Many webmasters are lost when starting learning how to optimize websites. Before being able to optimize for search engines, webmasters first need to know the different types of search engines. I’ve mentioned some non-Internet search engines that may play a major part in Web 3.0

Web Search Engines

Web Search Engines include Alexa, Ask.com, Google, Live Search, Yahoo! Search, and the newly released Cuil. These search engines use algorithms to crawl, index, and rank web pages. Each of them have their own criteria. Alexa focuses on traffic, and the quality of the traffic. Yahoo! focuses on Social Networking. Google focuses on inbound links. That is the simple answer, in truth; Google has 100 elements that define how it ranks pages.
Complete article on Types of Search Engines

Some search engines have limits on the amount of a page they index. Many of them leave a website when they hit javascript, or long segments of CSS. There are many good graphic elements of websites that ‘trip up’ search engine crawlers and lower a web page’s rank.

Web Design Goals

The first step is to create goals. Not every page needs to rank high. A website should have some pages created for human consumption. A website needs to sell. If the entire website is optimized for search engines, then the ‘conversion to buyer ratio’ will drop.

Many websites crate landing pages for the crawlers. These are often HTML pages, or have the CSS re-arranged so the crawlers can read the pages. A good web designer can create a landing page that mimics the rest of the website, but is still optimized for websites.
Complete article on The Evolution of Website Code

Most webmasters think about search engine optimizing, not traffic. This is the first post in a series I created after helping manage two blog communities.

1. Ping to as many blog search engines as possible. This is easy with Wordpress. Enable the automatic ping feature in most blog software platforms.

2. Customize your template. Optimizing it to put the content at the top is ideal. Try changing the alt tags of images, or changing enough of the code to make the site appear unique.
Complete article on 10 Hints for Marketing a New Blog

There is no way to guarantee that a website will jump in Google’s Rank to PR4. However, there are some simple, easy to follow guidelines that will help your website reach PR4 within a few months. One of my websites, launched March 2008, was not ranked until July, where it jumped to PR2, with only 89 inbound link, only 38 of them original.

Complete article on Simple Method for Building Google PR4

There are a few dos and don’ts that determine the success, or failure, of a link baiting project. Link baiting can promote and generate more inbound links than a professionally managed campaign.

• Do not link between your websites.
• Link in the article, not a signature line
• Do not build more than 50 inbound links a week
• Do not swap links
• Do not put links on websites with no-follow code
• Do not waste time putting links on pages which will have a PR0 forever
• Do not use ambiguous keyword anchored links
• Do not link to pages that may never be indexed
• Do not link to blogs or ‘deep’ websites where the link will be dropped
• Avoid generic directories, small search engines, word cloud sites, and link farms
• Avoid all but the top 10 article directories
• Try link baiting
• Headlines sell
Complete article on What You Need To Know About Links And Link Baiting

You may have seen them. Someone has been fired from a company, and to ‘get them back’ they are telling all their clients about the black hat 302 redirects that are stealing your customers.
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Good web content is important for any SEO campaign. However, it plays a more important role when determining Conversion Rates and Return on Investment (ROI). Search Engine Marketing involves marketing a website to the search engines, to bring traffic. The content needed to do this is often optimized web pages, in HTML, and well coded to MSN’s specifications.

Once the web visitor arrives at the website, the focus must change to conversion. This is where most webmasters lose their edge. Marketing to search engines is a mathematical process. The more data the webmaster collects, the more power they have and the higher their conversion rates.
Complete article on The Fundamentals of Good Web Content