Debunking the Top 10 Search Engine Myths

We've all done it at some point in our professional lives. We search a keyword that describes our business only to scratch our head as to how our competitor's website shows up on the top of the list instead of ours. If you've gone one step further and read about Search Engine Optimization, then surely you have come across the conflicting information online.

One article tells you to do one thing while another tells you to do the opposite. Which one should you believe?

This gray area of what you should or should not do is much like the modern day "Bat Cave." If you are lucky enough to stumble upon it, chances are you don't quite know how you got there and if you had to go back one day you would probably just find yourself lost in the woods.

So what should you believe? The general rule is to combine what you read or heard with what you have experienced and somewhere in there lies the truth. To get you started, let's debunk some of the more commonly used myths floating around.

1) Use a Keyword Rich Domain Name:

It is widely believed that if you include your keywords in your domain name like www.professional-website-design-in-nj.com it will greatly increase your rankings. This is not true. It is best to choose a domain name that is short, easy to remember and if possible includes your company name.

2) Google Partnership:

If you are ever approached by a company claiming to have a partnership with Google, run in the opposite direction. There is no such thing as a "preferred" relationship with Google and in fact on Google's website it even states: Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google.

3) Meta Keyword Tag:

It used to be that the Meta Keyword Tag was given a lot of weight in the early days of Search Engine Optimization, but people abused it and now it does very little. You may still want to include your keywords here, but know that it will not do much and in fact most search engines won't even check it.

4) Bold or Italicized Text:

Adding emphasis to certain keywords like using bold or italics can make your text easier to scan for the reader if done properly, but has little to no affect on your search engine ranking.

5) Content Length:

There is no search engine rule stating that your content needs to be a specific number of words in order to get indexed. Any recommended length is more to assist the reader in understanding what you do than to aid the search engines.

6) Duplicate Content:

Posting specific content like an article or blog entry on your site and then on another site will not get you penalized. In the search results, Google will recognize that the content is the same and only choose one of the pages to display, but it will not hurt your overall search engine ranking.

7) Avoid Flash:

Any text that you place in Flash will not be readable by a search engine, but this doesn't mean you have to avoid flash altogether. You can still very successfully incorporate Flash into your site through rotating pictures or a header on the page. Just don't have an all Flash site or use a Flash intro if you are interested in increasing your search engine rankings.

8) Pay-Per-Click:

Some say that using Pay-Per-Click will help your organic listing while others say it will hurt. Both are false. The fact is that Google has gone to great lengths to separate the two departments of organic and paid listings to a point where the two departments don't communicate or even sit at the same table for lunch.

9) Update the Site Frequently:

Updating your site often is a good idea if you have something new to say. Just don't change around a few words to accommodate the search engines as that won't help your listing at all. Regularly adding legitimate content like articles, press releases and blog entries will help though.

10) Doorway Pages:

Many companies will sell this idea of increasing your ranking by creating hundreds of one page sites loaded with keywords that link to you from various domains. This is considered spamming the search engine and is not recommended. If you properly optimize your site and focus on the correct way to get listed, you will increase your ranking much quicker than these doorway pages ever could.

Of course there are many other myths out there confusing the general public about what works and what doesn't work. Some of them are spread by people who don't really know the truth and others are spread by SEO companies in an attempt to make search engine optimization confusing... mission accomplished! Regardless of where the myths come from, if you or the SEO Company you hire use common sense and do things the right way, you will have no trouble finding the proverbial Bat Cave…and when you get there please tell them that I want my utility belt back!

About the Author
Marc D. Ensign is the CEO and Visionary of Sound-n-Vision, a New Jersey web design and Internet marketing company. Marc actively teaches workshops and seminars on web design and search engine optimization throughout the New York Metropolitan area.

5 Ways to Entice Visitors to Keep Coming Back

What does a website need? The simple answer is repeat visitors, this is what successful websites share in common, and this accounts for a major part of their traffic.

Why is this?

Well, experience shows that returning visitors are much easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The whole issue of credibility disappears.

So what do you need to do to keep your visitors coming back and visiting your site?

How about checking out some of the solutions below:

1) You could consider starting a forum, chat room or shout box.

Providing a forum, chat room or shout box, allows your visitors to have a voice where they can share their opinions and interact with their peers -- all of them visitors of your site.

