Archive for the 'SEO tips' Category

Internet marketing

When considering a marketing service there are many things to think about. First you have to decide your goals and aims – what do you want the seo consultant to do for your site? Achieve higher conversions on your sales, get better rankings or better qualified traffic or simply overhaul your website tomake it more user friendly. Discount click offers a range of services with a genuine common sense approach as you can see from this quote:

At our company we do not guarantee you top search engine rankings listings. That was not a misprint. What we do offer are satisfaction guarantees on all of our internet marketing services including our search engine promotion service.

Any company which offers number 1 placements will have to use a lot of money or questionable practices to get you there.

Getting started with Japanese directory submissions

Once you’ve got your Japanese website up and running you need to start getting links. One of the easiest ways to do this is to submit your site to web directories. There are quite a few directories in Japan that accept submissions so here is a brief list of some of the better ones I’ve found. Where possible I’ve included a link directly to the submission page as well! (I don’t know how good your Kanji is, but I was just about able to figure it out!) Here are two paid for submission services http://www.xlisting.co.jp/registration_goo/ http://www.jlisting.jp/jentry/biglobe/ And here are the free ones (some may require a recip). http://park18.wakwak.com/~directorys/ http://www.infoseek.co.jp/Help?pg=help_addurl.html http://web-directory.jp/ http://joyjoy.com/ http://www.find-out.jp/ http://hp-ranking.net/top/html/regist.html http://www.webranking.net/regist.html http://www.pvranking.com/regst/inputform.aspx http://bestranking.misty.ne.jp/link/ http://ninkirank.misty.ne.jp/url_touroku.html

SEO Glossary with a difference

If you’re new to SEO, or even an old hand, all the terms and jargon can cometimes be baffling. However there is now a really funny alternative SEO / webmaster glossary written by a UK consultancy. Some examples: Content Website: A site put together by someone so full of himself that he believes what he has to say is more important than the ads. CPM: It used to stand for Cost Per Million impressions. But now stands for Cost Per Thousand impressions, the M being the roman numeral for 1,000. It was one of the concessions the European Union had to make to the Italians to stop them gesticulating wildly at European Parliamentary sessions. Google: The company best known for its logo made entirely of radioactive earthworms. WHOIS: A word that prefixes “your daddy” to suggest I slept with your mother. There are loads more – well worth checking out the next time you’re wondering what the hell that acronym or bit of jargon someone is telling you.

Credit card processing

With the advent of widespread internet use and ecommerce paying by credit card online has become an everyday occurrence for millions of people around the world. The problem faced by merchants who run ecommerce stores is how to integrate a credit card processor into their store so they can accept payments online. There are many credit card merchant services available to handle all the online transactions and rates and services vary according to the risk involved to the processor. When considering a payment gateway you should consider some of the following:

  • What are their rates?
  • Will they handle transactions for high risk industries?
  • Will they transact outside of your country of residence?
  • What are their security services like?
  • How do they handle chargebacks?
  • What cards do they accept?
  • Monthly fees?
  • Do they have plug and play shopping cart integration for their transaction services?

In Japan, there are a couple of online processors such as www.remise.jp but everything is in Japanese, and they require you to have your Japanese site as the first page before they will consider your application. Needless to say if you are looking for international markets you want to have a processor which will handle transactions from all countries, and have good security and rates. Paypal is an obvious choice but their Japanese support is very limited. Advantage processors handle all types of cards and work with high risk areas. Authorize.net is an established company in the field.

What character set to use for Japanese websites search engine compatibility?

There are several different versions of the Japanese character set, three popular ones being shift_jis, x-euc-jp, and iso-2022-jp. Depending on the charset encoding that you use in your webpage a browser, especially older ones, will have massive problems displaying the text. Also, having your source strings and then converting between the charactersets renders them into meaningless babble. If you take a survey of popular? results from the search engines you can see that the three popular charsets mentioned above are all in play, so there dosent seem to be any particular problem in using any of the encodings and getting ranked. However, it’s not impossible that the older sets like EUC and shift_jis will become obsolete, while the UTF8 charset looks set to become the standard for non-roman sets. Google itself uses UTF8. In summary, although search engines don’t seem to have a problem with any of there charsets, you need to think about browser compatibility and futureproofing which is why I would recommend all Japanese websites to be encoded in UTF8.

DIY SEO backlinks from 1000 directories!

When launching a new site or trying to promote it, a somewhat slow but cheap and effective method is to get backlinks to your website from directories. This means that you get a lot of one way incoming links which help with your search engine rankings. Sometimes the directories will charge for a listing, or require you to give a link back to them. Charging is ok (if you can afford it!) but link exchanges are now cast slightly in doubt as a method of safe search engine optimisation as Google and co can figure out that these are not natural links, and possibly penalise you accordingly. The internet is jam packed with website directories of all sorts, from specalist niche to gigantic all inclusive mammoths. It is possible to get SEO software to help you with the process of submitting links to directories but sometimes their list just isn’t big or good enough. You can also find various companies willing to submit to directories on your behalf, and these charge fees depending on the quality and number of links you want. However, if you’re a real cheapskate with a lot of free time then perhaps you’d like to check out this list of over 1000 directories which accept submissions. The list is a little out of date, but there is enough information on it for you to be able to make a good guess which ones are worth submitting to or not. So, here is it the directory submission list.

Expired domain name research tools

If you’re thinking about buying several domain names, expired or new, then it’s tedious having to find out if each one is registered or not. There are however several great tools you can use to speed up the process and find a great expired domain name. One of the best programs I’ve used is called Domain Research Tool. It’s a windows program and has many great features like generating domains from keywords you type in, finding domains from given keywords and a great checking system which looks up the domain’s expiration date and its rankings in Google, Yahoo DMOZ etc. This really is a one stop shop for all your expired or new domain registration searches. I’ve managed to find a few great expired domain names and register them with this program and saved many hours of boring work by not having to go through lots of lists manually. What’s more, you can buy a copy of DRT from here at a massive discount. Normal RRP is $249.99, buy DRT through this link and get it got only $139.99!!!

Search Engine Submission

The term ’search engine submissions’ is as the name suggests about submitting to the search engines, in order to get your site indexed by the search engines and web directories, so that people can find your site. Search engine submission is also known as search engine registration. Search engine optimization on the other hand refers to search engine positioning and placement, a concept whereby you improve your site’s design and content to achieve higher rankings in search engines. Do not confuse search engine submission with search engine optimization. Free submissions doesn’t guarantee inclusion You’re going to learn how to submit your Web pages to the search engines. Where possible, I will discuss free search engine submissions. Most search engines offer a “paid inclusion” service which guarantees inclusion of your Web pages, for a fee. However, I haven’t covered the paid inclusion topic in this course, so as not to confuse those of you completely new to search engine optimization. You’ll find more information on paid-inclusion submission programs in my Search Engine Optimization Strategies ebook. Please note that submitting your web site via free submission forms in search engines and web directories doesn’t guarantee inclusion into an index. You may have to resubmit again and again get all of your Web pages indexed. What are web directories? Web directories are human edited lists of web sites organized into categories of topics and subtopics. web directory submissions are an essential part of the search engine marketing and optimization process. I highly recommend that you spend a bit of time selecting appropriate categories and composing your web directory titles and descriptions, as they will ultimately determine the success of your listings in the directories, and can also contribute a major part to the success of your listings in the search engines as well. Each web directory have its own set of editorial and submission policies. So study the policies carefully before making any submissions. I recommend you submit your web sites to the top web directories, before submitting them to the search engines. The reasons are because: It helps search engines to find and index your web site, as they often crawl the top web directories some search engines place a great deal of importance on links to web sites from top web directories. This will help you search engine rankings. There’s only one recommended method of submitting your web site to the top web directories; by hand. Search engine submission software claim to submit to web directories. But in reality you spend as much time entering your web site’s information into the software, as you would do if you submitted directly via the web directory submission form. So bypass the software and submit directly to the web directories. What are search engines? Search engines are defined as a set of programs that includes:

  • a spider (crawler, bot or robot) that crawls the Internet retrieving Web documents, then follows links to retrieve other Web documents
  • a program that creates an index from the documents retrieved by the spider
  • a program that receives search requests, compares it to the entries in the index, and delivers the most relevant results to the user.

Search engines are the starting point for most people when they’re looking for something on the Internet. As such, it’s essential that your Web pages are indexed by the search engines. Otherwise, your Web pages simply won’t appear in the search engine search results. Search engine submissions – also known as search engine registration – are important for getting your site indexed by search engines, but not as important as it used to be. The reason is because more and more search engines, such as Google, do not rely on web site owners to submit their site for indexing. Instead they rely on finding sites via links from other web sites already in its index. Having said that, it’s still a good idea to submit your web site to the search engines. There are 3 ways to submit your web site to the top search engines; submit manually, use submission software, or use an online submission service. Manual search engine submission The process of ‘manual search engine submission’ means personally visiting each search engine and registering your Web pages. Some search engines have a policy of only accepted a limited number of Web pages each day, so you would have to return each day to submit additional pages. Most search engine spiders only crawl a limited number of pages in a site. So if you have a large site you should register every important page of your site, which may require many visits. Search engine submission software The alternative to the manual search engine submission process is to use search engine submission software or online services that simulate manual submissions. There is a very important distinction between the two, as most search engines have banned automated search engine submissions. If a program or service does not simulate a manual submission, your submission will likely be ignored or rejected. Search engine submission services Online search engine submission services are similar to their software counterpart except they are hosted online rather than on your computer. Just like search engine submission software, online search engine submission services should also simulate manual submissions. Many online search engine submission services are very basic in design. They claim to submit your site to thousands of search engines. That is just marketing hype, so please ignore such claims. The fact of the matter is there aren’t that many search engines on the Internet. Of the thousands of search engines these online submission services claim to submit to, the vast majority are either small directories or link pages, with little or no traffic. Most online submission services do not take into account that some search engines will only accept a maximum number of Web pages from one site per day. As such, people submit too many pages which either get ignored, or rejected by the search engines.

Metacrawlers and Search Engine bots

Here are the major search engines that you should submit to. Google Google is the most popular search engine, powering Google, AOL and Netscape search. Google searches over 4 billion Web pages, supports 82 languages and processes more than 200 million searches a day. Read Google’s own site submission and ranking tips in the Google Information for Webmasters section. Submit your site to Google for free. Yahoo! Yahoo! recently introduced its new search engine called, “Yahoo! Search Technology.” It powers Yahoo!, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, and MSN. Yahoo! offer a free site submission program. Expect a delay of several weeks before your URL is crawled. Ask Jeeves / Teoma Ask Jeeves is powered by the Teoma search engine. However, neither search engines provide a free submission form. The only method of submitting your Web pages is via their Ask Jeeves Site Submit program. The submission fees are US$30.00 for the first Web page, and $18.00 for each additional Web page. The fee guarantees: inclusion into the database powering Ask Jeeves and Teoma within 7 days Web pages will be reindexed every 7 days Web pages stay included in the database for 12 months. Please note that the Ask Jeeves Site Submit program neither guarantees top rankings, nor a boost in your rankings. The only guarantees are those listed above. Visit the Ask Jeeves Site Submit site for more information. Web portals Web portals are sites that provide users with multiple services, including search, email, shopping and other services. Virtually all Web portals use search results provided by other top search engines. The following table shows the Web portals and its corresponding search engine and web directory partners. Click on a link for more information on the search engine or web directory. Web Portal Search Engine Web Directory AOL Google Open Directory Project MSN Inktomi – Netscape Google Open Directory Project Metacrawlers Metacrawlers search other search engines simultaneously, compile the results, and display them either in groups, sorted by search engine employed, or by clustering them together and eliminating duplicates. Unlike true search engines, metacrawlers do not crawl the Web themselves to index Web pages. Because metacrawlers neither crawl and index sites, nor have their own database of sites, they cannot accept site submissions. To get your web site into a metacrawler, submit your Web pages to the search engines or web directories that the metacrawlers search. The top four metacrawlers are Dogpile, Ixquick, Mamma and MetaCrawler.

Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising

How to get top rankings in major search engines in no time at all. Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines are also known as Bid For Location, Bid For Position, Cost Per Click (CPC), Pay For Performance, Pay Per Performance, Pay For Placement, Pay Per Placement, Pay For Position, Pay Per Position, Pay For Ranking, Pay Per Ranking and Pay For Result search engines. Pay per click search engines refer most of their traffic via partner sites. The main advantage of advertising in pay per click search engines is that they can guarantee top listings in the search results of top search engines, web directories, Web portals and metacrawlers. You only pay for click throughs to your web site. Prices vary as each key word is auctioned on a bidding system. The more people bidding for a keyword, the higher the price.