Promoting Your Amazon Kindle eBook

Kindle is the newest craze and it could be a huge source of income
for you, so you need to take advantage of it. However, having your
Amazon Kindle eBook finished is only the first stage in the process.
If you want to be really successful, you need to promote it.
The Amazon market has a huge potential and you can't afford to
miss it. On the other hand, despite the fact this is a new niche, the
competition is really fierce, so if you want to stand out from the
crowd, you need to make your book attractive and easy to find.


Of course, you must apply all the conventional promotion and SEO
strategies, like building backlinks to your page and promoting it on
other sites, but there are also some special steps to take in order
to make your product visible. Here they are.

1 Choose a Good Cover

The cover of your Amazon Kindle eBook is its face. The cover
appears in the listings when you search for a book and in addition to
the title of the book, the cover is what makes a user click to see
more about the book or move to the next title in the listing. Lots of
times a catchy cover gets additional clicks and even if users don't
buy your book only because of its cute cover, these additional visits
to your page make it more popular, which in turn brings more
potential buyers in the long term.

2 Choose a Perfect Title

The title, together with the cover, are the first (and frequently
the only) parts of your book users see when they search for books on
a particular topic or in general. Needless to say, your title must
contain your keywords because this way it will appear more frequently
in relevant search results. On the other hand, don't stuff your title
artificially with your keywords because this will have the adverse
effect ‐ we have seen this too often and this keyword stuffing
hurts the rankings of otherwise good books a lot.


The second major requirement for a perfect title is to be catchy.
Amazon searchers are humans, not bots, so they don't care about
keyword density in the title. What they care about is a catchy title
that provokes them to click on and see more details about the book.
Similarly to covers, high click throughs and purchases will give you
a better rank in a popularity filter search (and maybe even relevance
filter) and this pays in the long term.

3 Optimize the Description

After the catchy cover and/or title has done its job to land
readers on the page of your book, you wouldn't like to miss them,
right? This is why you need to come with a concise, yet truthful and
attractive description. This description also needs to be keyword
rich without being keyword stuffed.

4 Pay Attention to Tags and Reviews

On the Amazon product preview page there two other very important
things: tags and reviews. You can use keywords for tags but you also
need to come with more ideas. Basically, see what readers search for
in your niche, and add these words and phrases as tags.

As for reviews, they are simply vital. You can obtain reviews in
many ways but probably the easiest is to give away a few copies of
the book in exchange for favorable reviews. There are Internet
marketing forums where you can find potential reviewers and it is
best if they are Amazon veterans with a positive rating on their own
because this makes their word weigh more.

5 How to Choose the Keywords to Optimize for

As you have probably guessed by now,
keywords are very important on Amazon, too. You can use the keywords
you use for SEO but you can also take advantage of the options Amazon
offers.
For instance, Amazon gives you a bunch
of 'Related Searches'. Check if these keywords are OK for you. Keep
going on till you get the keywords that best match your book. Try
sticking to keywords found in the 'Related Keywords' suggestions
because these tend to be the most popular ones. If this piece were an Amazon book rather than an
article, some of the other keywords we would have chosen to optimize
for are: Kindle Listing Optimization, Kindle Optimization, Kindle
self publishing Optimization tips, Make your Kindle Ebook free.

6Make Your eBook Free - Enroll in KDP Select

In order to get even more free publicity, you might consider the
KDP Select
service. This service helps you reach new audiences and even though
it might not lead to direct purchases, your presence in the program
helps you in indirect ways.


Now, you might be wondering how this can help you make money with
your Amazon Kindle eBook. KDP Select will allows
you to list you book for free for 5 days in a 90 day range, which is
an excellent way to get additional reviews and spread the popularity
of your book. It also allows you to lend books to Amazon prime
members, which is an additional avenue for selling books ‐ if a
prime member likes your book, chances are he or she will buy it after
the lease period is over.

7 Take Advantage of Listmania! Lists and Amazon's
Author Blogs

Listmania! Lists are one more place to get free publicity. You can
create a list and include your book in it. You can also ask your
friends and partners to include your book in their lists. This way,
people who are browsing Listmania! can encounter your book and click
on it.

Amazon author blogs are also a place for some more exposure. They
are great as establishing yourself as an expert in your niche, which
in turn increases the trust users have in your expertise. When users
consider you to be an expert, they are more likely to buy your book.

8 Participate in the Discussion with Potential
Buyers

It always makes a difference when there is live contact with the
author. This is why you might consider spending some time in
discussions with potential buyers.

9 Promote Your Book on Forums and Social Media

Finally, don't forget the power of forums and social media. Use
them to promote your book and drive traffic to your Amazon listings.
This might not be shortest way to sales but it also helps.

How to Get Free Press Coverage

There are two types of marketers ‐
the ones who believe that press coverage does miracles and the ones
who believe it doesn't work at all. If you have never experienced the
benefits of coverage by main media, you might fall into the second
group but if you have, you know how beneficial to your business press
coverage can be. So, how do you make yourself interesting to the
media? Here are some tips to follow to get free press coverage:

1 Know Where to Stop

Before we get into the ways of getting
free press coverage, a word of warning: yes, there is too much
exposure and it can hurt. This is why, before you learn how to
attract media attention, you need to learn that measure is key. If
you are constantly in the news without being newsworthy, this will
harm you because people won't be interested in you even when there is
real news about you. So, don't imitate Z-list celebrities that get
coverage on a daily basis because soon you might end into the Most
Hated list instead.

2 Do Your Homework

It might sound obvious that in order to
be covered by media, you need to be something. There are so many
companies and individuals out there that if you aren't standing out
in some way, you are not newsworthy. This is why you need to position
yourself properly in your niche ‐ think what is special about you
and what makes your company unique. Also, come with a clear message ‐
a short and to the point one. For instance, if you create affordable
sites, your message could be, “Affordable sites ARE professional”
or something similar that stresses you are not expensive but this
isn't because of poor quality.

3 Start the Hunt for Media and Reporters

After you know where you stand and what
your message is, the next step is to start the hunt for media and
reporters. If there is some really important news around you,
reporters will find you but since this is highly unlikely to happen
to the average company, you need to be pro-active. For a start, think
of which media you want to conquer (local,
national, newspapers, magazines, TV shows, etc.) and establish
contacts with their reporters who are responsible for news in your
niche.

