The FREE search engine optimization eBook covers everything from an introduction to search engine marketing to tips and tricks on how to improve your order page. If you apply all tips and tricks that you learn in this ebook to your website, it is almost guaranteed that you’ll get more visitors and more sales.

You could pay a lot of money for an Internet marketing eBook, or you can benefit from the proven methods that are described in this eBook for free.

The free eBook covers all important aspects of search engine optimisation on more than 160 easy to read pages. Here are some screenshots of the table of contents:

Easy to use checklists in the free eBook help you to find out quickly if your website is ready for prime time.

The eBook also contains “What can happen” chapters that tell you what can happen if you don’t optimize your web pages correctly.

The free search engine optimization eBook is fully searchable. The keyword index helps you find information quickly about a special topic.

I recently relaunched http://www.easyonlinediscountcodes.com and did some SEO work on it. Within just a month or two, it has managed to reach 20th place in Google for the search term “online discount codes“, which has approx 8,000 searches per month & about 50,000,000 results to compete with on google.co.uk!!

There may be further developments with this site, so hopefully the content will become even more comprehensive & improve the rankings still further!

It just goes to show that there is definitely something strange going on with Cashback Shopper, as this site still fails to rank in Google, despite being optimised more than some of the sites that are actually in the top 10! It’s very annoying & my resolution for 2010 is to find out why.

I’ve been carrying out a lot of link building on Cashback Shopper as its Google rankings have pretty much vanished & I’m keen to recover them. I wonder if it’s because the site is a white label & Google has decided it’s just duplicate content.

However, a recent ranking check of Bing has revealed that Cashback Shopper has 15 page 1 positions, 5 on page 2 & 5 on page 3, for some of the most popular search terms relating to cashback shopping. This is how the site used to feature in Google, so I hope these positions aren’t just temporary until Bing picks up a market share of searchers.

It’s very frustrating that Cashback Shopper is in no4 spot for “cashback shopping” and “cashback uk” in Bing, but neither phrase is anywhere in Google! I guess I just have to keep trying to find more Google worthy links for the site

It’s easy for everyone to get caught up in obsessing about how to optimise your site & build links for Google, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google totally dominates the search market. But, there are still other search engines that some people are using, so it is wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too!

Obviously the other two engines are Yahoo and Bing and whilst Yahoo is seemingly declining fast, Bing is actually gaining a market share. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway. With the muscle of Microsoft behind Bing, you can be sure the search engine won’t be prepared to play second fiddle to Google for long!

However, unlike Google, we don’t hear much about what Bing wants out of a site for decent rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don’ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for complying with Bing’s policies, does not differ too much from the advice that Google would give you. It is however, still always nice to hear what they think, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,” says DeJarnette. “You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time.”

What You Should Do!

DeJarnette shared some tips for getting more quality links. The following are Bing’s tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

What You Should Not Do!

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction,” says DeJarnette. “If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalised with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any experienced search marketer is not already aware of, but it can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and not to do, to help webmasters get better rankings.

Why not use one of our link building or Bing Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site.

I still hear a number of people talking about page rank, page rank, page rank, when discussing whether their website is doing well, or trying to assess the results of their search engine optimisation efforts. However, page rank became less relevant when Google removed PageRank values from their webmaster centre!

Here’s the statement Google made when they did it:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

However, if this is Google’s position, then why bother updating their toolbar PageRank values? Doing so is only going to create a stir in the webmaster community & cause confusion as to it’s relevance. Surely it would’ve been much mbetter to remove it from both webmaster tools and the Google toolbar at the same time.

It’s also important to remember that the toolbar Page Rank values can be a couple of month’s old, so they’re out of date even after the update & therefore not really relevant to your current ranking position. The recent PageRank update has left many webmasters confused with most reporting major decreases in their website’s ranking in the search results. But if Google’s statement is to be believed, should you really be concerned about it?

If you have a search engine friendly site, the most important issue for your Google search engine rankings are quality inbound links!

Use one of our link building or Google Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site

Search engine optimisation can be very time consuming for small business owners, not to mention often expensive if you outsource to professional SEO companies. I’ve recently been quoted a price of £500 per month, for a period of 12 months, to promote just one of my sites, which is way above my limits!

Google says it understands that many small business owners and webmaster don’t have the time or funds and are offering some quick DIY tips.

