Web CEO 7.0 is a suite of 12 programs that cover all aspects of SEO optimization and website promotion. The company broke new ground when they made the lowest level of Web CEO a free product in 2004, a bold step but one which seems to be paying off. My first introduction to Web CEO was an email that offered me the amazing Free software.

Web CEO is a feature rich application and is backed by a superb team of developers. New updates are constantly available (even for the free version) and response times for technical queries are excellent.

Optimize Your Site:

Find best keywords. The keyword mining software will help you pick out keywords with lowest competition and highest demand, i.e. best from the SEO POV.

Optimize your site for high rankings: the page analyzer built into our SEO software will give you detailed SEO advice in plain English.

Promote Your Site:

Submit your URLs to search engines by using our wise and safe SEO submission software.

Know who links to your site, and to your competition. Web CEO’s link analysis software reports inbound links, and even analyzes their text which is important for SEO.

Find link partners and build link popularity. Any SEO software would be incomplete without a tool for building link popularity.

Manage paid search campaigns. Though not directly related to organic SEO, PPC software is an important Web marketing tool.

Analyze Your Site:

Check your rankings with search engines. Web CEO software allows for tracking your SEO success with an advanced ranking checker and keywords trends.

Track and analyze your visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, revenues, etc. with more than 120 live analytical reports built into our software

Maintain Your Site:

Pinpoint broken links and other errors on your site.

Edit your Web pages in the WYSIWYG mode.

Upload HTML and other files to your server.

Monitor your website to know if it is up or down.

I don’t think any webmaster should be without at least the free edition of Web CEO. If you’re a serious webmaster or site owner, or active in flipping web estate (websites), upgrade or purchase Web CEO 7.0 before leaving this site. It’s must have software and will be money well spent. I can’t imagine pulling the traffic I need to make the income I make without it.

seo-guy

Technorati Tags: web ceo, seo software

I’ve read quite a few articles recently about submitting articles to other websites and to free article sites. It’s a great way to secure backlinks. Incidentally, I’ll gladly write an article for your SEO-related website or blog, providing my signature bio and link is published with it.

What I haven’t seen mentioned much is the value of strategically creating a large number of backlinks within your own website.

In 2002 I built my first affiliate marketing website after purchasing and studying various popular affiliate marketing courses available at that time. An SEO strategy touted by affiliate marketing gurus centered around building 5 or 6 HTML product pages and creating text links from the menu bar to these product pages. In phase two, the publisher would then add a few new article pages every week, linking these articles to the product pages. Within a year or two, 50 to 300 pages would link to each product page. The process would often be accelerated by hiring content writers from Elance.

Hundreds of internal backlinks would improve Google ranking while also providing hundreds of potential landing pages, each linking to a money page.

The model proved incredibly effective on my affiliate sites and we began to add article pages to our SEO client’s sites to improve their rankings as well.

A new spin on this model is to substitute a blog for the article pages, linking posts to the static affiliate product pages or pages promoting the company’s products or services. To date this has not been as effective as the HTML article pages and we suspect it’s because archived blog content may be receiving a lower content value than a permanent page. I’d like to get your take on this and welcome your comments.

If you’ve been missing out on the power of internal backlinks, give the Affiliate Marketer’s Website Model a try.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, developing backlinks, backlink strategy

A question I’m often asked is, “Is it worth using meta tags?” As long as SEO experts have been publishing advice on search engine optimization, the answers have been as varied as the respondents.

From my perspective, anything you can do to make it easier for both users and search engine crawlers to understand your web pages has benefits. While often abused, meta tagging provides some assistance in this regard.

Title tags should be a focused indication of the on-page content with the primary keywords to the left (first), yet they should be written in sentence form and if relevant, with a call to action. Writing page titles is both an art and a science. It is my experience that titles count on all search engines.

Moving on to the description and keywords tags, I find that Yahoo! Search gives them considerable weight, while Google does not. A meta description should be an elaboration of the title. A few search engines will display the meta description you supply, so its use as a link description in the search results will influence clickthrough to the web site.

Having worked on more than one hundred site optimization projects over the past ten years, the most common mistake I see is coding the exact same title/meta information on every page of the web site. This may save the web developer and content editors some time on site maintenance, but it does very little to distinguish one page from another. Search engines index web pages, not websites.

Dynamic web sites can automatically populate title and meta description tags from the database. Be sure that your CMS software provides unique titles, keywords and description capabilities. WordPress, for instance, will provide unique titles and keywords with the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin.

I welcome your experiences with meta tagging and look forward to your comments.

Brandon

P.S. Here’s a reply to a previous question about meta tagging.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, meta tags, meta tagging

Like an investment plan, search engine optimization produces the most reliable returns when implemented automatically every month. There’s no mystery to gaining top search engine positioning. Tricks and shortcuts don’t work; at least not for long.

SEO must be a win-win-win: a win for your site, a win for the sites who link to you and a win for Google. Google and other search engines are really looking for two things: great content and great backlinks (the inbound links from other ‘on topic’ related websites to yours).

1) Off-Page Search Engine Optimization: Developing Great Backlinks
The most significant factor in your page ranking is it’s popularity or PageRank, based upon the number of ‘votes’ your site has received by way of quality inbound links. A quality link is one from a site of the same topic as yours (a site that targets the same keywords as yours) with well-chosen anchor text (the actual text used in the link to your site), preferably from a site with a higher ranking than yours. That’s a tall order and most website owners and web designers are at a complete loss as to how to obtain these absolutely vital backlinks.

The Problem: Obtaining backlinks is not design! Securing backlinks, often from competitors and peers, requires public relations skills; creating a buzz across the Internet. Writing press releases, article publication and distribution, working the forums and other networking skills are required in gaining quality inbound links. I’m sure you’re beginning to understand why web designers usually fail at obtaining backlinks for their clients, and consequently your search engine positioning suffers.

2) On-Page Search Engine Optimization: Creating Great Content
You must make your content more attractive to the search engines without affecting readability for your visitors. Begin with an extensive keyword analysis to come up with just the right keywords to target, then tweak the text for improved keyword density. Add a highly optimized title for each page and add meta information. Back-end upgrades are generally made to make certain the search engines can crawl the entire site, and  any pages you don’t want indexed (ie: secure data for logged in visitors only) should be isolated with a robots file. In many cases, significant alterations to the web pages are not possible without affecting readability, so you’ll want to write article pages, based upon your content, to provide the kind of keyword-rich content the search engines would like to see.

Low cost monthly SEO packages.

Google is launching a new product, Custom Search Business Edition. It offers a custom branded search feature without displaying Google advertising, advertising that often takes visitors out of our websites to competitors’ sites or MFA (Made for AdSense) websites.

SEO Web Design is a web development strategy that determines where the website traffic will come from for your website before your graphic designer begins developing the design concept. The most drop-dead-gorgeous award-winning website without traffic is completely useless.

Most web design clients already have the core ‘design’ worked out before they contact their ‘designer’. It’s generally all about visual placement and marketing never enters the design equation. They’re actually looking for a ‘mouse-pusher’, not a ‘designer’, to convert their vision into a website. The designer wants to make the customer happy (after all, the customer is always right) and just builds the thing the way the client wants. Fortunately, most of the websites out there are client-designed on that very model and consequently fail to produce results. This presents an enormous advantage to website owners who hire a an SEO design firm that develops a site with built-in search engine optimization.

Far superior SEO results can be achieved by incorporating traffic building strategies at the earliest stages of design. The real key to getting a great volume of targeted website traffic is to clarify your Internet Marketing Strategy before designing or redesigning your website.

Determine exactly what are you selling. What products or services is your site marketing? Where are you positioned for price and quality. High quality – High Price will certainly need a very different strategy than Mid Quality – Bargain Price. Your site must be focused and target the keywords for your USP, your unique selling position.

