Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Allthough you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google’s search engine result page, believe it or not that is not Googles intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they’ve even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you’ll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

To Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop.

Effective 11/06, Google,  Google, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

* Froogle - part of the Google family, this site is still under development.
* MSN Shopping - a Microsoft company where you can compare over 36 million products from over 8,000 stores, all in one place.
* MySimon - owned my CNET offers shopping recommendations, buying advice, and side by side price comparisons.
* NexTag - is the leading comparison shopping site for products, financial services, travel, automobiles, real estate, education and more
* PriceRunner - was designed to provide consumers with easy online access to specifications and prices.
* PriceGrabber
* TheFind.com - Our unbiased “Product Ranking Engine” crawls over 500,000 stores to find over 150 Million products web-wide. (Still under development in Jan 2007.)
* Shopping.com - this eBay company pioneered online comparison shopping and today is one of the fastest growing shopping destinations for a comprehensive set of products from thousands of trusted stores from across the Web.

The web service for fetching contacts from MSN messenger / Windows Live Messenger has been hit by a series of problems over the past few days. First I hit the bandwidth limit for the account used to host the service. Next, the server used was hit by a DDoS attack. Finally after all that was sorted out the bandwidth limit again caused problems.

Hopefully everything should now be back to normal and the service will be stable.

As always, if you do have any problems, my contact details are available under the ‘About’ tab at the top of the page.

The two biggest search engines worldwide are Google (used by Google / AOL) and Overture (used by MSN / Yahoo). Google fills it’s database mainly by letting robots automatically crawl and index the web. The Overture database is mainly filled through affiliate programs. That will cost you, so let’s focus on Google for now. Google is the cooler one anyway…

Website linking structure and number of links pointing to your site or page is crucial to ranking High in Google and if you rank good in Google, chances are you’ll do good in Yahoo and other search engines but top 3 search engines that will bring most traffic are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Analyzing your competitors is important and included in Free SEO tips because search engines do analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria which is called Page Rank (PR).

So what other websites are doing to rank on top of search results. In order to find out you need to gather a significant amount of data about the top ranking sites for whatever keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize your page for, like:

1. Competition’s rank in the Search Engines Results for given keyword
2. The number of incoming links to the site’s home page, not including

internal links.
3. What keywords they use in the title tag
4. Number of links containing keywords in the link text
5. PageRank of linking pages
6. The Alexa traffic ranking

Most of this information can be collected free by querying Google and Yahoo (Read about it in this Analyzing Individual Keyword Phrase article) and using free seo tools but it is very time consuming and you can’t get all data in one place.

I use This SEO Tool that can easily crawl a Web site and compile statistics on keyword usage throughout the site with single click of a mouse and all data is displayed in one window.

Links are one of the most important parts of successfully running a search engine optimization campaign. As a matter of fact, having well-placed links will do a lot to help to push your website to the top of the search engine result pages for the keywords of your choice. Although there are many different ways for you to acquire these links, there are some ways which are almost automated in nature. By taking advantage of every aspect of your link building campaign, you can not only get your website listed in the search engines quickly, you can also be benefited by the incoming links for a long time to come.

One of the easiest forms of linking that exists is that which is found in directory submissions. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of directories for you to choose from on the Internet where you can post a link to your website. Some of these directories are free to post links and others charge a fee, either a one time fee or a recurring fee. It is up to you to decide if it is worth the effort to post to the free directories and if it is worth the cost to post to some of the paid directories.

Some of the paid directories are very important for you to be listed in, regardless of what the price is. This is especially the case if you are a little bit experienced with search engine optimization and are fairly confident in your ability to get your website listed well on the search engines from your efforts. Some of the paid directories that you want to make sure you’re part of include Yahoo and Joeant.com. Yahoo is fairly expensive at $299 a year but by having a link in the Yahoo Directory, you will be giving your SEO efforts of major shot in the arm. Popular directories such as Joeant are an excellent way for you to position yourself with some back links as well.

Submitting your website to the free directories is also an excellent way to give yourself a boost in the SERPS as well as getting yourself listed on the search engines initially. Google does not necessarily give as much weight to these free search engine submissions but remember, Google is not the only kid on the block. Yahoo also has the ability to send you a massive amount of traffic if you’re positioned well in their search engine results and MSN can send you traffic as well. Each of these lesser search engines will place a lot of weight on many incoming links from these free directories.

All in all, submitting to directories, whether free or paid is an excellent way to set yourself up for success in your search engine optimization efforts. Make sure, however, that you don’t stop with just a few simple directory submissions. Make it a part of your overall efforts to continue improving on your rankings in the search engines.

Yahoo! Finance was the leader in the category during May with 18.5 million visitors, up 58 percent versus year ago, followed by AOL Money & Finance with 15.2 million visitors (up 48 percent) and MSN Money with 13.7 million visitors (up 13 percent).