“Google Guru” Matt Cutts has put his top SEO tips into a video. It’s not particularly long but does give some good tips for webmaster or business owners new to SEO.

Here’s the video:

I wrote previously about using article submissions to increase the number of backlinks & traffic to your website.

I’ve been submitting my articles manually, to the top 10 article directories, but this process is very drawn out & complicated by the slightly different layouts & entry requirements of each directory. With thousands of directories out there, although submitting to the top 10, 20 or 30 will achieve results, it will be impossible to do many more manual submissions, which will mean you have to write significantly more articles to get more links.

I’ve been looking at the different article submission websites & software for some time & decided now was the time to take the plunge!

I’ve used Submit2Please’s Article Submission Service in the past, but the charges could be considerable if you have a number of articles to publish:

• $49.95 for 100 PR 3 and above Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories & 65 PR 3 Directories)
• $74.95 for 200 PR 2 and above Directories(35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories & 100+ PR 2 Directories)
• $99.95 for 300 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 100+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)
• $124.95 for 400 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 200+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)

Bearing in mind I currently have 7 articles to submit, this is a bit too much to pay!

So, I started to look around for services or software that promise to submit to a large number of sites at a reasonable cost, whilst making sure that the submissions are valid & not classed as spam by either the directories, or Google.

Apart from the dodgy looking article submission software packages for $37, there seems to be a consensus of opinion around the following:

• iSnare
• Article Marketing Automation
• Article Marketer
• Ultimate Article Wizard
• The Phantom Writers
  

I was drawn to Article Marketers & Ultimate Article Wizard out of these, mainly because The Phantom Writers is another pay per article plan, iSnare seems a bit too cheap (my opinion on cheap services has been clouded by my recent experiences with 1and1 & Tiscali!) & other users have suggested that AMA only gets your articles out to about 30 sites.

I was originally put off UAW as it costs $67 per month & it seems that you have to spend time using it to rewrite your articles using what is known as “spinning”. Content (article) spinning involves taking an original article and using it to generate 10′s or 100′s of new unique versions of the text & these “spun” versions of your article are submitted instead. Each of these new articles presents the same ideas and concepts as the original, but expressed in different ways. Whilst all are readable and grammatically correct, each is different from the others in terms of the words on the page and therefore unique in Google’s eyes.

The importance of “spinning” your articles will depend on whether you believe that the backlinks from duplicate articles are being disregarded by Google, when Google’s duplicate content filter is treating the article submissions as duplicate content! If this is the case, then it seems pointless to submit your articles to any more than one site for link purposes, but of course, there is the side issue 0f site traffic that your article could generate. There seems to be some debate as to whether this is the case or not, with some people saying it does & others saying it doesn’t! Here’s the part of Google’s duplicate content policy that seems to say it does!

If you believe that each time you submit your article you need to use a different title, different summary, different resource box, and different article body, then perhaps the extra cost of UAW is worth it. However, I’ve also found a free spinner system called Jetspinner that I’m signing up to, which will hopefully allow me to carry out this process for nothing. Then I can create dozens of versions of my articles & submit them to all the directories instead!

Jetspinner also advertises its own article submission service called Jet Submitter (which also costs $67 per month), but as I’ve already signed up with Article Marketer for 3 months use (cost $79.95), I’m going to have to use it for now. If I’m not happy with it, I may switch to Jet Submitter & use their combined tools, but I’ll use this time to submit as many articles as possible, on all of the topics covered by my affiliate websites & see if it makes any difference to their links & rankings!

I’ve got the Alexa Sparky ranking add-on installed in Firefox & obviously, the displayed figure is the only one you notice on a day to day basis. However, since my Cashback Shopper ranking started plummeting day by day (following on from the Google Vince update), from 205,000 at its peak, to around 460,000 & falling now; although my rankings for Cashback Shopper seem to have recovered & stabilised a bit recently, the ranking is still falling, so I decided to look into the figures a little more.

