Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox – you probably do too.  The thought of living without all those powerful and highly supported plugins/extensions actually scares me.  All I’m asking is:  where did my fast and furious Firefox go?

The Firefox we all knew and loved did not go out with a bang or with one patch.  Instead, we all slowly and deliberately killed it with one new bit of information at a time.  Firefox can handle those bits, but the way you and I surf and work has created an entangled mess of data that takes Firefox seconds to sort out.  Those seconds can cause communication delays, followed by packet loss which leads to “Cannot Find Server” errors.

So what can you do to bring the speedy Firefox back to life?  The solution is fairly quick:

(Guide is for Windows XP or newer)

1. Download IniFox_en.zip (contains a .bat file and sqlite3).
2. Extract the file somewhere you can find it.
3. Make sure Firefox is closed.  Then place both files, inifox.bat and sqlite3.exe in your Firefox profile folder.  To find your Firefox profile:   Start –> Run –> “%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\”  (exclude the quotes)
4. You should see a folder called something like “6tiqwopx.default”  (yours will be different).  Open that file, it’s your profile.  Place both inifox.bat and sqlite3.exe in your profile folder.
5. Again, be sure Firefox is closed.  Now double click the inifox.bat file.

Done!  Restart Firefox and enjoy a return to the good ‘ole days of near instantaneous surfing.  Anytime you feel Firefox is bogging down, just open your Firefox profile folder and repeat step 5.

What did you just do?  For those that care:  you have used sqlite3 to run the instructions in inifox.bat which optimize your various Firefox databases.  Now Firefox can sort through your tangled mess of data in milliseconds.  This should dramatically speed up your surfing experience, in addition – the “can’t find server” message should be a relic from your past…unless of course the site is actually down.

The matter of fact is that link building is one thing that has not dramatically changed. The more websites that you can get to link to you, the higher your website will rank in the search engines and the more visitors and customers your website will get. So how should we go about link building in 2010?

Well, my predictions are that this is the year that the Google toolbar pagerank will be dubbed worthless as it has been getting less and less effective and finding out which sites are of higher authority. Google is moving a lot more towards conversions and links that send traffic, however they are not ‘quite’ there yet, and until they are we can continue to build lots of little links quickly and reap the search engine benefits.

One link building method that will continue to be beneficial for many months and possibly years to come will be blog posts, because they accomplish so many things with one post. You reach a large bloggers audience and possibly his twitter/email syndication, you get a powerful backlink in the post, and you can get related links in your industry. The best part of this is guest posts are completely free and only require you to be up to date in your industry and you to be actually passionate about it. There are large blogs in nearly every niche in the world, so go start searching for flagship blogs that you can start writing for in your industry, and start leveraging off their success to build up your blog to their size, and then in good faith, offer your readers the ability to guest post off your success.

The #1 rule for on-site is SEO is relevance.  Make sure that the site or page you are trying to rank is relevant and useful for the visitors that click on your primary keyword.  A clean, straight to the point site will be appreciated by your visitors.  Use custom web design techniques which enhance the subject matter, don’t go over-the-top with flash, moving graphics, or anything distracting.

Start at the top.  The title of your page should feature your primary keywords and tell visitors and search engines what the focus of your page/site is.  Once you have attracted traffic to your site, they should instantly be able to see content which directly addresses the keywords you’ve placed in your title.  Article, video, or post headers should feature the keywords.

You can’t cram a ton of info onto your homepage, so include excepts with links to back pages that expand on the subject matter of the keywords.  According to Web Design Richmond you should keep the focus of the page simple and concise.  Function over form.

You want to make your site as clean and crisp as possible.  Even though most people have fast connections such as cable or satellite internet you don’t want to miss out on vital new consumers that are still kick’n it old school with dial-up.

Finally, make sure your link structure is easy to follow and intutive for finding information on your site.

For most legitimate web sites, the above steps will be all the on-site SEO necessary.  If you have a particularly large site, consider a site map.  For most though, they are unnecessary.  Keep it simple, stay focused, and above all – be useful!

Everyone has a blog these days. My dad (just turned sixty last month) has three. He has his business blog, his personal blog and he’s got a twitter blog where he’s writing a novel at 140 character installments six days a week. ??So what makes your blog special, and how do you write a snappy, eye-catching, engaging blog post every time?

Journalism 101

Seriously, if you want to write a blog and you’ve not taken a basic course in journalistic writing, do so. You’ll discover ‘The Inverted Pyramid’ and a semester’s worth of other concepts that can be applied directly to your blog. A creative writing course would be nice, too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Most important are the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Where and Why. Here’s a crash course.

Who are you Writing For?

It’s a simple question, sure, but it can have a difficult answer. Who will be reading your blog post? Are you writing for ten year olds or twenty-something’s? Do you intend to be read by colleagues, fans, friends, employers, locals, internationals, or bi-lingual’s?

Having a targeted demographic will help you to picture your audience while you’re writing your blog. It will help you to choose a tone, vocabulary, and topic that will appeal to them, as well as be understood by them. More important than knowing what you’ll be saying is knowing who you’ll be saying it to.

What Will You Be Writing About?

This one is pretty simple, really: “What is this blog post about?” If your blog is designed to share your adventures with friends and family while you’re teaching English in South Korea, your topic is already decided. If it’s more of a soap-box upon which you champion a political stance and ideology, you might have a little more work cut out for you in coming up with a topic.

When Will This Be Posted?