4 Get in Touch with Reporters

Very often reporters aren't that
difficult to get in touch with. However, it pays to get familiar with
their work and style first and then contact them. You can watch/read
their previous work to get an idea about their style because it might
turn out their style isn't what you are looking for. As for the ways
to contact a reporter, very often publications list their reporters'
contacts, or they are available in the article/video. If this doesn't
help, you may want to search for the reporters of interest to you on
social networks and contact them there.

5 Always Celebrate Major Company Events with a Press Release

Reporters aren't lazy but they certainly appreciate when news
lands in their inbox. This is why, when you have a major news to
report, don't be shy but write a press release about it and send it
to the media on your list. You could even invite reporters to your
premises for an interview. However, be careful that you correctly
identify what a major company event is ‐ a new product release, a
new office opened, etc. Don't spam with press releases about
insignificant events because this could easily make you a persona non
grata with the media.

6 Comment on Breaking News in Your Area

After you have established a contact
with reporters in your niche, when a major event happens, consider
sending them an email or calling them with your point of view about
the breaking news. If you are a real pro, reporters will be happy to
quote you as an expert on the subject.

This way you are maintaining your
contacts with the media and you are also maintaining your public
image as an expert. Alternatively, when a major event happens, you
can also comment on blogs in your niche - this also helps to build
your reputation as an expert.

One practical hindrance could be the
lack of news or more precisely the fact that you learn about the news
long after it isn't news anymore. If you don't have the time to
monitor news in your niche, consider using the free Google Alerts
service. Set alerts with your keywords and Google will mail you every
time a piece of news matches your criteria.

7 Invest in Your Relationships with Reporters

Reporter relations are one of the major
assets for any PR practitioner. What is more, today's reporters are
tomorrow's Editors in Chief and it pays to be on good terms with
them. For instance, it always helps when you are being interviewed to
provide useful materials to the reporter he or she can use later
because this way you are making his or her work easier. You can also
send follow ups ‐ this also helps to maintain healthy relationships
with the press.

8 Make Your Social Media Profiles Outstanding
and Easy to Find

If you are really newsworthy, reporters
will be finding you, not vice versa. In order to make yourself easy
to find, you need to create public profiles on social networks, such
as Facebook,
Twitter,
G+, LinkedIn, etc. and allow people outside your network to contact
you.

9 Regularly Release Useful Information for Free

You might not be a news source but you
can be the source of tons of useful information the media will gladly
quote. Some suggestions are to release poll results, reports, market
research, case studies, tutorials, videos, and any other material you
deem useful and send it to the media for free. Not every media will
quote you but even if one in ten do, this is a great way to get some
free press coverage.

10 Create a Gallery of Publications about You

A gallery of publications about you,
preferably in reputable newspapers/magazines in your industry, is a
great bait to show to reporters who are still not certain you are
newsworthy. You can create such a section on your site and point
reporters to it. However, always ask for permission from the media to
list their publications about you. Alternatively, you can include
only links to such publications but from time to time don't forget to
check if the links are still working.

11 Promote the Articles/Videos about You

Getting into the news is awesome but if
you want to amplify the effect, you need to promote the publications
about you. Always promote the articles/videos about you among your
partners and followers! If you manage to drive lots of traffic to
them, the reporters will be happy and will consider you a popular
topic to report about again.

12 Measure Your Success

Last but not least, your free press
coverage includes metrics. You need to know how all this coverage
affected you and your business. Did you get more traffic, new leads,
new partners, etc. as a result of the free press coverage or not?
Which channels proved most efficient? These are all questions you
need to find the answers to because even though free press coverage
is great, it might turn out you are doing it out of sheer vanity and
the positive results on your business are not worth the time and
effort.

Free press coverage can be a huge help
to you. The tips in this article are just the tip of the iceberg and
there is much more to learn, if you want to be a media star. However,
for a start even these simple tips will help you to get the most out
of free media coverage.

Google Adwords Alternatives

When it comes to running a PPC
campaign, the first name that comes to your mind is AdWords from
Google. While this is a really good ad network, it is also a very
expensive one. Even with careful keyword selection and targeting, it
is not an exception to pay more for AdWords ads than you make in
revenue. Cost is the main reason to look for alternatives to AdWords.
Fortunately, such alternatives do exist and the best is that some of
them could even outperform AdWords in terms of return on investment.
Here are 12 great AdWords alternatives to consider.

1 Facebook Paid Ads

Facebook paid ads are a
great alternative, especially if you are targeting a younger
audience. Facebook
is the number one social network and (almost) the whole world has an
account with it. Facebook ads offer lots of targeting options ‐ you
can choose age, location, gender, hobbies of the audience to watch
your ads. However, do have in mind that with Facebook generally the
click through is lower, so don't get discouraged if on Facebook you
get fewer clicks on your ads than on other networks ‐ this is
pretty normal.

2 Yahoo!/Bing Ads from Microsoft

Bing and Yahoo are Google's competitors not only in the area of
search engines but also in online ads. Yahoo!/Bing
Ads, formerly known as Microsoft AdCenter appeared after the ad
networks of Microsoft and Yahoo! joined forces in order to beat
Google AdWords. Yahoo!/Bing ads isn't a cheap alternative to AdWords
but you should also consider it because it is really good. Basically
they offer search advertising (i.e. ads are placed in the search
results of Bing search engine) and if you manage to correctly
identify your keywords, you can see huge results.

3 Amazon Product Ads

The biggest online marketplace is also a huge ad board. Amazon
Product Ads place your ads on product pages. This makes the
positioning very targeted because if a user is reading about a
product similar to yours, your ads are likely to catch his or her
attention. Since Amazon sells everything but space ships, it is a
good alternative for almost any niche because chances are there will
be numerous products in your niche to publish your ads alongside.

4 Clicksor

In addition to the big three AdWords alternatives (i.e. Facebook,
Yahoo!/Bing ads, and Amazon), there are many smaller ones that still
serve millions of impressions a month. One of them is Clicksor.
It isn't the cheapest alternative because it has $0.05 cents a click
minimum but it is a good one because its conversions are known to be
excellent. If clicks are expensive for you, check the other forms of
ads offered by Clicksor, such as popunders and interstitials that are
CPM or mixed CPM + clicks.

5 7Search

In terms of cost, 7Search is
probably the most cost-effective ad network. It has low per click
minimums, high conversions (though this depends on the niche) but
also high numbers of fraudulent clicks, as some marketers complain.
Nevertheless, even with these allegedly high numbers of fraudulent
clicks, it is still a very good alternative to Google AdWords.

