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!!!

Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant will soon be entering the Japanese search market. Although the dominant search engine in Japan is Yahoo, which also controls a large ISP service, Google is trying to gain leverage and this ambition from China will see an interesting struggle for second place in 2007. The Chinese president of Biadu, Robin Li, said: “Baidu eyes the Japanese market as its ‘ideal next step.’ ~ [based on] six months of extensive research into the development of Japanese language search technology.” The reasons are obvious – Japan is the second largest economy and Baidu wants to grab a slice. With internet penetration reaching into the 80s in Japan, and with high speed ADSL and fiber the standard way of connecting Japan is a juicy fruit for web 2.0 technologies. We’ll have to wait and see if this attempt to enter Japan, where consumer loyalty is famous, can do anything to dent Yahoo’s power.

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.

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.

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.

What are meta tags? Meta tags are hidden HTML tags used to describe various aspects about a Web page. The two most important meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords tags. Let’s take a closer look at each meta tag. Sample meta tags: Meta description tags The contents of meta description tags are indexed by some search engines as the page description in its search engine results. However, meta description tags is often misused, with misleading or even false descriptions about a page. As a result, the relevancy of search results are often compromised, so search engines have begun to de-emphasize the importance and even totally ignore the contents of the tag. Some search engines, such as AltaVista and Inktomi, do still index the contents of a meta description tag for its search results. But if the meta description tag is missing, the search engine will usually extract a description from the body text. In general, search engines will index the first 135-249 characters of the meta description tag contents. Write a description that sells the page. Include the most important keywords at the beginning of the tag. But, don’t just fill the description tag with keywords. Meta keywords tags The contents of a meta keyword tag is used to help define the important keywords of a page. It sounds good in theory. However, in practice, the meta keywords tag is often misused, including the addition of excessive or irrelevant keywords. So much so, that most, but not all, search engines totally ignore the contents of the meta keywords tag. Inktomi is the only search engine that indexes the meta keywords tag. Since Inktomi provides search results for top search engines such as MSN, HotBot, and Overture, I would say it’s probably worth the effort to include the meta keywords tag in your Web pages. If you do decide to use the meta keywords tag, I suggest that you only include the most important keyword phrase in the content of the tag. The meta keywords tag should be placed just after the meta description tag.

Guide to link popularity and how it affects your search engine rankings. Link popularity refers to the number of links pointing to and from related sites and is an extremely important method of improving your site’s relevancy in search engines. There are three types of links that will increase the link popularity of your site; internal, incoming and, to a lesser extent, outgoing links. Let’s take a look at each one in more detail. Internal links Internal link popularity refers to the number of links to and from pages within a site. I recommend cross linking your important related pages. This helps search engine spiders find and index your most important pages quicker, especially if some pages are buried deep within your site. Site maps Site maps are visual models of a site’s content that allows users to find specific content or page. Site maps are like interactive table of contents, with links leading to most, if not all, pages of a web site. Site maps are organized hierarchically, breaking down the site’s information into increasingly specific subject areas. If you have more than a dozen pages, I recommend you include a site map in your site. The add a link to the site map page from the home page, and on other pages. This way search engine spiders will find the site map, crawl the links and index your entire web site. Incoming links Incoming link popularity refers to links pointing to a site from other related sites. In addition, there are two types of incoming links: 1. Links from sites you control I recommend cross linking all of your web sites. Select keywords that describe the site you’re linking to. The reason for doing this is because some of the major search engines, such as Google, place a great importance on the text used within, and close to, links. 2. Links from sites you don’t control There are two ways of finding sites to link to yours. The best way to get other sites to link to yours is to ask them politely. And the best way to find likely candidates is to ask web sites that link to your competition. To find out which sites are linking to your a particular competitor, visit a search engine such as Google and enter, “link:” followed by the competitors domain name (with and without “www”). For example: link:google.com link:www.yahoo.com To check the link popularity of your own sites, simply use your own domain name. Do not forget that all the sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as Yahoo! and Open Directory Project, are ideal link candidates too. Once you have compiled a list of related sites, add a link to them in your site. Then send an email to each web site owner informing them that you have linked to their site and politely ask them for a link back to your site. Another way of finding sites to link to yours is to find sites that accept site submissions. To find such sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for: “add url” “your keywords” Include the quotation marks to ensure the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases you enter. Also try replacing, “add url” with one of the following sets of search phrases: add site, add link, submit url, submit site, submit link In addition, you can also find site submission pages by searching for the actual page. So, try replacing the “add url” search phrase with one of the following page names: addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, submiturl.html, submitsite.html, submitlink.html, add-url.html, add-site.html, add-link.html, submit-url.html, submit-site.html, submit-link.html, add_url.html, add_site.html, add_link.html, submit_url.html, submit_site.html, submit_link.html Outgoing links Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders will crawl your site’s outgoing links and determine that the content of the sites you link to are related to the content of your own site. How much importance outgoing links add to a site’s link popularity rating is still being debated by search engine optimization specialists. Link keywords It is important to name your internal and outgoing links carefully. Since keywords play a major part in determining the relevancy of a Web page, it is essential that they are also included in link text. Link quality The quality of the links is just as important, if not more, than the number of links to your site. The types of sites you should concentrate on getting links from include major search engines (Google.com), popular search portals (MSN.com), web directories (Yahoo.com and Open Directory Project – dmoz.org), high trafficked sites (eBay.com and Amazon.com), news sites (CNN.com), and sites related to your site’s theme. Link exchanges and farms Do not get links from link exchange sites and link farms. Link farms are networks of heavily cross linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. All of the major search engines consider such links as spam, so stay clear of these types of links.