It’s at this point that I have to confess that I’ve modified the journalistic “5 W’s,” in order to better meet my own needs. The original ‘When’ refers to “When did the event happen?” That doesn’t work well in an overall guide for writing blogs. So instead I’ve chosen “When Will This Be Posted.”

You need to decide whether or not you’ll be posting immediately, delaying the publishing date, or even implying that it has been posted weeks prior to the day you actually wrote it. Knowing this while you’re writing allows you to maintain continuity with other posts you may have written. If it’s an article about Halloween posted in April, you might want to explain why.

Where Will This Be Seen?

You know your audience, your topic and your time, now know your stage. Does your blog have any recurring themes, concepts or standards you have to adhere to? Is it moderated by an outside censor or is it governed by your own good judgment?

Second to deciding who will be reading it, knowing where it will be read will help you to craft an appropriate tone and vocabulary. These are key components of the ‘voice’ of your piece.

Why Are You Writing?

I’m not getting metaphysical on you. If you’re an artist, poet, or novelist, you could be writing to express yourself, or gain exposure. If you’re an activist you could be writing this blog to engender awareness and provide a voice to the voiceless. If you’re a fan you could simply be pointing out why United is better than City (over and over and over again), or if you’re a freelance writer you could simply be trying to build a good name and reputation for yourself while sharing useful and hard-earned knowledge as a guest poster on quality websites.

Having an honest answer for this final ‘W’ enables you to write your post with purpose and drive. Your readers’ time is too precious to waste with unclear thoughts and ramblings. Make sure you always know why you’re writing, and why it matters to your reader.

and “How.”

Like the five vowels ending in ‘and sometimes Y,’ our 5 W’s end with a “How.”

The concepts above aren’t a magic key to always writing good blog posts, but it’s how you start. It’s an easy to remember mnemonic device for building a foundation before you type every blog post. I take the time before I sit down to actually write out the five W’s and then build my article on top of them. That’s how I do it.

Jake Walker is a freelance writer and has been working on the web on and off for the last 10 years. An avid blogger he has had many posts featured on major social networks and other news portal websites. He currently works as a search engine optimization consultant with the other smart people at SEOP.com

1. One Way Links

This became important after all the link exchange programs started sprouting up in hopes of manipulating search results. For a while it worked. Now, the best kind of link is not recipricol. One way links only please.

2. Backlinks To Linking Site

You will want to check the backlinks pointing into a site when considering it for a linking partner. No pagerank isnt everything, but it might be a good indication of the quality of links a site has pointing into it.

Remember, neighborhoods are important. So associate with quality sites. And don’t be afraid to link to quality when it makes sense for your reader.

3. Number of outbound Links On Linking Page

The more links pointing out, the less juice a link has. That’s the bottom line. It’s always best to have as few outbounds as possible on a page where you’re placing your link. However, it should be said that a link is a link, so don’t be too picky about outbounds, unless you’re paying for the placement.

PRO TIP:
The best links are the ones that occur naturally, because you have a good website with quality content.

Good luck and happy link building!

This is a guest post from our friends at Top Click Media.  Please visit their site for more search engine optimisation information.

First you will want to determine your costs on the level of the campaign. If your campaign is utilizing both Google’s ad networks as well as its content networks, then you will want to set up a campaign that exclusively targets the search aspect and a duplicate campaign that focuses on the content side. Creating these separate campaigns will allow to you control spending for each one separately, so you can find optimum costs that maximize the utility of each campaign. In your content based campaigns it is also important to use exclusions for both site and category terms that will prevent your click dollars being spent by putting your ads on unrelated websites.

When your campaign has gotten started and you are seeing some results, you will want to analyze the data coming back on your top performing keywords, and adjust their spending so that you can see even more returns on them. In addition to this, you can also add new query match formats for your existing and underperforming keywords to boost their functionality, allowing you to develop a unique bid for every match type that you are using.

Be sure to monitor the quality scores of all of your keywords. Stop using terms that have zero conversions and/or low quality scores, as they are essentially wasting your time and money. Remember, that your keyword’s quality score will affect its cost per click and its estimate in bids for the first page. Quality Score also affects the ranking of your ad and its eligibility to be featured in an ad auction.

When you are working with an insurmountable number of key words, it is simply not possible to manage them by hand, you will require the assistance of software to help manage your spending for each of your selected terms. The following list details a number of management tools that will help you to adjust your campaign spending in the most efficient manner possible:

• Acquisio SEARCH. This is a top of the line, well programmed pay per click bid management tool. It is able to offer suggestions on which keywords should be paused, alerts you by email to keywords that are given low quality scores, and allows you to set programmable cost per click values for your keywords.
• Clickable. This tool is able to offer performance enhancing recommendations for your campaign. It will indicate calculated and reasonable bid increases on high performing keywords, a reduction of bids on your lower performing keywords, or alerting you when keywords have not met their first page estimates.
• DoubleClick DART Search. This tool is able to automatically bid on any of your keywords a maximum of twelve times daily. You can create a bid strategy that is executed based on a variety of factors concerning your keywords.
• Omniture SearchCenter. This tool offers the standard bid management tactics that you find in such software which includes portfolio based or rules based routines. This tool also features day-parting, but this comes standard with almost any modern pay per click engine.
• Podium adCore. This tool can adjust your bids on a wide level and will allow you to remove underperforming words that do not meet specific performance requirements.