My attention was drawn to the following:

Cashbackshopper.co.uk users come from these countries:

• 77.3% United Kingdom
• 1.5% France
• 21.5% OTHER

and:

Cashbackshopper.co.uk traffic rank in other countries:

• 602,105 France
• 25,967 United Kingdom

This was very interesting – as my overall ranking is falling, my UK traffic rank seems to be rising! The last time I looked, it was over 28,000 & now is 25,967. Bearing in mind the fact that Cashback Shopper is a site for UK residents only, I can only assume that despite the displayed figure falling, the fact that my UK traffic rank is rising can only be a GOOD thing! My site is the 25,967th most visited site in the UK?

Perhaps I’m interpreting this wrong, but would be interested to know if anyone else has a view on this, or perhaps knows for sure whether this is the case or not?!

This month, the Google Webmaster blog published an article, in which Google’s Maile Ohye officially explained what it takes to get a high ranking in Google’s search result pages.

Inbound links are important but content is even more important

Google’s Maile Ohye writes the following about inbound links in his article:

“Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance.”

Nothing new here! If many related websites link to your site, and if these links look natural, this will help your rankings on Google a lot.

However, links are not the most important ranking factor & he gives a concrete example:

“Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site.

As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking. “

The website’s content is mentioned as one of the strongest ranking factors. The inbound links are additional. That makes sense; it’s the content of your website that really tells Google what your website is about.

If you want to get a high ranking for the keyword “used cars in essex”, but your web pages are about microwave ovens, then you won’t get high rankings for that keyword.

For that reason, it is very important that you optimise your web pages for the keywords for which you want to get high rankings, before you try to get links from other sites. This optimisation should also be an ongoing process as keyword popularity may vary over time.

Google analyses over 200 ranking factors

According to the article in Google’s blog, Google analyses more than 200 signals (we call them ‘ranking factors’) to specify the position of a web page in the search results:

“Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

It’s a simple two-step process

Apparently, getting high rankings on Google is a simple two-step process!!

1. You must optimise your web page contents so that Google can find out what your website is about. Optimise your web pages for your keywords so that Google knows that your website is relevant to these keywords and your topic.
2. Other websites must confirm that your website is about that topic. That’s what inbound links are for.

Hmmm, we all knew that didn’t we? So why is it so hard to do then?!!!!! ;o)

If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by people that are looking for it. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimise your web page titles for your product & location.

What is the web page title?

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the tags in the HTML head code of a web page, is displayed in the web browser window when someone visits your website and it is usually used as the linked text when your website appears in the search results.

Why should you use optimised web page titles?

The web page title is one of the main factors that Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank web pages. A good, relevant, informative web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings for your product/service.

The web page title is used by the search engines as the bold linked text on search result pages. That means that it should be clear, relevant, concise and appealing, so that web surfers will be drawn to click on it.

How to write your web page title so that it gets better local rankings

If you optimise your web page titles correctly, they will both increase your search engine rankings and attract people from the local area & those looking for your products/services, to your website.

You’ll benefit from targeted traffic and targeted traffic leads to more conversions i.e. sales. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:

FreshWebz – Affordable web design in London and Essex

Depending on your business size, change the order of these items. Well known businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it’s usually better to list the keyword first:

Affordable web design for small businesses: Freshwebz in London

People are probably looking for a solution to their problem (web design) instead of your actual company name. Instead of your town, you can also use the name of the greater area if your service is available in that area.

Use a different title tag for every page. This is important! The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page, so it’s less effective just copying the homepage title to every page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines:

FreshWebz: Search engine optimisation & SEO services in London and Essex
FreshWebz: Web design Portfolio – websites designed for recent clients
FreshWebz: Contact us for an affordable quote for your new website design

Use short web page titles. Short titles are much easier to read for web surfers. Do not try to stuff your title with keywords in the same way that you wouldn’t stuff your page content with keywords. It is much better if your web page title is highly relevant to one keyword, than somewhat relevant to many keywords. If you want to optimise your website for different keywords, optimise different pages for different keywords.

Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters wherever possible. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website listing might look strange in the search results.

If you change your web page titles as described, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people looking for your products/services & who live in the right area. By getting more visitors for one topic, you will improve the overall ranking of your site & so improve your position for other search terms.

Unfortunately, the web page title is not the only element that influences the position of your website in the search results of Google and other search engines. If you want to make sure that your site appears in the top 10 results, you should optimise all factors that are needed to get top rankings. FreshWebz can offer your website guaranteed Top 10 Google rankings for your desired keywords in the natural listings.