Analyze the competition. Understand exactly who your top competitors are. How are they priced and what is their sales strategy. What are their policies, products or services offered, keywords targeted, site rankings? How are they perceived by their customers? Be unique in your keyword selection and website’s presentation. Being a ‘me too’ cliche isn’t attractive to customers or search engines.

Determine who your customers are. Evaluate demographics like age, sex, income, what they read, and the types of websites they like to visit. Who makes the buying decision and what causes them to make a buying decision? What will it take for you to attract these people to your website, and what will be required to convert your visitors into buyers?

Use this information to create a Web Traffic and Keyword Plan. Design a navigation flow to guide visitors step by step towards taking the action you want. Developing a comprehensive plan will greatly improve results and the bottom line for your website.

SEO Book is a 328 page downloadable ebook currently available for only $79.

Since 2004, over 10,000 SEO professionals have learned SEO by reading the SEO Book. We often reference Aaron Wall’s ebook in posts and comments on our blogs.

This is an SEO bible you can’t afford to be without. No tricks or black hat tactics; just good old strategies that actually work.

Be sure to check out the SEO Book blog as well.

Technorati Tags: seo book, seo ebook, learn seo

One way to increase the usability of a website is with the proper use of frames. Frames basically segment the browser into different portions and each portion is independent from the others.
Ultimately, your goal as a website developer should be to make it easier for more people to use your site, whether with using frames or not.

Here are some factors to consider:

Content is difficult or impossible to print with frames

Web browsers tend to select the frame to be sent to the printer randomly. In most cases, the user cannot print the frame that he or she wants because the computer selects the frame which is the focal point of the webpage.

On the whole, frames sites are unprintable unless a ‘Print this Page’ button is provided, linking to a PDF version of the web page. Adding such a page means two page revisions must be produced and tested every time you update.

Linking issues with frames

Using frames to display third-party content can raise issues of infringement of copyrights and trademarks. If you must use frames, display your own content unless you have written permission from third party content owners.

Bookmarking with frames difficult or impossible

Few visitors will have the skills to bookmark a particular frame when using framed websites. The basic structure of frames deviates from the normal structure of website unification.

Search engine positioning suffers with frames

Search engines encounter problems when indexing framed sites. Search engine spiders are drawn to what developers refer to as black hole pages. Many spiders simply stop indexing when the first frames tags appear. If you’re looking for a high ranking on major search engines, ditch the frames.

Over-all usability suffers with frames

Surfers often become confused with the structuring of a website using frames. Multiple scrollbars add to the problem. If a designer hides the scrollbars, some of the contents of the website may become inaccessible.

Ease in design?

One of the key advantages of using frames in website development is that it is supposed to make the job easier for the developer. Newcomers to website development frequently rely on frames to cut the downloading time of their websites, offsetting their lack of knowledge of external CSS and scripts. Experienced developers place stylesheets and scripts outside the page and they will normally be cached by the browser, requiring a single short download.

The apparent ease of use can be misleading and most of us have encountered frames sites where links and buttons open entire new pages into a single frame instead of the parent window.

Quicker downloads?

With the use of frames, some of the site content need not be downloaded every time a click is made. In some situations this can provide quicker downloads. Advocates of frames argue that the time saved in downloading an extra hundred or so lines of HTML provide a considerable reduction in page download time. Five years ago that would have been a significant consideration. With high speed internet and today’s processors those lines are downloaded faster than you can blink. Header and logo images are already cached, as are buttons and footer graphics. Any time savings is negligable at best.

It is my opinion that the disadvantages of frames far outweigh any advantages, particularly where search engine optimization is concerned. I welcome your feedback, including disagreement with my conclusions.

Technorati Tags: frames architecture, html frames, seo frames, frames bad

Starting up a new website is the most daunting challenge a webmaster/blogger faces. Weeks of sleepless nights, getting the site ready for launch, are likely to produce only a trickle of visitors within the first weeks. It can be downright discouraging.