Though these tools sound like they will have your campaign running itself, it will still require regular human intervention, if only to collect your earnings. Though these tools will help maximize your profits, they still require solid human generated ideas to be truly effective. If you give your campaign the human touch that it needs and employ the tools above, your campaign will really start gaining steam and really getting your ads out there!

Both free and paid dating sites have their advantages and disadvantages, but for this case study we will discuss smart SEO techniques for promoting a free internet dating site that has an average monthly advertising budget but needs to do smart SEO. The simple SEO techniques still apply, such as strong on site content as well as submitting the site to a plethora of strong directories. The problem with being in the dating niche is that there are not a lot of dating related blogs like there are in other industries. This lack of normal every-day-joe blog’s means dating webmasters need to make up for it somewhere else, and that usually means it is a competition of buying the most links.

However, with a smart search engine optimization plan, this is not necessary. The are the recommended link building strategies for a site in the competitive dating niche would be social bookmarking, blog commenting, press releases, strong internal structure, and throwing a small contest to attract bloggers to write a dating site that they otherwise wouldn’t have on their blogs. Hope this is a good start for all of you in the free dating niche!

Google is used as a verb instead of ’searching’. Bing/Yahoo have a long way to go before they steal permanent market share.  At this point I suspect Microsoft will shovel money into marketing for the next few years with no hope of generating anything close to a profit.  They have a big stockpile of money, but at some point shareholders will complain.  When the marketing ends, their product better deliver results as good or better than Google.  I doubt that will be the case.

The search algorithm seems fairly straight forward for Bing.  Unfortunately big company sites with huge budgets and blackhat auto link techniques will be more effective on Bing than Google.

My prediction:  the simple nature of the search algorithm used by Bing will be either exploited and results will look like your email spam folder, or they will look like Forbes 500 list — neither is as useful as Google’s results.

Most search engine optimizers do not realize there is a better solution. All you need to do is to start thinking big by targeting small. It does not matter what niche your company or website is in, every single niche has a more targeted keyword that you can be targeting. You will be able to rank higher for this keyword, in a shorter time frame. When you start ranking for this niche keyword, you will start receiving a representative sample of the traffic you will be seeing for the big keyword you are targeting for the long term. You will be able to build up sales, leads, customer contact information, and most importantly cash while you are slowly building up to your long term keyword goal. It is often easier to rank for the number one spot for five to ten niche keywords with a high volume traffic than it is to rank for one mega keyword as it is often called. For those of you who learn by example, imagine you own an affiliate company that sells supplements. Ranking for for a term like weight loss will result in potentially hundreds of thousands of sales because so many people search for it every day, however the traffic is only semi targeted. Instead of trying to target a term like weight loss, a company that sells bottles containing maqui berry could target a term like weight loss pills, which is a slightly more targeted and less competitive keyword. Depending on the size and competition of the niche, you could keep going smaller and smaller in your niche search. Instead of targeting weight loss pills, you could target a very longtail term like how to lose weight fast. The more longtail and smaller the niche, the faster you will be able to rank. You can then easily rank number one for a niche term which you can then shift the focus to a bigger keyword, ultimately moving closer and closer to ranking for your ultimate keyword in the long term. If its going to take two years to rank for a term like weight loss which will let your company make ten thousand dollars per day… wouldn’t it be smarter to rank for ten niche keywords earning you a thousand dollars a day and then have an entire year of that to rank for your big term and have the benefits of 11 income earning keywords, 10 of which have been earning you money every day for an entire year? I think you are finally now seeing the benefits of targeting small, so go out and search google for your favorite keyword tool and start doing keyword research to find the niches you can rank for in a lot shorter timeframe than trying to stick it out with your main keyword.

Believe it or not…in 2001, the White House web site was completely shut down thanks to a hacker war launched by thousands of people in China, then joined by people from other countries including Saudi Arabia, India and Argentina. These hackers turned the Navy website’s home page into the blaring phrase, “I Am Chinese!” Over at the Labor Department the main page screamed, “China Hack”. The National Business Center was dealt the worst blow with the proclamation, “Beat down Imperialism of American! Attack anti-Chinese arrogance!” Imagine how devastating this could all be if these hackers’ English grammar were as accurate as their computer acumen!

So why do Chinese hackers show such disdain towards America? It all started with an American spy plane crashing into a Chinese jet. The American pilot walked away unharmed while the Chinese pilot died, escalating the tension between the two countries. Many believe China is working towards world dominance in the electronics arena and sees the United States as their premier competitor. In the years following this initial Cyber War of the World, China has launched close to 100,000 computer attacks against the US. In 2005 alone, The Pentagon logged more than 79,000 attempted intrusions with a whopping 1300 successes.

Are these invasions orchestrated by the Chinese Government or the general populace of China? The PLA (People’s Liberation Army), is the unified military organization of all land, sea, and air forces of the People’s Republic of China. For years, it is believed that the PLA outsources its hacking efforts to individuals who are the winners of hacking competitions held throughout China. In Sichuan province, one such winner uses the nom de guerre Wicked Rose. He, or she, went on to set up a hacking business that penetrated computers at a defense contractor for the United States aerospace division. Wicked Rose is believed to be employed by The PLA. There’s no definitive proof which allows the Chinese Government to comfortably deny any involvement.

So how has the United States responded to this cyber espionage? Three years after the 2001 incident, the U.S. Government assigned ONE person to investigate.(He knew nothing about intelligence; his only qualification was that he could read and write in Mandarin.) None-the-less, he managed to retrieve names, photos, cell phone numbers, and the software used by the leaders of the hacker assault, after just one day on the job, by typing in the Chinese characters for “hacker” into Google. How Mickey Mouse is that!