Find out how keywords can have a huge influence on your search engine rankings. Keywords contained within a Web page are the most important element to achieving high search engine rankings. Keywords are by no means the only relevant factor in how search engines rank a Web page. Other factors also count. But the majority of search engine optimization strategies involve a Webpage’s keywords in one form or another. Therefore, it’s fair to say that keywords are the most important element to achieving top search engine rankings. After all, if a page had no text at all, there is nothing for a search engine to index! Perfect Keywords You should create each Web page by concentrating on the following (in order of importance): one keyword or keyword phrase matching the page content and most frequently used by the target audience and has the least number of competing pages in the search engines. Admittedly this is not easy and is not always possible. And how do you go about finding the one perfect keyword phrase that matches the page content, that is most frequently used by the target audience, and has the least number of competing pages in the search engines? Top keywords Fortunately, there are tools to help you find out what those all important keywords are. Keyword frequency Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword phrase appears within a page. The theory is that the more times a keyword/s appears within a Webpage, the more relevant the page is likely to be for someone searching those keywords. But do not abuse the system by repeating the same keywords over and over again. Keyword density Keyword density is the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a Web page. In general, I suggest using a keyword density ratio in the range of 2-8%. Keyword prominence Keyword prominence is about improving the prominence of keywords by placing important keywords at the top of a Web page. Basically, the closer your important keywords are to the start of a page, a sentence, title or meta tag, the better. Keyword proximity Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better. For example: Internet keyword marketing and analysis tools Internet keyword analysis and marketing tools If someone searched for “keyword marketing,” a Web page containing the first sentence is likely to rank higher than the second, because the two keywords are closer together. Word stemming Word stemming is a concept used by some search engines to return search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you searched for. For example, a search with the keyword “optimize” might return results for, “optimizes,” “optimizer,” and “optimizers.” In general, always try to use the longer version of a keyword, especially plurals. Stop words Stop words are common words and characters ignored by most search engines. For example: a and are as at be for from he his I in is it of on that the they this to was Ignoring stop words helps to reduce the amount of storage needed to index the billions of pages of data, and enhance the speed and relevancy of the search results. Only full-text search engines, such as AltaVista, index every single word on a Web page. As such, always try to use keywords instead of stop words as much as possible. Admittedly, it maybe a bit more difficult to read, but I think it is worth the sacrifice, in the cause of trying to achieve higher search engine rankings. Keywords in domain names Keywords in domain names can help to improve search engine rankings. I generally recommend registering keyword rich domain names for search engine optimization campaigns. Keywords separated by hyphens I have yet to find conclusive proof that separating keywords in a domain name improves rankings. But I do suggest that you do use this format, just to be on the safe side. After all, you wouldn’t want a search engine to index the wrong keywords. For example, what are the keywords in this domain name, “newshut.com?” Are they “news” and “hut,” or “new” and “shut?” You can see how a search engine can easily index different keywords from those you had in mind. If the domain name is, “news-hut.com,” it would be clear to a search engine exactly what the keywords are. Keywords in directories and file names Its a good idea to register keyword rich domain names, it’s also a good idea to name directories and file names after the keywords you’re targeting.