Here are the top 10 Financial News and Research Sites:

Total Unique Visitors (millions) May 2008
1. Yahoo! Finance 18.5
2. AOL Money & Finance 15.2
3. MSN Money 13.7
4. Forbes Property 7.0
5. Dow Jones & Company 6.6
6. CNN Money 6.0
7. BNET 5.6
8. TheStreet.com Sites 5.3
9. Reuters Sites 4.8
10. Reed Business Information 3.8

The category displayed visitor growth across virtually all demographic segments. However, certain segments contributed more than others.

The number of visitors to the category age 50 and older grew 46 percent versus year ago, while visitors under 50 grew by 32 percent. Above average growth was also seen in the following segments: households earning at least $60,000 annually (40 percent), households with children (38 percent) and households with at least 5 people (57 percent).

In other words, the segments displaying the greatest growth are those more likely to have greater financial responsibilities or challenges, such as paying for their kids to go to college, or needing to figure out how best to handle rapidly escalating monthly payments on home mortgages. And don’t get me started on rising gas prices.

Why should search engine marketers pay attention to this trend? Check out your favorite financial news site, search for a couple of publicly traded companies, and see how many press releases you can find in the results. Most of them have been distributed by Business Wire, Marketwire, PrimeNewswire and PR Newswire.

These occur when a search engine treats www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, and yourdomain.com/index.html as different web sites. When Google does this, it flags the different copies as duplicate content, and penalizes them. If yourdomain.com is not penalized and all other sites link to your web site using www.yourdomain.com, then the version left in the index will have no ranking. These are basic issues that other major search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN, have no problem dealing with. Google’s reputation as the world’s greatest search engine (self-ranked as a ten on a scale of one to ten) is hindered by its inability to resolve basic indexing issues.

What to watch out for with some SEO companies

First of all, when you are choosing a search engine optimization company you want to find one that has a website with up-to-date information. If you are on a website and see a company stating that Yahoo charges $199 per year to index your site, this is old information. Yahoo now charges $299 per year. If the SEO website you are on states Alltheweb.com or Altavista.com have a basic free submit service, this is out-of-date information. These two search engines have gone over to the “dark side” and have joined Overture in the pay-per-click business model.

Of all of the websites on the Internet that should display the latest information, the SEO companies should be at the top of this list. This is our game. Old information on any website is bad news (except for archived information that is).

Some search engine optimization companies will guarantee that you see significant results within 15 days for a new website. This is an unrealistic statement that no reputable SEO company would make. Most significant results from search engine optimization and submission will occur in months, not days. Some search engines like Google and MSN may index your site within 30 days, but if you have a new site, your search engine placement will be in a sort of “holding tank” for a while and may be buried in the search engine database for another 30-60 days. Sure, your site may be listed, in short order but it will take additional time to gain prominence in the search engine rankings.

Also, some search engine optimization companies will guarantee newbies high-ranking results on low-traffic keywords that have little competition in the search engines. If you are an SEO company who is not concerned about your customer, this approach makes sense. There are fewer high-traffic keywords than low-traffic keywords and the high-traffic keywords generally have much more competition.

There is an SEO scam on the Internet that consumers need to be aware of called the “I’ll host your optimized pages” scam. In the “I’ll host your optimized pages” scam you do not have control of your own web pages and basically pay ransom to the host company on an ongoing basis. Once you miss a payment your web pages may disappear or the optimization you had previous paid for will be wiped clean.

Have you been unfortunate enough to receive the SEO spam scam? This is the email scam that starts out, “I’ve noticed you are not listed on some search engines.” You may have gotten this email even though you are listed number 1 on all of the major search engines. First, any reputable SEO company will not spam you to gain business. The first quest of any SEO company is to try to get to the top of the search engines, not send out spam. Second, this email is not specific to you or your company. Like all spam, the spammers send out thousands of emails hoping a small percentage pay off for big profits. Many of the reputable SEO sites now have ethics statements on their sites. Ethical website optimization includes no cloaking, no deceptive practices and no spamming.

This list is not comprehensive so it is a good idea to ask your SEO company questions upfront and that you receive answers to your satisfaction before you jump onboard. Also, if you have had any bad experiences with some SEO companies not covered here, please send us an email so that we may include what to watch out for in this section and warn other consumers.

The top 4 search engines are as follows:

1. Google.com - The best of the best, what can we say about Google that others haven’t Read our detailed review of Google with tips on submission and ranking.
2. Yahoo.com - Yahoo is getting better and better! Their Yahoo Directory is also very popular.
3. MSN.com - Microsoft’s attempt to get a piece of the search engine pie. They are also catching up fast.
4. Teoma.com - A search engine to look out for. Their results do seem to vary considerably from the above.

In order to not be repetitive in our advice we recommend you read our article on Google Submission, Ranking and Tips. You should be able to do well on all the other search engines too, though ranking and time period for updations may vary.