The China Syndrome and its new meaning has brought on a new division of terror to our modern world. It can shut down a major corporation, derail a bank, and above all, it could start a New World War that could change the face of this earth. And you could be innocently sleeping when it all happens.

Sometimes it’s difficult to be ethical, especially when your competitors often are not. Often the temptation to take the easy way out is there. However, it is possible to efficiently and effectively meet the needs of any site using ethical SEO. The good thing about an ethical SEO agency is that they will avoid trickery and always choose to act responsibly in an effort to get optimal results for the Website. In doing that, they will be able to make the site work for you. No matter whether you do your own SEO or hire someone, always choose to be ethical. It really is possible to succeed that way.

Ultimately, the best kind of link you can get is one that is of decent pagerank but is extremely relevant to your niche. Google’s algorithm is moving more and more towards being relevancy based, because that is how they can filter out spammy websites easier than truthful ones. Imagine owning a website that talks about weight loss but the only backlinks the websites have are from porn or gambling websites. Google knows that these links are not all legitimate, and so since they are not relevant they are not as strong.

Now imagine a small niche weight loss site with dozens of PR1-4 links from highly relevant weight loss blogs. Google knows that the weight loss blogs have good authority and are making content-relevant posts talking about your weight loss site and so these links will be far more beneficial than a single PR6 link from a gambling site.

The diamond in the rough is being able to get the highly authoritative and high pagerank websites that are relevant to your niche, which are the best of both worlds.

In less than 5 minutes, that can all change.  Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up a permanent, flexible, and secure password management solution:

Step 1: Download KeePass.  Choose the Portable KeePass 2.xx version.

Step 2: Extract to a directory of your choosing.  Then run it – you may want to create a desktop or taskbar shortcut.

Step 3: Enter a master account password – choose something new, this is the one password you will ever need to know from now on.  Add one entry (the key icon).

Step 4: This is the powerful step that allows you to access your passwords from all machines and anywhere you happen to be.  Choose file > save as > save to URL.  Enter your ftp details.

Even if you don’t have a server, your ISP likely has given you some space to store a personal page or files.  If you don’t know your ftp details, contact your ISP or network administrator.  ** Choose an easy to remember location.

How it works: Whenever you open KeePass it will access the file on your server.  Whenever you save the file it will upload the newest save to the server.  From now on, from any machine, your passwords will be updated in real time and you will always have the latest passwords!  If you are on a new computer – just download KeePass again, then file > open > open URL.

*  If you like this solution, send KeePass a donation – this is a well supported and extremely useful program.

Inbound links can help raise your chances of getting a better ranking in the search engines, but only if they have relevance to your site and if they come from sites that are also high-ranking. Both of these things are important, and which one is more important is arguable. In the past it was believed that the page ranks of inbound links were more important than anything, but many of the larger search engines have since changed their algorithms.

With that being the case, the relevance of the sites that are giving you inbound links and the keywords that they use are becoming more significant than the page rank of the sites that offer the links. One thing is clear, however: getting inbound links to your site from relevant sites is crucial if you want to succeed and see your page rank rise.

In other words, the first thing that you need to do with SEO is to have a main, authoritative site. If you haven’t built one, that would be the first thing to do. From that point, you can create niche sites that link back and tie in to the main site. If you don’t create niche sites that are related to the main site, though, you might find that the SEO won’t do you much good. It’s also important to keep in mind that it takes time to build authority, even if you have a good site.

People have to be able to find you and they have to believe that you know what you’re talking about. That means that the site – or sites – that you create should have valid and interesting content on them along with the SEO targeted words and phrases. If the site content isn’t any good, the SEO won’t be nearly as effective as you had hoped.

The bandwidth that the host is giving you is vital. If your site starts to get a lot of traffic and you don’t have much bandwidth your site will start to go down frequently and you’ll lose customers.

Another consideration is reliability. If the host frequently shuts down for maintenance, because of server issues, or for any other reason, people won’t be able to get to your site. They might not bother to try again later.

How much disk space you have is also important. You don’t need more than around 20MB for most sites, though, so don’t buy into a huge disk space package unless it just comes along with the original price. There’s no point in paying for a bunch of space that you aren’t using now and won’t be using in the future.

In the past, the Webpage could be hastily put together and it would be just fine that way, but that’s not the case anymore. Now, it’s more important than ever that both visitors and search engines can easily find your site based on keywords and that they get interesting and original content once they get there. That sounds easy, but it’s not. It’s becoming more and more difficult because people are changing the way that the Web is used, and how it evolves from a business standpoint is also changing.

If you don’t really know your target audience you’re going to have a very hard time getting them to your site and keeping them there, so make sure that you know who you’re talking to and what they’re looking for. Optimize your site for SEO with your target audience in mind.

Your Website is Live! Don’t Pop Open the Bubbly Just Yet

Congratulations are in order when your website has gone from the drawing board to fully functional. However, the efforts must not stop there – in fact, they are just beginning.

Regardless of how beautifully crafted your site may be, or how competitively you may have priced your products or services, if your site cannot be found via the major search engines, you are liable to end up in the deepest, darkest corners of the internet.

How to Outshine Your Competition and Thrive

The old adage “Content is King” still reigns true today, and with the connectivity of the Internet, wherein millions of companies compete for the same market share, this adage may be more relevant now than ever before.

Ensuring that your content is well written, compelling and engaging is critical. Does this sound like a daunting task? It certainly is, yet there is more. Your content should also speak to the search engines by possessing an optimal keyword density and latent semantic indexing algorithm considerations. This is where the professionals come in to help your content shine.

Hiring a Freelance Writer

To ensure that your content sings to your audience and romances the search engines, a freelance writer is imperative. However, not all freelance writers are shaped from the same mold. You must be certain that the writer possesses significant search engine optimization knowledge, as well as an ability to capture the essence of your products or services in the best light possible.

CommunicateBetter.org is one such company that provides a harmonious blend of eloquence and SEO infused content. In addition to their affordable services, CommunicateBetter.org has a stellar reputation, with nearly 200 client raving testimonials, all boasting 100% satisfaction, verified via an independent third party.

By leaving your content in the trusted hands of a professional writer, you will increase the likelihood of your online success, while simultaneously enhancing your search engine rankings. Thereafter, it will be time to pop the bubbly!

Internet, Internet service, and Internet provider are some of the most popular terms for people who do business on the web, but there are many other popular terms, depending on what field you are in. If you have something to sell, using the item that you’re selling and ’sell’ or ‘buy’ or ‘price’ might be a great way to bring traffic to your site.

There are ways that you can find out what the most popular terms are for your industry, and that will help you bring more visitors to your site, as well. Just make sure that you give them a reason to stay around and buy your products or services once they get there, or having good search terms might not lead to the desired increase in sales.

The key to natural SEO is to write articles and other informational content that is good for the search engines and also good for the people who read it. The keywords should come in the body of the article in a natural way. If you are talking about SEO you should talk about SEO instead of rambling and sticking the term in there a couple of times in the hopes that the search engines will go crazy over it.

It’s possible that it will drive traffic to your site, but what will they find when they get there? They probably won’t be back if you don’t tell them anything worth knowing, so choose not only your SEO terms but your phrasing carefully.

Popular ways of obtaining one way links to your website:

• Directory listings – some are free, some you must buy (usually permanent)
• Blog / Forum postings – social media/viral marketing

One way of acquiring backlinks to your site that is often overlooked and hardly ever talked about is from an eBay Store. eBay actually setup their store pages to be quite search engine friendly, which ecommerce marketing specialists can use to their advantage. They let you specify the titles and keywords for all of your category pages. With a basic eBay Store subscription you are allowed to create 5 custom store pages. These pages are automatically built into the navigation of your store and quickly become indexed by the search engines. You can then deep link to pages within your website from the text on these custom pages in your ebay store.

SEO benefits of an eBay Store:

• Ability to specify titles and keywords for category pages
• Search engines love eBay listings
• Deep linking to pages within your website (one way links)
  
• Ability to control the anchor text of these backlinks
  

eBay has some strict policies regarding linking to external websites from listings or store pages. You must only link to outside pages that do not directly offer the same or similar items for sale (example: you can’t link to a product page on your website from your ebay store if the webpage shows a ‘buy now’ button or any prices)

It is wise to limit the outbound links on your ebay store pages to 3 or less per page. This would be about 15 total links from your ebay store to different pages on your website. A smart thing to do would be to link to the homepage on your website with about 5 of those links and with the remaining 10 link to different pages within your site (i.e. category pages or informational pages).

When you figure that a basic eBay Store will cost you $15.95 per month you can imagine what a great investment it is – not to mention you will probably sell your items as well. 15 one way inbound links for under twenty bucks? you can’t beat that.

The whole point of everything mentioned above is to improve search engine rankings and ultimately the online exposure of your business. The more keyword-rich backlinks you have pointing to your website the higher you will rank. Spend the extra time on your link building… it could be the single most important factor in search engine optimization.

If you look around the web for ways to build links, a lot of people tell you the obvious that you have already heard. Submit to directories, write articles, and exchange links, which has been repeated since 1999. So how can you build some strong links after you have already done the directories and simple stuff?

1.) Social Media
Social media sites are becoming insanely popular in the last two years, and many have some excellent pagerank on them. You can submit your websites to the most popular ones by visiting SocialMarker.com or by using Google to find your own social media websites to submit to.

2.) Pligg Sites
Pligg is an open source script that runs many of the social news websites. You can do a google search for “powered by pligg” and find over 1 MILLION places to add your link to, although it will take a bit of time.

3.) Buying links underground
A great way to build some links (if you are careful) is by joining webmaster forums like Digitalpoint.com and buying strong links directly from sellers, which reduces the risk that Google will find you. You should only do this if you know what you are doing though.

4.) Profile Links
Many websites that you can sign up for a free profile allow you to enter your homepage in your profile. The good thing about 90% of these websites is that they do not even know what link building is or how it will benefit them. You can use this to your advantage by joining hundreds of these websites and getting that good link from your profile, and then you can even promote your profiles with social media sites like I listed above.

These four areas you can spend countless hours building some excellent links if you have the time and effort to do so. So get on out there and start building some links to improve your search engine rankings.

SEO is a term that’s very common today, but if you don’t spend a lot of time working with the Internet you might not know what it means. It’s short for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to the process of organizing your website content and links in order rank for the most relevant and valuable search terms.

One method to optimize your site is to tailor the articles and blog posts that you write toward the terms that people will be searching for.  When someone puts terms that have to do with your website into a search engine, you want your site to come up in the results. If you don’t have the right search terms, though, that won’t take place. You might have the greatest and most helpful site in the world but no one will be going there because their searches don’t send them to where you are.