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves making Web pages more search engine friendly to promote them as the most relevant solutions for the search engines’ users. The improvements can mean the difference between achieving top rankings, which can result in thousands of monthly visitors, and being lost in oblivion. Why is search engine optimization important? A good SEO consultant will explain that it’s basically about following search engine rules. If your Web page fits the criterias that a search engine considers the most important factors in terms of relevance, then it will reward you with a top ranking. SEO consultants simply modify Web pages to fit these criterias. This gives the Web pages a better chance of being selected by the search engines as the most relevant page for the search query. The importance of keyword research The Internet is basically a massive disorganized library. Search engines are like librarians. They both try to organize the content, so that people can find what they’re looking for without too much effort. With books, librarians have the benefit of bibliographic databases and the information on the book covers to help them organize their library. Search engines don’t have such a luxury. There aren’t databases of every single Web page ever created. The Internet is just too big. There’s too much information to index. The only way a search engine can try to organize the mass of information available on the Internet is by the use of keywords and links. It makes sense to think that if a Web page contains enough keywords related to a certain topic, it should be relevant to a search for information on that particular topic. So part of the SEO consultant’s job is to make sure the Web pages target the keywords that people search for when looking for products, services or information related to what the Web page offers. The variety of keywords used to search for the same product, service or information is quite staggering. For example, here are the most popular keyword phrases used by people searching for information on search engine optimization: search engine optimization search engine ranking search engine optimisation (notice the English – as opposed to American – spelling of optimization?) search engine placement website optimisation search engine positioning web site optimization (notice a space between “web site?”) high search engine ranking web page optimisation search engine promotion top search engine ranking high search engine rankings search engine rankings better search engine placement web site optimisation high search engine placement search engines optimization website optimization search engine optimizations (notice the “s” at the end of optimization?) high search engine positioning engine optimization resources You notice how many different variations people use to search for information on the same topic? The fact is, unless a page contains all of the keywords in a search query, then it will have very little of appearing at the top of the rankings. Before Web pages can be optimized, you must conduct research to determine which keywords to target. This involves finding targeted keywords, determining their popularity, assessing the amount of competition, and then deciding which keywords to use in your Web pages.

Meta Tags >>

Most of the major search engines give the most relevance to keywords in the title tags within the Web page. As such, every page should have a title tag. In general, I have found that short keyword rich descriptions in title tags work best. Good title tag: Not so good title tag: Header tags Many of the major search engines place a lot of relevance on keywords in header tags (H1, H2 and H3). As such I recommend that you sprinkle keyword rich header tags on your Web pages. Sample header tags:

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Positioning

ALT text Always include ALT text to describe the contents of an image. Use keyword rich descriptions in the ALT text, as some search engines index the keywords. You will also provide a text description to visitors with slow download connections or have their images turned off. But to ensure that the text is visible, you must set the image’s width and height dimensions. The use of ALT text also enable visually disabled visitors using screen readers, or reviewers, to interpret the image on the screen. Images can be translated, only if there is alternative text describing the image. Also consider adding a period “.” at the end of the ALT text, so that someone hearing the page can tell where one image stops and another starts. Sample ALT text within an image tag: