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Keywords in the links within your copy are particularly important in SEO.

Unfortunately, however, search engines and humans like different things when it comes to links. Search engines like to see your keywords used toward the top of the page. So if you’re using keywords in your links, it makes sense that you put the links at the top of the page.

Humans, on the other hand, tend to find this distracting. And because they start clicking on links before they’ve finished reading the whole page, they become easily lost and don’t grasp the intended message (or worse, don’t continue with the purchase). In most cases, visitors prefer a text link at the bottom of the page, rather than a plethora of links distributed throughout your body copy.

But there is a solution; if you have links within the main body of your website copy, you simply make them unmarked. By this, I mean tell the reader’s web browser to override the default visual indicators of a link (normally blue font colour and single underlining).

One way of doing this is to include the following in your CSS file:

Then format the HTML of each link as follows:

Now, as any real programmer reading this will no doubt already know, I’m no programmer. I just picked up this little trick from someone who was. And I don’t even know how good they were. All I know is that it works. Give it a go and see for yourself…

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

When assessing what your website is about, search engines pay close attention to the words you use in your text links and headings (and it’s also argued that they pay more attention to the copy at the top of the page than to the copy at the bottom of the page). So make sure your copy in these areas is keyword rich.

Using keywords in links

For both internal and external links, try to use your target keyword as the link text (the part that’s normally blue and underlined). For example, on your “Cheap Second Hand Macs” page, you could include a text link to “Cheap Second Hand PCs”.

Using keywords in headings

Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site, so to do search engines. This means headings play a big part in how the search engines will index your site. Try to include your keyword phrase in your headings. In fact, think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of the site because it will help customers scan read.

For example, if you have a page detailing the benefits of cheap second hand computers, you could break it up into logical sections with the following headings.

• “The cost benefits of cheap our second hand computers”
• “The technical benefits of our cheap second hand computers”
• “The support benefits of our cheap second hand computers”

Using keywords at the start of the page

Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page as more representative of what your site is about than words at the end (i.e. prominence). So it’s a good idea to make sure you use your keywords toward the start of each page. This normally happens fairly naturally, anyway, so don’t put a lot of effort into making it happen.

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

As a rule of thumb, it’s easier and more effective to target keyword phrases than single keywords in your SEO web copy. Why? Because:

1. The more specific the keyword, the fewer websites there will be targeting it. This means you’ll move up the rankings faster, and you’ll find it easier to achieve a high ranking.
2. The search results for the more generic keywords tend to be dominated by the big multinationals. E.g. Search for “computers” and you’ll see there are nearly 200 million results and the top rankings are dominated by the Apples and Dells.
3. Internet users are learning that by searching for more specific strings, they find the information they want quicker (I read a report on this recently, with real statistics and everything! Can’t seem to find it right now. If anyone can cite something useful in this regard, it’d be much appreciated…).
4. Customers tend to use generic keywords in early searches (e.g. during their initial research) and more specific keywords in later searches (e.g. when they know what they want to buy and they’re looking for someone to buy it from). So by targeting a more specific keyword, you’ll attract more qualified traffic.

Unless you dominate your domain and you have a global presence, you’re better of going with a specific keyword phrase. For example, when it comes time to write your SEO web copy and meta tags:

• target “cheap second hand computers” instead of “computers”
• target “tax accountant Sydney” instead of “accountant”
• target “thai restaurant delivery” instead of “restaurant”
• target “small blue widgets” instead of “widgets”
• target “direct response copywriter sydney” instead of “copywriter”

TIP: If you really want or need to target a generic keyword, start out targeting a very specific keyword phrase that includes the more generic – hotly contested – single keyword. For example, you’ll notice that the keyword phrase above, “cheap second hand computers” includes the single keyword “computers”. This way, you’re really targeting both at once. As your site’s importance (or PageRank) and search engine presence increases, you’ll start to rank for the single word as well. In time, you’ll start ranking well for “computers” even though you’re only actively targeting “cheap second hand computers”.

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

Before you can start optimizing your web copy and meta tags, you need to know what words you’re optimizing it for. What words do you want to rank well for? To answer this question, you need to know what words your customers (or potential customers) are searching for. This is called performing a keyword analysis.

Keyword analysis involves a bit of research and a good knowledge of your business and the benefits you offer your customers.

There are several websites specifically designed to make keyword analysis easier. Two examples are:

1. Overture’s inventory tool (inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). This tool is free and very easy to use and understand, but (last time I looked) it only tells you how many searches have been conducted in the previous month for your keyword (and similar keywords).
2. WordTracker (wordtracker.com). WordTracker is a much more powerful tool, but you have to pay to use it (you can subscribe for a day for around $10). WordTracker helps you find the most appropriate keyword for your site by telling you what people are really searching for. Here’s how it works… You type in a word which summarizes what you do, and it tells you how many times that word has been searched for in the last month. It also tells you how many other websites are using that word as a keyword (i.e. targeting the same customers you are). Based on this information, it rates the word. The ‘best’ keywords are the ones that a lot of people are searching for but which few websites are targeting. WordTracker even suggests and rates alternative related words.

TIP: When you’re using WordTracker, bear in mind that it’s just talking about numbers, and numbers don’t always tell the whole story. So don’t just jump in and use the best rated keywords; you need to consider your own situation. It may be the case that you’re forced to select a keyword phrase which is not rated particularly highly. There are two situations in which this might happen:

• You’re in a niche market with relatively few customers searching for the keyword. In this situation, you’ll probably find it relatively easy to reach the top of the rankings, but you won’t generate a huge volume of traffic when you get there.
• A lot of your competitors are targeting your keyword (it’s hotly contested) but it’s the only one you can use. If you target it, you’ll just have to work a bit harder on your backlinks in order to rank highly. When there’s a lot of competition for a keyword, it’s likely that the traffic payoff is good once you reach top.

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

Search engines don’t see websites the way you and I do. They require your site to be designed a particular way. If you don’t observe a few rules of thumb, you can severely hamper your search engine presence.

Following is a list of the main things you need to be aware of. I’m no web developer, so don’t take the below as gospel. Just discuss these things with your developer first. If you engage an experienced SEO web designer, they’ll already know all the issues (far more than are listed here).

Do’s…

1. Design your site in HTML – i.e. HTML based copy and headings and text based links at the base of each page as per existing site
2. Use static URLs
3. Use standard rollovers and/or CSS formatting for navigation menu
4. Create a robots.txt file. This file is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed.
5. Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read. These tags are as follows:
6. <meta content="ALL" name="ROBOTS"/>tells the spiders to crawl and index your entire site
7. <meta content="NONE" name="ROBOTS"/>tells the spiders not to index anything.
8. <meta content="NOINDEX,FOLLOW" name="ROBOTS" />says don’t index this particular page, but follow its links to other pages (e.g. for use on secure or private pages).
9. <meta content="INDEX,NOFOLLOW" name="ROBOTS"/>says to index the page but not follow its links.
10. Create a 404 error handling page, and place a sitemap on the 404 page.
11. Create a text based site map containing links to every page in your site (see divinewrite.com/site.htm for an example).
12. Create a Google Sitemap (Read an overview of Google Sitemaps and download a great tool for generating Google Sitemaps)

Don’ts…

1. Don’t embed your copy within a graphic (the search engines won’t be able to read it)
2. Don’t use frames (this is a contentious one - some people use frames quite effectively)
3. Don’t use internal JavaScript or Flash (ditto)
4. Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter if you want maximal Googlebot crawlage (many sites use “&id=” with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter)

Hope this helps.

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

The short answer is, “no”.

The long answer is, “yes, but only if you’re more concerned with pleasing visitors than pleasing search engines”.

“Huh?” This from an SEO copywriter???!!!

Here’s the truth of the matter. Writing search engine-friendly web copy is pretty easy. You just have to include enough of the write words in the right places. Sure, there’s a learning curve and it takes a little practice, but it’s not rocket science!

Writing visitor-friendly web copy, on the other hand, is much more difficult. No matter what you’re selling, your visitors are a lot more sophisticated than search engines (yes, even more sophisticated than Google’s algorithm), with much more complex needs. They need to be engaged, educated, persuaded, guided, respected and compelled to act. What’s more, every visitor is different. Oh, and let’s not overlook the fact that very few visitors are keen to part with their money…

In other words, when you look at the phrase, “SEO copy”, the “SEO” part is merely technique. The “copy” part is the artform.

So if you’re thinking about engaging an SEO copywriter, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Yes, a seasoned SEO copywriter will help you increase your search engine ranking. But if that’s all you want, you could do it yourself! (See divinewrite.com/seocopy.htm for more info on writing SEO copy yourself.) The true value of an SEO copywriter is in their ability to write search engine-friendly copy that is still engaging and compelling to visitors.