So how do we get eyeballs to the site? Job 1 is knowing your target market; your audience. Do you know the top twenty sites in your niche market? Why does your target audience like those sites? Have you been active on the forums and blogs for your niche market? Do you frequently comment and join discussions? Have you made some connections? Do you have a feel for your audience and their needs?

When launching a new website for a bricks and mortar business my clients often generate traffic from existing relationships with customers, partners, suppliers and even the press. They add their website URL to their brochure and flyer mailouts and drive traffic to their site. Internet-only businesses don’t have that luxury.

So where do we get eyeballs? We must become part of our niche communities. I’m surprised at the number of bloggers who are afraid to comment on blogs they feel are competitors.

For the record, if you have an SEO blog, you’re most welcome to comment (yes, even disagree with the writer) and leave your website URL in the signature block at the bottom. If you’d like to post an SEO-related article on this site as a guest contributor or regular author, contact us. If our visitors like your comments and articles they are very likely to click the signature link to your site. More eyeballs!

Email other bloggers. Bloggers are always hunting for content. Time your offer for content or a scoop. When you see a blog with YouTube clips two days in a row, or very skimpy content, you know they’re scraping the barrel for content or simply too busy to write. A really nice article would be welcome about then.

Get involved with social networking communities like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BUMPzee! and Blog Cave. Visit other sites, post comments on peoples sites, leave messages to them in the communities, join their communities and add them to your contacts. Include the social networking buttons and/or widgets on your site.

Make sure people can vote for your site and subscribe to your RSS feed. Is your Orange RSS feed button prominently displayed close to the top of the page? Have you made Technorati, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, digg and other buttons available so people can vote for your content?

Have you joined forums in your niche market? You have to be more careful on forums as they don’t accept naked self promotion the way blogs do. However, with some tact, you can present a solution to a guest’s problem and then provide a link for a download or additional information on your site.

Include link bait wherever you can. Is there a plugin or tool you can offer as link bait? How about a top ten list? Are you privy to some latebreaking news or an insider scoop? Can you give away a free ebook? Something really funny can spread like wildfire, especially if you include a ’send this to your friends’ script.

Lastly, and most importantly, write good content. Make it interesting and helpful. I keep a file of ideas for future articles so I don’t run dry (hopefully).

Consistency pays. Plan your work for networking and posting to blog or updating your website and then work your plan.

I welcome your input…

I’m often asked about ‘Black Hat SEO’, the use of underhanded tactics to gain higher rankings than deserved. A good example would be Buy Blog Comments, who promote a new service offering to leave comment spam on blogs for those wanting to increase SEO rankings. Buy Blog Comments offers to leave spam comments at a rate of 100 comments for $19.99, 500 comments for $99.99 and 1,000 comments for $199.99.

On their website their service is described as follows:

Blog comments help your site rank better in the SERPs. We hired a few people who go through a list of blogs in a database we set up and pick out blogs that are in your niche. They then read through blog posts and leave a comment that has to do with the blog post they read, that way it wont get deleted. Your backlink will then be on a targeted blog, giving you more weight in the search engines.

I believe this will hurt legitimate bloggers who rely on a hard-won readership that comments on their blogs. Carried to the levels Buy Blog Comments intends to take this could cause Google to place considerably less weight on comments in their algorithms, and that will hurt the entire blogging community. Many CMS sites, not generally grouped with blogs, but where commenting is an option (Joomla!, Mambo, Typo 3, etc.), are likely to be painted with the same brush in that event.

True, some comment spammers have profited from the practice, but in most cases that I’ve heard about they don’t just leave a few hundred comment spams, they leave tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of them. Fortunately, Akismet and the use of no follow tags in the comments sections helps curb the practice. I think it’s time bloggers take a stand against such blatant attacks and begin adding spammers to the Akismet blacklist.

Your thoughts?