It can take a while to build up search engine ranking, but the better you are at SEO the higher your chances of getting noticed. Once you start to be noticed and people are going to your website, that will also help boost your rankings. You don’t want to stop the SEO, though, because you want to keep more people finding your website. If you can do that, your business will continue to grow.

In ancient web history (5 years ago) you had to use Silicon Valley firms for internet marketing.  Not so any longer.  Even in a small city like Richmond you can find talented SEO Companies capable of ranking competitive keywords at the top of the search engine rankings.

BloomSEO is a search engine optimization specialist.  To stand out among the top seo firms in Richmond, BloomSEO offers unique services few other companies can handle.  You may be able to find SEO companies in Richmond with the skill and knowledge required to place your site in the top 10 on Google for your most valuable keywords.  BloomSEO does that of course, but you shouldn’t settle for rankings alone.  After all, you want visitors.  It doesn’t matter if your business is located in Richmond.  If you are interested in dominating the search engine rankings and generating valuable traffic to your website, BloomSEO delivers.

For an example of one of the unique services, take a look at the Link Bait Case Study.  If this is a service you are interested in, make sure your server can handle 10,000 to 20,000 visitors in a single day!  If you are looking for search engine optimization in Richmond, or anywhere – you’ve found a specialist capable of helping you acheive your goals.

How many links you need for a good ranking, depends on how many your competitors have. If they only have a few, you only need a few. If they have hundreds…well, you’re going to need to do some serious link building. It’s also not just the number of links that you have. They need to go to sites that are popular and that are of good quality. Otherwise they are mostly pointless.

Directory listings are a great way to get links, so that should be your first stop. Next, work on getting reciprocal links from complementary sites that aren’t competitors. You should also create a testimonials page where you recommend products and services and you may get links to the sites that you like. You can also publish articles and make sure that they have your bio and link information so that people can find you. Discussion forums, affiliate programs, and contests are also all great ways to get more links.

A 301 redirect is the one to use. This is the redirect code for something that is ‘permanently moved.’ It’s the only one that Google and other search engines accept completely and it won’t get you banned or penalized. If you use a 302 redirect, for ‘temporarily moved’ and you leave it there forever, you can be penalized by the search engines, which will certainly harm your business.

This didn’t used to be problem, but there is a lot more sensitivity in what the search engines look for today, and now a lot of 302 redirects that were fine before are causing many businesses headaches that they don’t need.

One of the easiest things you can do is let go of all the SEO work that you’re bogged down with and outsource it so someone else. There are both individual freelancers and firms out there today who specialize only in SEO and in helping other companies with it. They can market, promote the Web site, research keywords, build links, and market through places like the social networking sites, as well.

There are almost endless possibilities for SEO, and that means that there are endless possibilities for your business to make money, but you need to trust professionals to handle your SEO for you. Then you can focus on running your business and hiring new people to do the new work that’s coming in.

Once the customer gets a clear understanding of what SEO is and what it isn’t, you can start doing your research, but educating the customer should be your first priority. The research that you’ll do after that has to do with the fact that each and every business is unique. As you research the business and draft the proposal consider the project objective, the goals that the customer has, the strategies that you’ll be using, and the target audience. Those are all very important.

You’ll also want to include keyword and competitor research, an assignment of responsibilities, and any additional research requirements that you may have. Then give them an overview at the end so that everything you’ve just talked about is summed up nicely and they can see how it will greatly benefit their business.

Sure, it takes some work. If you need and want their business, though, you’ll take the time to write the perfect proposal.

People need to bring traffic to their web sites if they’re going to survive in this economy, and one of the best and least expensive ways to do that is through SEO. When you look at the return on investment that you get from good SEO, it’s almost like free advertising, and there are a lot of people out there who can create SEO content for you. In the past these people, were somewhat looked down on and they definitely weren’t taking seriously, but they are starting to be seen as more important and more valuable now.

The SEO bubble keeps getting bigger. It might pop one day like the dotcom bubble, but it doesn’t seem likely. It’s based on different things and businesses always need advertising. If they can get it for almost free on a global medium like the Internet, why would they do anything else?

There is a phrase in the SEO world called black-hat SEO. That means that you’re spamming the search engines and pushing against every boundary you can find to try to increase rankings and bring interest to your site. A lot of people do it, but it doesn’t work for everyone and it’s certainly not the ethical way to do things.

You need to practice something closer to white-hat SEO, which means that you do things the way the search engines ask you to. You follow their guidelines and you pay attention to what they ask of you so that your site is optimized the way that the search engines want it to be – the ethical way. If you’re too purist, however, you might lose out because there are a lot of people out there who aren’t purists.

You’ll find that the best SEO professionals often wear grey hats instead. They stay within the ‘law’ but they know when to push against a few boundaries.

How often you use a keyword on your page is certainly something that you want to focus on. If you don’t know what keywords people are searching for when they find your page, find out. Then, make sure you continue to use those and related keywords.

Also, search engines look at the first paragraph and the last one, so keywords that are vital to your success need to be there. Don’t get spammy with them. They should come naturally in the sentences that you write, and they should be in each paragraph at least once. If you also put them in the meta tag, make sure that they are in the alt tag of an image that you put on the page, and put them in the title of your article as well as the body, you’ll be well on your way to complete SEO optimization.