So in reality, you only NEED an SEO copywriter if you want copy that is both search engine-friendly and visitor-friendly and you’re not confident you can achieve this balance yourself.

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

You’ve no doubt heard a little (or a lot) about SEO. Chances are, not all of it has been very clear. Hopefully this article will shed some light on the subject for you. You’ll note that it’s a very short article (in fact, article may not even be the right word for it); that’s because, in principle, SEO is really quite simple…

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it’s the art of increasing your site’s search engine ranking (in the natural search results - not the paid listings down the side, like Google AdWords).

There are two main steps involved:

1. Tell the search engines what your site is about, so they know what searches it should appear in. This is commonly referred to as ‘on-site optimization’. Your site needs to be search engine-friendly so that the search engines can access it properly, and you need to use the right keywords in your HTML code and in your copy. Generally speaking, ‘on-site optimization’ - by itself - won’t increase your ranking much, if at all. But it’s a necessary first step.
2. Prove to the search engines that your site is important in its field (i.e. most relevant). There are millions of sites out there; only one can be first in the search results. At the moment, the search engines figure this out mostly by counting the links TO your site, and considering where they’re from. TIP: Think of the Internet as a big election, where every site is a candidate and every link TO a site is a vote for that candidate. The candidate (site) with the most votes (links TO it) wins! (Of course, not all links are equal, but that’s a discussion for another day…)

* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.

Websites can cost from virtually nothing, to many many thousands. They are your company’s shop window in the information super highway. Millions are spent by high street stores researching and building the best shop fronts, yet the vast majority have done no form of keyword analysis research to determine what will give them better search engine ranks. Why is it that the humble website is so often overlooked as the powerful sales tool that it sure is, or could be. How do you get the best Return On Investment (ROI) on your website?

No matter what the investment, you will get no ROI without one thing: a return. Unless your website is earning you money, which means increasing your sales, there can be no website ROI. And if your customers don’t know your website exists, there can be no sales, so there can be no website ROI. The good news is that with the right search engine optimization company, it is easy to improve search engine ranking, and soon get better website ROI.

Depending on your business model, timescales and budget, it is often best to take a 2 pronged approach: Start by finding a good Pay Per Click firm offering a comprehensive Pay Per Click advertising package and take their Pay Per Click management service. This is the only legitimate and ethical way to get yourself on the first page of the search engines, same day. With the right Pay Per Click firm, this alone could produce better website ROI. However care must be taken to accurately track your leads and conversions from your Pay Per Click advertising, to ensure that you are making money on the advertising spend. Basically that your profit per customer is higher than the cost per conversion.

It’s worth pointing out though, that this calculation should be performed on the lifetime value of customers, not the profit per initial sale. If it’s right for your business, it is indeed a valid marketing strategy to lose money on the initial sale, in order to profit from pipeline sales. Super markets do this all the time, it’s called a Loss Leader.

The second prong is to engage a Search Engine Optimization Company, to work on better search engine rankings for your website. It may be that this Search Engine Optimization Company is the same as the Pay Per Click Firm in stage one. The one thing that you must start with is a proper targeted keyword analysis research. Don’t be proud and arrogant enough to think you can skip this step, because you think you know your business, your market and your customers. You can’t beat getting a professional job done of keyword analysis research, it is absolutely the most fundamental step you must take to getting better website ROI.

Once your top 5 key phrases have been agreed with your search engine optimization consultant, they will start the marathon of getting you better website ROI from improved search engine ranking. Expect this to take time, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your dominance of your market place.

One last word, bear in mind that your online competition is not necessarily the same as your real life, bricks and mortar competition. In simple terms, your online marketing competition is anyone that ranks above you for your keyword analysis researched search terms. The nice part is, that the higher your search engine placement, the better the website ROI gets.

Colin McNulty is Principal Online Marketing Consultant at http://www.intrinsic-marketing.co.uk
Please click here for information on Pay Per Click Management and her for Better Website ROI .

Search engine optimization will help you turn your website into the most efficient business sales or marketing tool. To be able to take full advantage of what search engine optimization can bring your business website, you can teach yourself how to do it or you can seek the input of S E O professionals.

Search engine optimization by yourself

One option available to you is doing your own search engine optimization. Obviously, this course of action is highly desirable if you want to save money on professional costs. This course of action is also prescribed to somebody who wants to learn S E O.