6 AdBrite

AdBrite is another big ad
network and some marketers claim it works really well for them. Costs
vary a lot depending on your keywords, so as an alternative it isn't
necessarily very cheap (though the same keywords cost much less than
on AdWords). AdBrite offers lots of flexibility in targeting,
numerous ad sizes and types (text ads, banners, BritePic, which are
cute photo ads), and decent conversions ‐ what more can you ask
for?

7 Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser is very
similar to Adsense and AdWords. It is another big network of
publishers' sites. What is most distinguishing about Bidvertiser is
its relatively low CPC with moderate to good conversions. It isn't an
alternative for all niches but overall is a good choice.

8 Dynamic Oxygen

Dynamic Oxygen is a
relatively unknown ad network but with some good offers. Similarly to
Clicksor and AdBrite, they offer many more types in addition to PPC.
Its PPC division is not very expensive ($0.03 min bid per click) but
conversions could be a problem because Dynamic Oxygen doesn't have
that many sites to match your ad with, so your ad might end in sites
that are not completely relevant to your niche.

9 Infolinks

Infolinks is great for
intext ads. Its clicks are cheap, but targeting is a bit of a
problem. It has a requirement that you spend at least $15 a month,
which isn't much (many marketers spend ten times more a day on ads),
especially compared to the $50,000 a month min at Chitika, for
example.

10 BuySellAds

BuySellAds is an ad
marketplace. It's not a PPC network but you can buy ad space on sites
of your choice. Prices vary a lot depending on the traffic of the
site but it is possible to buy an above the fold spot on a relatively
high-traffic site for $15 a month or less. Because of this,
BuySellAds could turn more profitable than PPC. If you choose the
sites well, you can do great because for a flat fee a month you might
be getting targeted clicks at under 1 cent a click.

11 Adknowledge Miva

Adknowledge Miva is just one
more ad network to consider. It offers cheap PPC with decent
conversions, at least in most niches. They have a huge base of
publishers, which means you stand a better chance for your ads to be
run on relevant sites. Some webmasters have complained about
fraudulent clicks but unfortunately these are present with any ad
network.

12 BlogAds

If you are interested in ads on popular blogs rather than ads on
search engines or other types of sites, BlogAds
is the place for you. They specialize in ads on popular blogs, so you
might want to check if the blogs you are looking for are listed
there. They also do social media advertising, so if your audience is
to be found on social media, you could consider this as an
alternative to reach it.

It is not possible to say which of the AdWords alternative is
best. In some cases one network might do brilliantly, in others it
might be a complete failure. This is why you'd better test with a
small budget how a network works for you. Try the same landing page
with multiple ad networks and see which converts best. And never
forget ‐ you must always measure performance because even if one ad
network used to perform well in the past, things change and you
wouldn't like to waste your money on expensive clicks that don't
convert well.

Top Paying Adsense Keywords List 2013

I have compiled my own list of the Top 20 paying Google Adsense keywords, these are based on the CPCs returned by the Google Adwords Keyword tool.

Highest paying Adsense keywords

The Importance of Using Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

It is hardly difficult to guess from the name itself that Google
Webmaster Tools is a set of tools for webmasters. However, what you
don't know right away is that this is a very useful toolset that
allows you to communicate with Google and adjust many aspects of how
Google sees your site, such as list the external and internal links
to your site, adjust the crawl rate at which Google bot indexes your
site, check the keywords users typed to land on your site, as well as
the click through rate for each keyword, see your site's statistics,
and many more.

One issue that needs mentioning is privacy concerns. Since you are
giving Google a full access to your site's stats, you might be
worried about how they handle this data. While Google is a reputable
company and it is not very likely they will abuse the data you are
giving them access to, if confidentiality is a top concern for you,
think twice before letting Google (or any other statistics solution,
for that matter) to your site's secrets.

If you use Google Webmaster Tools together with Google Analytics,
the results will be even better. You can access your Google Webmaster
Tools data directly from Google Analytics, so if you are already
using Google Analytics, with just some more effort you could easily
integrate it with Google Webmaster Tools, too.

How Do I Get Started?

In order to use Google Webmaster Tools, you need to join it first.
You can do it from here.
After you join, you need to go through the verification process, so
that Google knows you are the legit owner of the site you want to use
Google Webmaster Tools on.

There are several ways to verify ownership. The first one is to
download an HTML file and to upload it to the root directory of your
site. Another one is to add an HTML tag into the head of your home
page. If you are using the same Google account for Google Analytics,
a third option to verify ownership is through Google Analytics. There
are more ways to verify ownership but if you are interested in them,
check the Google Webmaster Tools settings and you will see them.

Google Webmaster Tools to Use Daily

Once you have verified your ownership and have Google code in
place on your site, you can now start enjoying the advantages of
Google Webmaster Tools. When you log into your Google Webmaster Tools
account, the first thing you see is the Dashboard:

From here you can access all the major sections - Search Queries,
Links to Your Site, Crawl Errors, Keywords, and Sitemaps. Clicking on
any of these will open the respective section.

Search Queries

The Search Queries section shows the keywords that led users to
your site.

This long list shows which keywords users searched for when they
came to your site. It is best if this list matches the keywords you
are optimizing for but very frequently this list contains good
keywords you were unaware of. In this case, pick these good keywords
and start optimizing for them, too.

In the Search Queries section, you can also see the number of
impressions and the number of clicks, which gives you an idea about
the CTR for this keyword. All equal, a higher CTR means the keyword
is relevant, so you might want to invest some more efforts into this
keyword. However, if you notice that as a result of your efforts, the
CTR goes down, it is best if you don't touch this keyword anymore.

Links

The second very useful section of Google Webmaster Tools is the
Links to Your Site section.

Here you can see where your backlinks
(internal and external) come from, as well as the pages they are
linking to. As with other link checking tools, don't expect that
every single link to your site is displayed but nevertheless this
list of backlinks is useful to check from time to time.

One of the advanced uses of the Links section is to disavow links
to your site you deem harmful. Links from bad sites can hurt your
rankings, so if you want to get rid of them, follow the instructions
in this
article.

Crawl Errors

The Crawl Errors section shows the errors Google bot encountered
on your site. The data you get is similar to what you get when you
use the Spider
Simulator and it shows inaccessible pages, missing pages, server
errors, and all sorts of problems that prevented Google from
correctly crawling your site. You also get some other crawl stats
(such as the number of pages crawled a day) that are useful to know.

Keywords

Similarly to the Search Queries section that also deals with
keywords (but it is the ones users type to get to your site), the
Keywords section also shows keywords. However, the difference is that
here you see what keywords (and their significance) Google has found
on your site. The two lists (of keywords users type and the keywords
Google finds on your site) could be very different, which means you
are not optimizing for what users are searching for.

The Keywords section also allows to see the theme of your site,
which post Panda
has become even more important.

Sitemaps

The last section you can access from the Dashboard is the Sitemaps
section. Here you see the sitemaps
of your site Google has found and the number of URLs in them. If the
sitemap found by Google is different from what you expected it to be,
you can submit a new sitemap for Google to use.

Robots.txt and Other Advanced Stuff

The sections described so far are the basic Google Webmaster Tools
sections. There is also a lot of advanced stuff in each of them but
we won't describe it into details. For instance, you can use your
Google Webmaster Tools to submit a robots.txt
file, or to set the preferred domain syntax (i.e. with or without
www) to be displayed in search results. Google Webmaster Tools also
allows to know if your site is infected with malware. If it is, you
need to clean it first and then resubmit it for review.

Google Webmaster Tools is a really valuable instrument for SEO. It
gives you at a glance data about all important SEO aspects of a site,
such as keywords, links, crawl errors, etc. If you don't use it
already, take the time and get familiar with it ‐ it will help you
get better rankings for sure.

Google Keyword Planner and Other Keyword Volume Tools

Keyword research is a make-or-break
stage in any SEO campaign. If you do it wrong, all your efforts (and
money) are in vain. This is why you need a reliable keyword research
tool. For many years THE tool for keyword volume research was the
Free Keyword Tool from Google and it was all we needed but
unfortunately this great tool is history now.

The good news, though is that
fortunately there are alternatives for keyword volume research. For
instance, the new tool from Google with similar functionality ‐
Google Keyword Planner does many of the things the old tool did but
unfortunately it is more suitable for PPC
keyword research than for organic SEO research. There are also other
tools, such as Bing Keyword Tool, or WordTracker Keyword tool, or the
numerous paid tools and each of them has its advantages as
disadvantages, as we'll see next.

Google Keyword Planner – Still the Best Keyword Volume Tool

The new Google Keyword Planner offers much of the functionality of
the old Free Keyword Tool from Google and is a much better option
than most of the other tools, including the paid ones. Here are some
of the advantages and disadvantages of Google Keyword Planner:

Advantages of Google Keyword Planner

The advantages of Google Keyword Planner can be summarized as
follows:

• Data comes directly from Google itself. Obviously,
  data is more reliable when it comes from the source than from a
  third party.
  

  
  

• Great possibilities for local keywords. If you are
  doing local
  SEO, then you will certainly appreciate the enhanced
  possibilities for local search ‐ you can target your search to
  your small town audience.
  

  
  

• Suggested keywords are grouped. This isn't a new
  feature but it's convenient when you can see groups of keywords
  instead of single keywords only.
  

  
  

These aren't the only advantages of Google Keyword Planner but
even they are strong enough to make you use it.

Disadvantages of Google Keyword Planner

The disadvantages of Google Keyword Planner are not that numerous
and here are some of them:

• You need an AdWords account. Since the tool is not
  available separately, if you want to use it, you need to create an
  AdWords account.
  

  
  

• No Broad or Phrase search. The new tool lacks a key
  feature ‐ the ability to search for broad and phrase match. Now
  your search is limited to Exact matches only.
  

  
  

• No device targeting. Now you can't search for volumes
  on mobiles and desktops separately ‐ all this is mixed into one.
  

  
  

Nevertheless, despite its disadvantages, Google Keyword Planner is
still a better tool than its competitors.

Bing Keyword Tool – the Second Best Alternative

If you are not pleased with Google Keyword Planner, or simply want
an alternative, you might want to check Bing Keyword Tool.

Advantages of Bing Keyword Tool

The advantages of Bing Keyword Tool are these:

• The best tool if you optimize for Bing. If you have
  decided to concentrate your efforts on Bing, obviously this is the
  tool to use.
  

  
  

• Data range search. Unlike Google Keyword Planner, here
  you can search for volumes during a particular data range. This is
  very useful, if you are interested in seasonal volumes, or holiday
  volumes for example.
  

  
  

• You can see search trends as well. Unlike Google,
  where you need to go to Google Trends, if you need data over time,
  with Bing Keyword Tool this data is visible right away.
  

  
  

Disadvantages of Bing Keyword Tool

The disadvantages of Bing Keyword Tool are these:

• The data is not quite applicable for Google searches.
  The first and major disadvantage is that the data you get is not
  always useful when you optimize for Google. Of course, you could use
  it to spot trends but very often you need more precise data in order
  to do well on Google.
  

  
  

• Requires to signup for Bing Webmaster Tool. Similarly
  to Google Keyword Planner, this isn't a publicly accessible tool and
  you need an account. The problem is that you might have privacy
  concerns about what happens with the data for your searches,
  otherwise the tool is free.
  

  
  

• No good local data. If you are fine with local level
  up to country, then this won't be a problem but if you need more
  detailed local data, such as on a state level, not to mention on a
  city and town level, you are out of luck.
  

  
  

WordTracker Keyword Tool

WordTracker was one of the first keyword tools and even though
today its popularity (and usefulness) is quite low, it's still an
alternative to consider.

Advantages of WordTracker Keyword Tool

The main advantages of WordTracker Keyword Tool are:

• It gives an idea how competitive a keyword is. In
  other words, you get not only the volume of searches but also the
  volume of competitors. This is good to know because if a keyword is
  way too competitive, it might be better to skip it.

  
  

• Multiple search filter. You can narrow down your
  search to exact matches only, or include related terms, or search
  for keywords in any order.
  

  
  

• Paid searchers get data from SEMRush tool as well. If
  you subscribe for the tool, you will get data from SEMRush search
  tool as well.
  

  
  

Disadvantages of WordTracker Keyword Tool

The disadvantages of WordTracker Keyword Tool are these:

• The tool is not free. While it does offer a free
  version with somehow limited functionality, if you want to use the
  tool to the fullest, you need to pay.
  

  
  

• The tool requires registration. This isn't much of an
  issue but still it is a disadvantage.
  

  
  

• Reliability of the data. Since the data doesn't come
  from Google or other major search engine, its reliability is not
  high. Still, you can use it for direction but you'd better double
  check with other tools, if you plan to build your whole campaign on
  it.
  

  
  

These three keyword volume research tools are the best. In
addition to them, there are many other paid ones and some free but
their reliability is seriously under question, so basically they
aren't much of an alternative. Nevertheless, even these three tools
are more than nothing, so use them when you have to research for
keyword volumes.