Over time this develops into a sense of community and conversions will follow and your visitors will look forward to coming back to your site each and every day.

2) This probably goes without saying, but starting a blog can be a fantastic source for both new and recurring traffic.

Having your own blog is like keeping an online journal, and human beings are curious and thirsty for information. You need to keep your blog frequently updated with your latest news, both business and personal.

You will find that over time more and more people will come back to read your posts and with it you will develop credibility as an authority figure in your niche.

3) How about carrying out polls or surveys?

You will note that so far all the suggestions made have had some form of visitor interaction and conducting polls and surveys is no different. This is one that you should definitely consider adding to your site.

They are a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. It is important that you publish the results of any polls or surveys so that you keep the interest of your visitors to come back and see the results.

4) This is a little bit more innovative, but have you considered the use of puzzles, games and quizzes.

This will provide a yardstick as to how many people are willing to return to your site if you are maintaining their interest through entertainment.

You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) This may appear just plain common sense, but you need to update your site frequently with fresh content if you wish to attract multiple visits.

Although this may appear to be the most likely of strategies it is also the most overlooked with some sites seemingly looking the same for years.

If you want returning visitors to the same message over time that message needs a refresh, a different approach or angle!

Maintaining the same approach continually will have the effect of changing nothing, so don't be lazy and add new fresh bites of information from time to time to increase your visitor's interest.

About the Author
Christopher Raine - Are you ready to maximize your sales potential? If you answered "Yes", find out how you can increase your sales by 40%, even when your visitors are leaving your site! "Yes" you heard me right! Find out how this is possible with your own Virtual Sales Employee.

Accept Credit Cards Online - Add a Shopping Cart to Your Website

Selecting the shopping cart software

There is a variety of shopping cart software available that you can integrate into your site. We generally don't recommend that any business use a proprietary shopping cart system that is tied to one vendor, like Yahoo!. The problem is that if you don't like the service for whatever reason, you are stuck there, because the shopping cart is tied to their systems.

On the other hand, if you have a shopping cart that is transferable from host to host, such as the Zen Cart or OSCommerce shopping cart systems, you are free to use any host that supports their programming language - which is PHP - an industry standard language for dynamic Web sites.

If you want to accept Paypal exclusively, with a little programming, you may be able to circumvent installing a shopping cart. The transactions are handled off-site on Paypal's secure server. Paypal's website has a lot of valuable help for developers if you wish to look into that.

SSL Certificates

In order to accept credit card payments directly on your own website, you will need to have an SSL certificate. Check with your bank before buying your certificate. Some banks are very fussy about the security of your site, and you may need to buy a more expensive grade of SSL certificate.

Merchant Account

A merchant account is an organization that accepts the money from credit card purchases on your behalf, and deposits the money in to your bank account. You might get a quote from your bank for an Internet-capable merchant account. Sometimes your own bank can offer you better terms, faster deposits, etc. than a third party.

Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is the organization that manages getting the credit card information from the client, checking to be sure that the card is valid, gets authorization (or declined) information form the client's card bank, then hands the information to the organization that handles your merchant account (above) to get the money into your account.

A popular payment gateway is Authorize.net.

Paypal is also a Payment gateway. They handle all of the legwork of getting the money out of the clients account and getting the money to you. Paypal is very convenient, but usually more expensive than traditional Payment Gateways.

Another Payment Gateway that handles the secure transactions on their own server (remotely) is 2Checkout.

Final notes

Setting up an e-commerce website is not for beginners. Most people will need to find a reputable party to install the software, and set everything up. Your web host may offer development services, or can probably refer you to someone. Once the initial setup is done, a good shopping cart is easy enough for someone who is moderately computer literate to maintain and operate.

Be sure to check with your Payment gateway and merchant accounts to find out their fees. Especially if you have a very tight profit margin.

About the Author
Allen Howard is the senior Technical Support Representative for InfoServe Media, LLC. InfoServe Media is a full service Houston Website design company specializing in custom Web site design. In addition to superior website design that even a new business can afford, we also offer hosting and domain names. We can integrate a shopping cart on your website, and provide guidance for setting up your payment gateway. Or we can build a website for you from the ground up. See our website for complete website design and hosting solutions including website promotion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services, SSL certificates and more.

Break Through the Frustration of Optimization

"I am an artist," the man proudly proclaimed. "I don't care," the critic proudly responded. "The frame is too large, the colors are dark and it will not match my furniture," the critic further explained.