Monitoring a web sites overall SEO performance can easily eat up hours of your work day.  This is time that could be used much more effectively in pushing your site or client’s company site up the SEO battlefield.  Creating reports, checking rankings and referrers are all information you need to have, but it is without a doubt a time sink (especially if you are trying to rank numerous key words).

The old addage of time is money is true in Search Engine Optimization too.  If you can cut out some of the tedious and not so fun time consuming work, why wouldn’t you?

I highly recommend using some type of SEO software.  It’s a smart and convenient way to save time and cut some of the mind-numbing day to day drone work that needs to be done.  I personally like SheerSEO for evaluating your sites overall SEO performance.

SheerSEO software is online software, so there’s nothing to clutter up or slow down your desktop.  Once logged in you can track your sites performance in Google & Yahoo.

SheerSEO offers a free 3 month trial, for all new users.  I highly recommend checking out this software.

With the success of Google and the fact that so many people use that particular search engine, being in its rankings is extremely important. If Google sees something as ’spammy’ it’s a problem for the owner of the site, and that’s the main problem with paid links. They aren’t viewed favorably. As Google continues to devalue paid links, you’ll see less and less of them. There are certainly still people who are using them, but that doesn’t mean they’ll continue to in the future or that they’re having the success with them that they used to. Right now, however, Google is mostly targeting link sellers, so link buyers are still able to profit, to some degree, in some markets.

As long as Google doesn’t change the algorithm it has and the way that it’s search engine works, the paid links will never completely go away, because there are still ways for some people to continue to profit from them.

If you’re doing SEO for the holidays, you need to make sure that you get your keywords in order. Words like Christmas, Chanuka and other holidays are important. So is the word ‘gift.’ People search for those kinds of words, so put them in your SEO. You can find creative ways to do that or hire someone to do it for you, but you need to get the word out early and often, and make sure that if you give details about holidays, you get them correct. If you don’t it can really harm your credibility and how much money you might make from the traffic that you get to your site.

Driving traffic to your site is the point of SEO, but what people do once they get there will have a lot to do with whether you have good information for them, so make sure your holiday SEO is interesting and informative.

When you use link baiting, you bring a lot of short term traffic to your site. That can be good in a lot of ways, but most of that traffic is much different from the traffic that you really want to attract to your site in the long term. At that rate it can actually work against you, and that means that you’ll have more trouble from your link baiting than you’ll have benefits.

Naturally, that’s something that you really want to avoid. Too much short term traffic that you really don’t want could give you some negative publicity and harm the long term prospects that you would rather have. That’s a bad choice, and one that you’ll want to carefully consider before you decide whether to use link baiting.

In order to use social networking effectively you’ll need to exercise some common sense. First, you shouldn’t put anything on your site, anywhere, that you wouldn’t want a potential employer or a potential customer to see. It’s ok if you have some weird hobbies or if you like to party on the weekends – just keep that information to yourself and off of the Internet.

You want to set a good impression, and sometimes you have to keep things off of your profile in order to do that. That doesn’t mean that you should lie, because employers and customers don’t like that, but you have to watch what information you offer to others.

The best way to make sure that the press release is effective and does what you want it to is to make sure that it’s SEO friendly. If you don’t have any phrases in there that people search for when looking for your product or company, people might completely overlook your press release and the amazing things that you’re doing. You obviously don’t want that to happen because you paid for the press release, so having SEO embedded into it is a good choice. You can essentially kill two birds with one stone that way, and it will make your advertising dollar go a lot farther.

In today’s struggling economy, that could be very important for your business and its continued success.

The best way to do that is to make sure that your SEO is set up with a lot of holiday words and phrases. The names of the holidays, words like ‘gift’ and ‘present’ and other common holiday-time phrases are important for SEO around this time of year, and it helps to ensure that people who are looking for gifts will keep visiting your site to see what you have to offer.

Without any holiday SEO your business might go down around this time of year because people aren’t searching specifically for what you have to offer. Make sure that people still know that you have a lot to offer them in their gift giving.

Basically, you put a link to their site on your Webpage and they put a link to your Website on their page. It takes a little bit of time to do that, but it’s really not difficult. Some people wonder what the point is, but you get free advertising by trading links, and that can be a great thing, provided the site that wants to trade with you is a good one. You can also put a lot more links on your site that way, and search engines like links, as long as they are legitimate. With that being the case, the more the merrier.

Just make sure you pay attention to the sites that you’re linking to. If they don’t represent the kinds of values that you have or they would be detrimental to your site or your customer base, you don’t have to trade links

Getting other sites to link to yours is pretty important, because Google crawls the Web and the links make it easier to find your site. Natural links are the ones that you want. If you start buying a lot of links or placing links to try to make your site look more popular to the search engines it can really work against you. Your site will not rank as well and you might find that you have to make a lot of changes to make friends with Google again.

By following the rules and making your site easily accessible, you and Google can get along great.

* Check out:  What’s Your Google Rank?

The way that BrowseRank works is not be measuring incoming and outgoing links but by whether people visit a page, for how long, and how many of them do this. That’s vital for people who have a lot of content but don’t have a lot of links. They largely get ignored by Google and seen as unimportant when they may actually be great sites that just don’t need to have a lot of outgoing and incoming links to do what they do.

Microsoft hasn’t been doing that well when it comes to coming up with ranking systems, but this new one seems like it’s going to be something that other sites will actually have to contend with.