Website Speed and Search Rankings

Google is constantly modifying its
algorithm to sort sites based on keyword relevancy and while keywords
and backlinks always have the lion's share in terms of weight, more
and more seemingly minor factors are taken into account. For
instance, take website speed. You might wonder what at all it has to
do with search rankings but actually it is also a factor (though with
minor importance, to be precise) that influences your position with
Google.

How Website Speed Affects Rankings

First, if you expected that website speed influences your rankings
big time, we need to clarify that this isn't so. While the two are
related, you won't find a direct correlation – i.e. low ranking
sites might load fast and vice versa.

The results depend on which metric you use to measure website
speed. For instance, if you take into account the time needed to load
the first byte of the page, then it turns out this is a huge factor
because sites that are fast to load the first byte of a page
typically rank higher in Google.

If you take other metrics into account – i.e. the time necessary
to load the main content or the time it takes to load the complete
page (with images and ads), then things change because it seems these
two factors are not of that importance to Google.

Overall, it's believed that website speed has less than 1% effect
on rankings. Google themselves have stated that they take website
speed into account but they didn't disclose details about exactly
what matters.

Nevertheless, many sites report increase in traffic (from search
engines or otherwise) after they optimize their site for speed. This
is a pretty good reason to do the same, if your site is slow – you
are not doing it for Google, you are doing it for your users, your
traffic, and your conversions. Website speed is key to user
experience, so if your site is slow, there is no reason to keep it
that way. What's the use of getting traffic from search engines, when
your visitors have to hang for 10+ seconds before they can see your
content – they will have left much before the page has loaded.

What to Do to Improve Website Speed

If you want to improve website speed, there are a couple of steps
to be taken. First, you need to measure your website speed –
otherwise how do you know it's slow?

1. Measure Load Times

In order to measure load times, you need a good tool. The choice
here is quite rich. Pingdom
Page Load Time tool and Google
Analytics Site Speed reports give a good idea of your site's
general performance. WebPageTest
is a more advanced tool because it allows to test your site in
different browsers and spot slow areas on your site.

These tests could take some time for a large site but since they
give you detailed data about which parts are slow, just be patient.
Good tools report not only the average site speed but elements, such
as first byte, user time, time to fully load, percentage of images,
htmls, JavaScript files, etc., which is useful later when you start
fixing the problematic areas.

2. Move to a Faster Server

One of the obvious reasons a site is slow is that the server you
are hosting it on is slow. The reasons here could be numerous –
from a web hosting provider that lacks the capacity to offer fast
servers, to the type of your hosting account.

The easier solution here is to upgrade your account. For instance,
if you have a large site with many pages and frequent database
reads/writes and you are still using a shared account, then no
provider to Earth can offer the speed you need. In this case, if you
are happy with the provider per se, your solution is to upgrade from
a shared account to VPS (Virtual Private Server) or even to a
dedicated server. The costs for VPS or a dedicated server a month are
much higher than what you are paying for your shared account but if
your site is making
you money (or at least has the potential to), the problem with
website speed is literally killing your business.

On the other hand, if your web hosting provider is not good even
if you upgrade your account, this won't solve your problem. The only
thing you can do is migrate your sites to a good web hosting
provider. Here
is a list of some of the best web hosting providers for you to choose
from.

3. Optimize Your Site's Code and Images

Your server might be fast but if your site itself is slow, you
will still experience speed issues. If your code and images are not
optimized for fast loading, you won't see speed improvements till you
fix them. This task could take a very, very long time, especially if
your code and images are bloated but you've got to do it.

For images, you can use compression
and/or smaller sizes. This will speed loading big time. For HTML,
CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other Web languages there are tons of tricks
(and tools) how to optimize your code.

Website speed is not a factor with huge
importance for search engine rankings, though it does count. The
bigger problem with slow sites is that they are not user–friendly,
which in turn kills conversions. If you don't want to lose money
because of the speed issues of your site, take the time to fix them –
it will pay in the long run.

Links - Another Important SEO Item

In layman's terms, there are two types of links: inbound and outbound. Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while inbound links or backlinks, come from an external site to yours. e.g. if cnn.com links to yourdomain.com, the link from cnn.com is a backlink (inbound) for yourdomain.com, however the link is an outbound link from cnn.com's perspective. Backlinks are among the main building blocks to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Why Backlinks Are Important

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines like Google, give more credit to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Therefore, when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they not only consider the number of backlinks to that site but also their quality. In order to determine the quality, a search engine considers the content of the sites. When backlinks to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these backlinks are considered more relevant to your site. If backlinks are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of backlinks, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned dogs, and received a backlink from another website about dogs, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. Therefore, higher the relevance of the site linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to modify your webpages to make them more SEO friendly it is a lot harder for you to influence other websites and get them to link to your website. This is the reason search engines regard backlinks as a very important factor. Further, search engine's criteria for quality backlinks has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these backlinks by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide backlinks to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Anchor Text

When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the most powerful resources a webmaster has.
Backlinks from multiple websites with the anchor text "orphaned dogs" would help your website rank higher for the keyword "orphaned dogs". Using your keyword is a superior way to utilize a hyperlink as against having links with words like "click here" which do not relate to your website. The 'Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool' is a tool which will assist you find your backlinks and the text which is being used to link to your website. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something which incorporates relevant keywords. This will also help boost your rankings.

Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer Domain Name Note* Results may vary if prefixed with www.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome.

1 The Backlink Builder Tool

When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of relevent sites from where you might get some backlinks.

Backlink Builder Enter Keyword (Theme) Number of Results per Keyphrases Category     Display  10 results 20 results

2 Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ,Yahoo and Jasmin directory is a must, not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

3 Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

4 RSS Feeds

You can offer RSS feeds to interested sites for free, when the other site publishes your RSS feed you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

5 Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

6 News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites that publish news announcements and press releases for free or for a small fee . A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the past few Google updates, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant backlinks were ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain, interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.

What is Robots.txt

It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and
index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of
your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have
two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for
printing), you'd rather have the printing version excluded from
crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content
penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that
you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search
engines do not index these pages (although in this case the only sure
way for not indexing sensitive data is to keep it offline on a
separate machine). Additionally, if you want to save some bandwidth
by excluding images, stylesheets and javascript from indexing, you
also need a way to tell spiders to keep away from these items.

One way to tell search engines which files and folders on your Web
site to avoid is with the use of the Robots metatag. But since not
all search engines read metatags, the Robots matatag can simply go
unnoticed. A better way to inform search engines about your will is
to use a robots.txt file.