Many times web developers experience a similar scorn but not always from humans. A site has been designed with an interface that pops with beautiful GIFs and JPEGs, dazzles with Flash and functions like a charm with JavaScript. The search engines do not care. The content, the keywords and the tags do not correspond with the criteria of the search engines. Therefore, you are ignored.

It is a struggle between art and science that frustrates many. The responsibilities of web developing -- the art -- clash with the role of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- the science. That is why some companies and development firms are designating web developer and optimizer as two distinctive jobs.

Yet many smaller companies and shops still have the web developer fulfilling both roles. The problem is that optimization is becoming challenging and competitive. So here is some information to help start the optimization before, after or during the developing.

Content

It's all about the text.

Remember that optimization is all about the text. Search engines are text driven but there are still some basic HTML tags to keep in mind (i.e., h1, h2, meta tags, title tag). SEO helps improve search engine results but does not guarantee top ratings.

Patience and realistic goals will keep the frustrations low. Search engines have to crawl a site to determine what a site is about. This takes time, usually about a month, before crawls and indexing are completed by the various search engine spiders.

Take time to think (a lot) about the purpose of the website. Write down a lot of stuff in a word processing program even if it sounds silly at first. Then edit what you wrote. Edit some more, get some feedback and then start working on the keywords and keyphrases that identify the unique quality of your website.

Keywords and Keyphrases

Keywords used to be easy. Those days are gone. Keywords are highly competitive. Using two-word or three-word, maybe even four-word, phrases makes optimization less frustrating. A keyword phrase (keyphrase) helps identify the uniqueness of a website.

The keyword "game" will generate about 1 billion(!) results. The keyphrase "card game" will generate about 50 million results. That is a difference of approximately 950 million. The keyphrase "magic card game" will generate about four-million results. Time will need to be spent finding unique keyphrases but the benefits of narrowing the results, with multi-word phrases, provides a better chance of being noticed.

Keyword Density

The density formula is D = WC/KC (D = density; WC = word count; KC = keyword count)

For major keywords target 3-7% density
For minor keywords target 1-2% density

Keyword density measures how relevant keywords are in a page. The formula density = word count divided by keyword count will provide a general idea of the density percentage. For major keywords try to keep the density between three and seven percent. For minor keywords keep density between one and two percent. Try to optimize between five to ten keywords per web page.

Avoid the unethical practice of keyword stuffing. You will be penalized and possibly banned from the search engines which is worse than doing no optimization at all. Keyword stuffing uses various techniques but it is basically stuffing a page and/or meta tag with several occurrences of a keyword or keyphrase.

Keyword stuffing will result in being banned from the search engines.

Meta Tags

The meta tags are important although some will disagree. Meta tags have fallen out of favor because these tags used to be the magic solution to optimization. Not anymore. Keywords and content are more beneficial in getting a web site in top rankings. However, meta tags are still important. Meta tags are a part of the HTML and are used by most search engines to find a description of your website.

Therefore, no question about it, use the meta tags for description and keywords. Place these meta tags below the title tag on your page.





The keyword meta tag helps you keep track of the keywords and having these meta tags give a small boost to search engine ranking. While it is true that meta tags do not perform the magic they once did it is better to have the tags than to have none. Think of meta tags like vitamins. Vitamins are not necessary for being healthy but vitamins do provide a healthy boost.

Title Tag

The title tag should be unique for every page because every page will or should have different information regarding your website. Therefore, some pages will have some but not all of your total keyword list. For example, let's say that your web site provides information about card games; one page has data about magic card games and another discusses bridge card games.

The title tag of the page with information about magic card games could have a title like Magic Card Games available at ourwebsite.com. The bridge card games page would likely have a title of Bridge Card Games at ourwebsite.com.

The name of pages should also have keywords like magic_card_games.htm or bridge_card_games.htm.

Developing websites is fun. Optimization can be a chore. Yet by focusing on content, keywords and tags you have a good start to decreasing the frustration of optimization. Granted there is more to optimization than the items addressed in this article but these are the items that can be and should be tackled first.

About the Author
Lawrence Roth in an independent web developer who owns and maintains rothline.com. Lawrence has worked on various e-commerce and website projects. Lawrence writes articles and stories to submit to online publications.