If you want to do your own S E O, you will need to teach yourself the basics of S E O and its more advanced techniques. To do this, you can frequent and become a member of internet S E O sites and internet organizations. Through these free online resources, you will learn a lot about S E O, search engine submission, keyword optimization, page ranking, search engine results pages (S E R P) positions, etc. All you will ever need to know about S E O, it seems, is available in the internet, so you can apparently teach yourself how to do S E O.

If you think about it, though, knowing the concepts and knowing the theories will not be much help in the cutthroat field of the internet. First of all, you may not have the time to completely revamp your website and do your much-needed S E O. If you do have the time, however, you may not have sufficient skills for effective S E O.

Search engine optimization is a comprehensive and highly-coordinated task. Your main goal in S E O is to get your page ranking up in every major search engine in the internet. The internet resources you have been reading will tell you that to do this, you need to optimize your website content and codes for keywords. How do you know which keyword to target? Conceivably, you can learn about keyword from free resources like Google Ad Words keyword tool or Yahoo,s keyword select tool, but up to what extent can you expect these tools to be reliable?

Search engine optimization also requires more than keyword optimization. You also need to be able to build inbound links form other relevant and highly-positioned web pages to yours. This is very easy to do, in theory. In reality, though, you are likely going to be fighting for or paying through the nose for every quality back link you get.

S E O by yourself is theoretically easy but practically fraught with pitfalls for the S E O amateur. If you try doing your own search engine optimization, in the end, you may end up paying more money for pitiable results.

S E O by S E O Professionals

S E O professionals will know where to go for conclusive and accurate search engine information; they will have an extensive and comprehensive action plan for your website; and they promise results. Since this is their job, they have to be good at it or miss out on a lot of business opportunities. Therefore, they keep themselves up to date with S E O matters and continue to improve on their strategies.

Simply put, if you want professional results you need to let professionals do it. More than the theoretical search engine optimization knowledge which you can gain through extensive study, search engine optimization professionals have experience and practical knowledge, and this makes all the difference.

Written by Steve Pavis
In the last year Steve’s companies have generated over 1.5 million dollars worth of business using different strategies one of them been internet marketing online at http://onlinemarketingelite.com Steve is a leading expert with 25 years experience in the business sector has offices in both the United States and the UK. The most solid advice you will ever hear is “find an easy market” with little competition and research your keywords correctly, research is the key

It is every website aim to be on the top of the search engines results. Websites usually wanted to be in the first or second page of the search engines results.

Every websites aim this because the search engines are the no.1 provider of targeted website traffic. Those websites that are on the top of SERPs are the websites with high ranks and great quality content.

Now, you may be asking why they are on the top rank on the search engines, they are on that certain position since they have used web marketing strategies other than having original content. So if you wanted to be in that position as well, better to start doing the web marketing strategies too. Right after working some changes on your website, you have to wait until you have been indexed by the search engines.

Now, there are certain ways for you to consider in order to be ranked on the top of the search engines.

Stop tricking the search engines. Search engines can recognize if you are doing tricks on them. Use the right strategies and stop tricking; besides the search engines can penalize your website for tricking them.

The better thing to do is optimize your page title. Page title is the heading of the page which is usually at the top of your browser’s window. The page title should be related to your website page. Every pages of your website should have original and exceptional page title. Having an exceptional page titles will enhance the chances of each pages to be indexed appropriately. Each pages must have original and exceptional page title, so the search engines can indexed each of them, because if each pages have the same title, search engines would think that the pages are just the same and wouldn’t index them. So it is wiser to make each page title exceptional and unique.

Next thing to do is optimize your Meta tags. Meta Tags are the information you put in the HTML header of a web page. These give information to the search engines and that information is only visible to the search engines and not to the users. So in order for you website to be rank well in the search engines, optimize the Meta tags particularly the keyword and description tags.

Another way in order to be rank well is to establish internal links. Search engines can read html links remember. So to obtain a great indexing to each of the pages of your website, it is better to include a site map page. In doing this, it will allow the search engines to go to every page of the website.

Now, if you really wanted to see your website to be rank on the top, it is wiser to take these ways into consideration, and take them now. Start optimizing your website, in order for you to see wondrous results soon.

Make sure that you stop tricking the search engines, optimize each of your page title, use unique ones, optimize you meta tags, again use unique ones, and establish internal links, in doing all these will soon come up to be in the top rank, and your business will be a successful one.

Article Author Eliza Maledevic from http://www.Jump2top.com, a SEO Company. Know our company profile at
http://www.7seo.com