What Is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell
search robots which pages you would like them not to visit.
Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally
search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to
clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines
from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of
password protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is
something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on
an unlocked door – e.g. you cannot prevent thieves from coming
in but the good guys will not open to door and enter. That is why we
say that if you have really sen sitive data, it is too naïve to
rely on robots.txt to protect it from being indexed and displayed in
search results.

The location of robots.txt is very important. It must be in the
main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will
not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for
a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main
directory (i.e. http://mydomain.com/robots.txt)
and if they don't find it there, they simply assume that this site
does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything
they find along the way. So, if you don't put robots.txt in the right
place, do not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

The concept and structure of robots.txt has been developed more
than a decade ago and if you are interested to learn more about it,
visit http://www.robotstxt.org/
or you can go straight to the Standard
for Robot Exclusion because in this article we will deal only
with the most important aspects of a robots.txt file. Next we will
continue with the structure a robots.txt file.

Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely
flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed
files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

User-agent:

Disallow:

“User-agent” are search engines' crawlers and
disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded from
indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:”
entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at
the beginning of the line:

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

The Traps of a Robots.txt File

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to
allow different user agents access to different directories –
problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps
of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting
directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing
colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to
find but in some cases validation tools help.

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to
access everything on the site except the /temp directory. Up to here
it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more
restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading
robots.txt, it will see that all user agents (including Googlebot
itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for
Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will
index everything except /temp/ - including /images/ and /cgi-bin/,
which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure
of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made
easily.

Tools to Generate and Validate a Robots.txt File

Having in mind the simple syntax of a robots.txt file, you can
always read it to see if everything is OK but it is much easier to
use a validator, like this one:
http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml.
These tools report about common mistakes like missing slashes or
colons, which if not detected compromise your efforts. For instance,
if you have typed:

User agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

this is wrong because there is no slash between “user”
and “agent” and the syntax is incorrect.

In those cases, when you have a complex robots.txt file –
i.e. you give different instructions to different user agents or you
have a long list of directories and subdirectories to exclude,
writing the file manually can be a real pain. But do not worry –
there are tools that will generate the file for you. What is more,
there are visual tools that allow to point and select which files and
folders are to be excluded. But even if you do not feel like buying a
graphical tool for robots.txt generation, there are online tools to
assist you. For instance, the Server-Side
Robots Generator offers a dropdown list of user agents and a text box for
you to list the files you don't want indexed. Honestly, it is not
much of a help, unless you want to set specific rules for different
search engines because in any case it is up to you to type the list
of directories but is more than nothing.

Your Website from Google Banned to Google Unbanned

Even if you are not looking for trouble and do not violate any
known Google SEO rule, you still might have to
experience the ultimate SEO nightmare - being excluded from
Google’s index. Although Google is a kind of a monopolist among
search engines, it is not a bully company that excludes innocent
victims for pure pleasure. Google keeps rigorously to SEO best
practices and excludes sites that misbehave.

If you own and run a blog or website then being listed by Google is a very important step so it is read by as many people as possible; but what if your website gets Google banned? If this has happened to you, then you know that it hurts your site because you won’t show up in the Google search engine and that means less traffic to your site. Getting unbanned from Google is a long and drawn out process. And sometimes Google won’t even tell you the reason they banned your website in the first place, which doesn’t make things any easier.

Some of the ways a site can be Google banned include having spam on it, putting in too many keywords that clog up your site, making your owned URLs redirect to each other, improperly inserting a robot.txt file, duplicating your own pages and sending people to them over and over, and linking to bad sites like those with adult content, gambling or other unauthorized areas. There are multiple other reasons, so it’s a good idea to try to get them to let you know the reason for being Google banned. That will make it much simpler to fix the problem.
Over-optimization has many faces and you can have a look at the Optimization, Over-Optimization or SEO Overkill? Article to get some ideas of practices that you should avoid.

Here are the necessary steps that you need to follow in order to get Google reconsideration for getting unbanned. Be sure to follow Google reconsideration request process precisely and correctly if you want to get your website unbanned and get your site back in business providing whatever products or services that it has:

1 Send an Google Reconsideration Request for getting Unbanned

Getting Google reinclusion of your website requires putting in a Google reconsideration request. First, the way you know your site is Google banned is that suddenly it doesn’t have a page rank on it. Then, in order to determine for sure that this is the case, enter your site at www.yoursite.com into Google, using whatever the name of your site is instead of the words yoursite. If you don’t see any of your pages there, then it’s likely you were Google banned.

Another way to tell if you are truly Google banned is to see if your pages show up in page indexing on Google. Or, if it is a news blog then you can go to www.googlenews.com and if you don’t see your articles there, you will also know you were probably banned from Google and now need to send a Google reconsideration request.

2 Be Polite to Google

Next, make remember that you are sending your Google reconsideration request to a real person who works for Google and someone will actually read your reconsideration request at Google office to be unbanned. Therefore you want to be polite and go into as much detail as possible, as it is better to give too much information than not enough in this situation. Being nice counts in this situation and if you act like a jerk, then it’s likely no one will want to help you.

3 Provide Information about the Domain

List things such as if it was a brand new domain name, tell them some background about your website, and also tell them the rules you think you may have broken. In case, there has been spam click on your account, get to the proofs of the same and write to them about it. This shows them you are serious about resolving the problem when sending the Google reconsideration suggestion. Put down everything that you think someone would need to know in order to know who you are and to jog their memory on why you were banned in the first place. Be sure to do your research so you will understand what his going on and can fully explain it to the Google representatives while sending the reconsideration request to Google.

4 Explain the Solution to the Past Problem

While sending the reconsideration request to Google, tell the representative what you have already done to fix the problem that caused you to be banned. Spell it out in detail and give them your actual page URL to prove it. It’s best to give as much information and data as you can so they will understand what you did to solve the issue. For example, if you had your site linked to bad links, then you must make sure that you remove every one of those and unlink them. Be sure to have removed all spam, or anything else that Google doesn’t approve or like. Then, prove to Google that you did this by showing them the evidence. Or, if you had invalid clicks, which is one of the common reasons to get Google banned, show why the clicks were valid. It takes all this sort of information in detail to make them understand the situation and help you to resolve it. Also, ensure that the changes now made to your website meet the requirements for Google reinclusion. Don’t do even a single thing on your website, which may annoy them.

5 Verify the Website

Next, login to your Google webmaster account and add and verify your site. Then go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration. This is the area that you use to put in your reconsideration request to Google to be unbanned. You can also send the information in an email to help@google.com. This is where Google representatives give support to customers. You may have to also sign up for Google webmaster tools once you are logged into your account if you don’t already have it

6 Provide Proof

It’s never a good idea to be an idiot and try to blame Google, or try to say you didn’t have any idea what you did wrong. You need real proof for Google reinclusion, not just blame or acting stupid. Show them the proof of the changes you made for Google reconsideration. And at last, always be considerate and thank them for the time and effort that they are taking to look into your reconsideration request to Google and help you to solve the problems and to get you unbanned from Google so your site can be relisted and you can keep getting the traffic you need to run your business, blog or news site.

7 Be Patient

It can take several weeks for a Google representative to get back with you and answer your Google reinclusion suggestion. They do have a lot of other things to handle and you need to understand that you aren’t the only one who may be having issues. While you are waiting, continue to look over your site and try to make sure all the alleged violations are fixed and good to go.

8 Send Follow Up Email for Google reconsideration

Be sure to send follow-up emails to Google to ask how the request is going and if they know when the situation will be resolved. You probably shouldn’t send one every day, because this could be regarded as you being a pest, but be sure to send one in periodically until you get an answer that you understand and can deal with to solve the Google banned problem.

All in all, it can be a time consuming and complicated process in order for your site to switch your site from Google banned to Google unbanned, but with the proper preparation and information, you should be well on your way to being in their good graces again. However, it’s well worth your efforts, so just follow these steps and Google should get back with you and fix your situation and your site.

Optimizing Flash Sites

If there is a really hot potato that divides SEO experts and Web
designers, this is Flash. Undoubtedly a great technology to include
sounds and picture on a Web site, Flash movies are a real nightmare
for SEO experts. The reason is pretty prosaic – search engines
cannot index (or at least not easily) the contents inside a Flash
file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, you
can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of
course, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing
Flash movies as if they were plain text, these workarounds are just a
clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, although certainly they are
better than nothing.

Why Search Engines Dislike Flash Sites?

Search engines dislike Flash Web sites not because of their
artistic qualities (or the lack of these) but because Flash movies
are too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a
Flash movie directly, as they do with a plain page of text. Spiders
index filenames (and you can find tons of these on the Web), but not
the contents inside.

Flash movies come in a proprietary binary format (.swf) and
spiders cannot read the insides of a Flash file, at least not without
assistance. And even with assistance, do not count that spiders will
crawl and index all your Flash content. And this is true for all
search engines. There might be differences in how search engines
weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the
time beings, search engines are really united – they hate it
but they index portions of it.

What (Not) to Use Flash For?

Despite the fact that Flash movies are not spider favorites, there
are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. But as a
general rule, keep Flash movies at a minimum. In this case less is
definitely better and search engines are not the only reason. First,
Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement,
distract users and they generally tend to skip them. Second, Flash
movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup
days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection or
better is still not the standard one.

Basically, designers should keep to the statement that Flash is
good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it – i.e.
you have some text with the main points of the story (and the
keywords that you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie to
add further detail or just a visual representation of the story. In
that connection, the greatest SEO sin is to have the whole site made
in Flash! This is is simply unforgivable and do not even dream of
high rankings!

Another “No” is to use Flash for navigation. This
applies not only to the starting page, where once it was fashionable
to splash a gorgeous Flash movie but external links as well. Although
it is a more common mistake to use images and/or javascript for
navigation, Flash banners and movies must not be used to lead users
from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to
build site navigation.

Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites

Although a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be
optimized. There are several approaches to this:

• Input metadata
  This is a very important approach,
  although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although
  metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be,
  Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies,
  so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.
  

  
  

• Provide alternative pages
  For a good site it is a
  must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch
  the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the
  reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well
  will see the html only pages.
  

  
  

• Flash Search Engine SDK
  This is the life-belt. The
  most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the
  handiest applications in the Flash
  Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. As it
  name implies, this tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia
  Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document, thus
  saving you the tedious job to do it manually.
  However, you still
  need to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if
  necessary. For example, the order in which the text and links is
  arranged might need a little restructuring in order to put the
  keyword-rich content in the title and headings or in the beginning
  of the page.
  Also, you need to check if there is no duplicate
  content among the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color
  of the extracted text is also another issue. If the font color of
  the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will run
  into hidden text territory.
  
  
  
  

  
  

• SE-Flash.com
  Here is a
  tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is visible
  to search engines and what is not. This tool is very useful, even if
  you already have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed because it
  provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text.
  Besides, it is not certain that Google and the other search engines
  use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so
  this tool might give completely different results from those that
  the SDK will produce.
  

  
  

These approaches are just some of the most important examples of
how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well.
However, not all of them are brilliant and clear, or they can be
classified on the boundary of ethical SEO – e.g. creating
invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the
Flash movie itself. Although this technique is not wrong – i.e.
there is no duplicate or fake content, it is very similar to cloaking
and doorway pages and it is better to avoid it.

Web Directories and Specialized Search Engines

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and
occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong
in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is
the lion's share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you
do, topping Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need
to pay (not literally but in terms of effort and time) to top Google
and keep there is too high. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate
SEO nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can't
use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and
no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about
possible alternatives.

What are Google Alternatives

The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for
the other major search engines, if you have not done it already.
Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors,
though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three
of them at the same time because of the differences in their
algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit
to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.)
but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the
Web search traffic, do not expect much.

Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known
as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search
directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right
directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example.
Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the
audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a
particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your
target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines
will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google
but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.

Naming all Google alternatives would be a long list and it is
outside the scope of this article but just to be a little more
precise about what alternatives exist, we cannot skip SEO instruments
like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

Web Directories

What is a Web Directory?

Web directories (or as they are better known – search
directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google,
became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories
where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop
directories, where you gather files in a directory based on some
criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to
sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory
are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not
necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some
kind (otherwise it will be impossible to browse thousands of pages
for let's say Computers), search directories are fundamentally
different from search engines in the two ways – most
directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered
automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main
advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders
become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a
lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories.
The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web
directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do
the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad
because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore)
and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being
included in a search directory.

The second difference – no spiders – means that you
must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit
and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is
done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you
can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search
engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a
respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and
second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn
raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Examples of Web Directories

There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but
undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ.
It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all
kinds of sites. Another popular general-purpose search directory is
Yahoo! Directory. The
Best of the Web and Jasmine Directory are some of the oldest Web directories that still
keeps to high standards in selecting sites.

Besides general-purpose Web directories, there are incredibly many
topical ones. For instance, the The
Environment Directory lists links to environmental sites only,
while The Radio Directory
lists thousands of radio stations worldwide, arranged by country,
format, etc. There are also many local and national Web directories,
which accept links to sites about a particular region or country only
and which can be great if your site is targeted at local and national
audience only. You see, it is not possible to mention even the topics
of specialized search directories only because the list will get
incredibly long. Using Google and specialized search resources like
The
Search Engines Directory, you can find on your own many
directories that are related to your area of interest.

Specialized Search Engines

What is a Specialized Search Engine?

Specialized search engines are one more tool to include in your
SEO arsenal. Unlike general-purpose search engines, specialized
search engines index pages for particular topics only and very often
there are many pages that cannot be found in general-purpose search
engines but only in specialized ones. Some of the specialized search
engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to,
or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links
not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many
specialized search engines for every imaginable topic and it is
always wise to be aware of the specialized search engines for your
niche. The examples in the next section are by no means a full list
of specialized search engines but are aimed to give you the idea of
what is available. If you search harder on the Web, you will find
many more resources.

Examples of Specialized Search Engines

Probably specialized search engines are not that numeric as Web
directories but still certainly there is no shortage of them either,
especially if one counts password-protected sites with database
accessible only from within the site as a specialized search engine.
As with Web directories, if there were a list of specialized search
engines it would be really, really long (and constantly changing), so
instead, here are some links to lists of search engines: Pandia
Powersearch, Webquest,
Virtual
Search Engines, the already mentioned The
Search Engines Directory, etc. What is common for these lists is
that they offer a selection of specialized search engines, arranged
by topic, so it is a good starting point for the hunt of specialized
search engines.

Choosing a SEO Company

After you have been dealing for some time with SEO on your own,
you discover that no matter how hard you try, your site does not rank
well or that your site ranks well but optimizing it for search
engines takes all your time and all your other tasks lag behind. If
this is the case with you, maybe it is better to consider hiring a
SEO company to do the work for you. With so many SEO companies out
there, you can't complain that you have no choice. Or is it just the
opposite – so many companies but few reliable?

It is stretching the truth to say that there are no reliable SEO
companies. Yes, there might be many scam SEO companies but if you
know what to look for when selecting a SEO company, the risk of
hiring fraudsters is reduced. It is much better if you yourself have
a substantial knowledge of SEO and can easily decide if they promise
you the starts in the sky or their goals are realistic but even if
you are not quite familiar with SEO practices, here is a list with
some points to watch for when choosing a SEO company:

• Do they promise
  to guarantee #1 ranking? If they do, you have a serious reason
  to doubt their competencies. As the Google
  SEO selection tips say, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking in
  Google. This is true even for not so competitive words.

  
  
  

• Get recommendation from friends, business partners, etc.
  Word of mouth is very important for the credibility of a company.
  

  
  

• Ask in forums. There are many reputable Web master
  forums, so if you can't find somebody who can recommend you a SEO
  company right away, consider asking in Web master forums. However,
  beware that not all forum posters are honest people, so take their
  opinion (no matter if positive or negative) with a grain of salt.
  Forums are not such a reliable source of information as in-person
  contact.
  

  
  

• Google the company name. If the company is a known
  fraudster, chances are that you will find a lot of information about
  it on the Web. However, lack of negative publicity does not mean
  automatically that the company is great, nor do some subjective
  negative opinions mean that the company is a scammer.
  

  
  
  

• Ask for examples of sites they have optimized. Happy
  customers are the best form of promotion, so feel free to ask your
  potential SEO company about sites they have optimized and references
  from clients. If you get a rejection because of confidentiality
  reasons, this must ring a bell about the credibility of the SEO
  company - former customers are not supposed to be a secret.
  

  
  

• Check the PR of their own site. If they can't optimize
  their site well enough to get a good PR (over 4-5), they are not
  worth hiring.
  

  
  

• Ask them what keywords their site ranks for.
  Similarly to the page rank factor, if they don't rank well for the
  keywords of their choice, they are hardly as professional as they
  are pretending to be.
  

  
  

• Do they use automated submissions? If they do, stay
  away from them. Automated submissions can get you banned from search
  engines.
  

  
  
  

• Do they use any black hat SEO tricks? You need to know
  in advance what black hat SEO is in order to judge them, so getting
  familiar with the most important black
  hat SEO tricks is worth before you go and start cross-examining
  them.
  

  
  

• Where do they collect backlinks from? Backlinks are
  very, very important for SEO success but if they come from link
  farms and other similar sites, this can cause a lot of trouble. So,
  make sure the SEO firm collects links from reputable sites only.
  

  
  

• Get some personal impressions, if possible. Gut
  instinct and impressions from meetings are also a way to judge a
  company, though sometimes it is not difficult to get mislead, so use
  this approach with caution.
  

  
  
  

• High price does not guarantee high quality. If you are
  eager to pay more, this does not mean that you will get more. Just
  because a firm costs more DOES NOT make them better SEO's. There are
  many reasons for high prices and high quality is only one of them.
  For instance, the company might work inefficiently and this is the
  reason for their ridiculously high costs, not the quality of their
  work.
  

  
  

• Cheap is more expensive. This is also true. If you
  think you can pay peanuts for a professional SEO campaign, then you
  need to think again. Professional SEO companies offer realistic
  prices.
  

  
  

• Use tricky questions. Using tricky questions is a
  double-edged sword, especially if you are not an expert. But there
  are several easy questions that can help you.
  For instance, you
  might ask them how many search engines they will automatically
  submit your site to. If they are scammers, they will try to impress
  you with big numbers. But in this case, the best answer would be
  "no automatic submissions".
  Another tricky question is
  to ask them if they will place in you top 10 for some competitive keywords of
  your choice. The trap here is that it is them, not you, who chooses
  the words that are best for your site. It is not that probable that
  they will choose exactly the same words as you suggest, so if they
  tell you that you just give them the words and they push you to the
  top, tell them “Goodbye”.
  

  
  
  

• Do they offer subscription services? SEO is a constant
  process and if you want to rank well and keep on like that, efforts
  are necessary all the time. Because of this, it is better to select
  a company that includes post-optimization maintenance, than get a
  company that pushes your site to the top and then leaves you in the
  wild on your own. You may even want to see if they offer SEO Pay Per Click services to help you maintain an ongoing PPC campaign to further optimize your site's online marketing.
  

  
  

We tried to mention some of the most important issues in selecting
a SEO company. Of course, there are many other factors to consider
and each case is different, so give it some thought, before you sign
the contract for hiring a SEO company.