-submit your Web site to all search engines and directories when you move your Web site to a new Web hosting company or when you change your domain name. In time, search engines will realize that your IP/DNS address has changed and will remove the old IP address from their index.

It’s important that you re-submit only when the move is completely finished. A good way to know when the IP address change has been updated is to upload a slightly different version of the index page to the new server. When you enter www.yourdomain.com in your Web browser and see the different version you’ll know that DNS servers of your ISP (Internet Service Provider) have been updated.

If you have changed your server, resubmit your Web site URL to search engines. If you have changed your domain name, you should also change your Yahoo and Open Directory Project listings.

If you want to change your Yahoo listing, go to:

http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change

If you want to change your Open Directory Project listing:

1. Go to ” http://dmoz.org/ “.
2. First locate the category in which the site appears in (search for your domain name), and go to that category.
3. Click the Update URL link at the top of the Web page.
4. Enter the URL of the Web site you would like to update.
5. A new page loads where you can make changes.
6. Click the Update URL button once you’ve finished with the changes.

If you change your domain name, it’s likely that you lose your old visitors. Here’s advice how to reduce the loss of visitors:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/news/movinghosts.shtml

Reason #9: Your Web page does not have unique IP address.

Does your Web site has a unique IP address? If not, your Web site is running the risk of getting banned from the search engines.

Human beings use domain names like yahoo.com, but network computers use IP addresses, which are numeric addresses written as four numbers, separated by periods.

Every domain name translates to a so-called IP address. For example, yahoo.com is translated to “64.58.76.225″. Just enter “http://64.58.76.225/” in your Web browser and you’ll go to www.yahoo.com.

Many Web hosting services don’t give out unique IP addresses to their customers to save money. They assign the same IP address to multiple domain names. This means that several hundred Web sites could all be using the same IP address as your site does.

There are 3 reasons why you need a unique IP address:

1. If you’re sharing an IP address with 50 other sites, you’re trusting them not to over-submit or spam the search engines. When a search engine blocks an IP address, all the sites that are sharing that IP address are blocked. You could wind up being banned from the search engine.
2. If the server or the search engine spider software is misconfigured, the search engine spider may end up obtaining a Web page from another domain with the same IP address. This may mean that the other Web site gets indexed instead of yours, or your Web site will be found for the keywords which are applicable to the other site.
3. Rumor has it that having your own unique IP address may help your search engine ranking.

So when you select a Web hosting service, make sure that your domain name has a unique IP address, even if it means that you have to pay a bit more for your hosting.

Are you sharing an IP address with people you don’t even know? Here’s a way to test it yourself:

1. Go to ” http://www.eamnesia.com/hostinfo/i.jhtml ” and enter your domain name (for example, yahoo.com).

   (If this URL doesn’t work anymore, go to ” http://www.name-space.com/search/ ” and enter your domain name in the nslookup field.)

2. The result page shows you what IP address your site resolves to (for example, 64.58.76.225)
3. Copy the IP address to the clipboard.
4. Open a new window in your Web browser, enter the IP address (for example, http://64.58.76.225 ) and hit Return.
5. If your Web site appears, you have your own IP address. If another Web site or an error message appears, you probably share the IP address with others.

If you are unsure, ask your Web hosting service company if your Web site has its own IP address.

Reason #10: You are hosting your Web site at a free Web space provider.

Some search engines (e.g. AltaVista) limit the number of pages they will index from a single domain. For example, if your Web page is hosted at Geocities.com or Tripod.com, it might happen that your Web site is not listed just because the maximum page limit for that special domain name is reached.

Some search engines no longer even index pages residing on common free Web hosting services. Their complaint is that they get too many spam or low-quality submissions from free Web site domains.

However, Google is the exception. Google does index Web pages on Geocities.com and Tripod.com. Those pages also seem to have a Google PageRank of at least 3/10 because they are linked from a popular domain.

In summary, if you are serious about doing business on the Web, it helps tremendously to have your own domain name. Put yourself in the customer shoes: Would you buy from a Web site that is called “sub.free-web-space- provider.com/~category/162742/ my_business/home.htm”?

A domain name is easier to remember for your customers and it helps to build trust.

And while we’re at it: A recent survey by Consumers Union found that only 29 percent of Americans trust Internet sites that sell products.

Consumer WebWatch research report on trust:
http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/news/1_abstract.htm

How to gain your customers’ trust:
http://www.ecommercebase.com/article/37

Reason #11: Your host server was non-operational during spidering.

It can happen that your Web server is down when a search engine spider tries to index it.

If your Web site fails to respond when the search engine spider visits your site, your site will not be indexed. Even worse, if your Web site is already indexed and the search engine spider finds that your site is down, you’ll often be removed from the search engine database.

It’s essential to have Web space on servers that are very seldom down. Choosing a reliable Web space provider is very important for a successful online business.

At first it sounds impressive when your Web space provider promises 99% server reliability. But take a moment to calculate it. It means that 1% of the time, your potential customers cannot reach your Web site. One percent of a year means that your Web site will be down for nearly 4 days per year. That equals 4 days without sales.

As you can see, 99% reliability is not enough. You must constantly monitor your server so that you can act immediately if your server is down (e.g. call the service provider to restart the server).

Here’s a free monitoring service:
http://www.internetseer.com

Another free Web site monitoring service (without ads):
http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/

A freeware tool that can monitor the uptime of your site:
http://www.idyle.com/software/internet/host-monitor/

Monitoring service for bigger companies:
http://www.atwatch.com/

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:

—

—

you should replace it immediately with

—

—

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

from http://www.free-seo-news.com/search-engine-ranking-2.htm