However, they search differently than Google does, and some people don’t care for that. Many of them have incomplete directories, and they can also be quite far off the market. However, for some kinds of searches they actually work better because of the different opportunities to find search results. There are also copyright, censorship, and privacy issues that Google is starting to struggle with, and it makes people stop and consider doing things a bit differently.

The newest thing is query reprocessing. This actually requires logical analysis so that the intentions of the searcher are actually determined. It sounds like a good idea but can be difficult to implement. Improvements are being made, though, so it could be the next big thing.

They mostly work like this: for every piece of information that you provide (article, etc.), you get a link back to your site. It has to be something that you wrote or that you have permission to use. You can’t just steal something from someone else’s site, lay claim to it, and try to get links that way.

By doing it the legitimate way it brings traffic in, it’s not spammy, and it doesn’t require you to buy links from sites that might be less than reputable. Most of these sites make their money from advertising, so they don’t have to worry about charging you money.

First, SEO is very important, because it keeps you up there in the search rankings and makes people come back to you. You want that. You can also use pay per click advertising. A lot of people don’t want to spend any money, but sometimes you have to spend money to make money, and it’s really not that expensive. In addition, affiliate marketing is something that you can look into, and thousands of places can promote your

Website. Email marketing, direct mail marketing, and joint ventures are other things that you can explore, as well, and by using a lot of different strategies you should have no problem surviving the recession.

People have lots of good ideas when it comes to what they should do on the Web and how they can teach you to make money doing the same thing. Unfortunately, the market has become so saturated with these kinds of people that it’s to the point where no one’s doing that well and nobody else can get into the market. There’s too much competition and everything has overflowed so badly that there aren’t any new niches for people who want to get out there. So they just start recycling everything that’s out there and trying to put their own spin on it.

It doesn’t often work well, and without a great new slant there’s little you can do. You have to be an innovator instead.

You want the Website name to promote who you are and what you do. Or your product. Or your service. Or whatever you’re trying to convey to others. You also want it to be short enough that people don’t get a cramp typing it in, and you want to make sure that it’s catchy. People should remember the name and not associate it with anything but you. If it’s too close to a competitor’s name there can be a lot of confusion. You should also research it and make sure that it doesn’t come too close to something political, religious, or pornographic. That can lead people down the wrong path very quickly, and you want to avoid that.

There’s a lot in a name, so you’ll want to choose yours carefully, and there are a lot of places where you can purchase your domain name, so be sure to shop around for what you need and want.

Links need to be legitimate to be out there on the Web, and buying them means that they aren’t legitimate at all. However, a lot of people do it and they get away with it for a long time without getting caught, so they must think it’s alright.

The bottom line is that there is risk with it, just like there is risk with anything that you do in the Website/link/SEO field. If you think that there’s too much risk, don’t do it. If you’re going to do it, be completely open and honest with your clients about it so that you can sleep at night. If something does go wrong, your clients will have been warned beforehand, so coming back on you is less likely.

For the most part, they don’t protect anyone. The bottom line is that most SEO companies don’t even offer guarantees anymore because they know that they really have no control over rankings, even with good SEO. The only things that they can guarantee – and some of them do – are things like how much time they’ll devote to your campaign or how much experience the person working with you has. They can also guarantee performance improvements and customer satisfaction, but these are also hard to nail down.

There are risks for both the SEO company and the client, so it’s important to be sure what the real risks are before you offer or accept any type of SEO guarantee. Remember, there really are no guarantees when it comes to how well your site will perform, even with the best SEO in the world, so be cautious of such claims.

What you may not be aware of, however, is how golden they are for SEOs!

Let’s take a quick look at some effective uses of these features on well-known sites:

1) Yahoo! News. Yahoo! News features an entire page of ‘most popular’ stories, which is obviously popular with many. But the lack of a similar widget decreases the chances of pulling someone away from the current page to send them off to another.

2) Slate.com. A widget that displays both ‘most emailed’ and ‘most read’ which, I assume, measures standard page views.

3) Newsweek.com. This one is pretty ingenious. Not only does this site combine Slate.com’s feature of ‘most emailed’ and ‘most viewed’, it also allows you to post to your own website. It also provides a time scale that shows which story is most popular as little as 12 hours ago.

4) NYTimes.com. We have a winner! This gem has a three-tab system that that shows the ‘most-emailed’ and ‘most searched’, it also shows which stories has been blogged the most! Talk about pandering to bloggers!

These features give SEOs the opportunity to know their audience more effectively, earn links to the site, and can benefit your site’s rankings in news searches.

I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we’ve all seen some SEO get berated or pressured because a particular SEO campaign isn’t going at the ‘right’ speed. Even when every procedure is followed to the letter and every option explored, sometimes it’s truly out of our hands.

Let’s look at several reasons why SEO’s don’t function as well and as quickly as we all might have hoped:

1) Even algorithms take time. High quality links, for example, withstand the test of time. Shoddy ones, links that attempt to manipulate the crawler and create an illusory sense of legitimacy, simply don’t. In other words, earning the algorithm’s trust is essential.

2) Patience with engines is vital. I know we’ve all seen a colleague, or maybe even ourselves at one point, luck out and get highlighted in a week or so. But that’s not very realistic. Sometimes the crawler process can take months.

3) Don’t forget those link partners. It can be a frustrating wait while that new viral content you posted or some other feature gets the attention it deserves.

And perhaps the last thing I should mention on this topic: it may take awhile to attract links and increase your standing from that, especially if you’ve just created new content. You won’t get counted by the search engine until those links start coming in, so sit tight!