Dirty Blue Widgets

Deciding on the ablest search engine optimization company can become a Herculean task, if you are not very sure of what you are looking for. But, following some key thumb rules will make you take an informed and educated decision.

Firstly, you should know, more than anyone else, what you are looking for. You ought to know what exactly you want the SEO company to do for you. Once you know your requirements, you will be in a position to decide whether the company is doing what you want them to do.

Often, misleading company ads claim to add your website into hundreds of search engines and assure good rankings too. No company can assure that and this does not work for two reasons. One, they will probably place your ad or website link in many websites, that too for free. Secondly, these sites that they submit your website to (or search engines as they call them) usually do not generate enough traffic to effect your website. This brings us to the most pertinent question. Which search engine do you generally use when you are looking for something? In more cases than none, it's Google or Yahoo. Will this company submit your website to them? Sounds doubtful.

Steer clear of companies who claim to give top rankings to your website immediately after submission to search engines. Nothing can be closer to falsehood than that. Also, stay away from firms that are more interested to make money than provide rules that can improve the ranking of your website. The company should strictly abide by the SEO code of ethics and not make false promises to its clients.

So, how do you choose a reliable SEO company? Above all, build trust in organizations that are very clear about their dealings with clients and those who do not make tall claims about improving or retaining search engine rankings of websites within an absurd amount of time.

Study their websites and decide if they sound sensible and reasonable to you. Do they emphasize on the importance of relevant keywords that, among other factors, will enhance the website rankings? Work with companies that have earned good recommendations in the industry. In other words, you can trust companies that have done a good job with people you know and can rely on.

Have you ever wondered exactly what you need to do to get your blog or website to #1 in Google. Well you needn't look any further because www.academyseocompetition.com now have SEO tutorials in podcast, video and text formats.

You can subscribe to their feedburner feed and receive these tutorials every day and soon you too will be an SEO expert.

The tutorials cover topics like link building and article writing which everybody else does too. But that is just the 101 part. We also go into the more complex stuff which most people are afraid to touch or genuinely have no knowledge about.

So come pay us a vists and subscribe to our feed ...you will be glad that you did!

Everybody, simply everybody with a website wants to be listed on Google. And why not, it is after all the most popular search engine used by millions of people all over the world, the doorway between you and thousands and thousands of visitors who will flock to your website once they spot you, and isn't the main purpose of putting up a website just that ? Although getting listed isn't the only thing required for you to get visitors, you also want a good rating, a high ranking which will put you in the spotlight and will give you the opportunity to be noticed. But perhaps your site is new on the block, maybe you think it's too small a fry to be picked up by Google. Relax that isn't even an issue, just sit back and look at all the options you have.

First of all, let us clear out a fundamental point. There are, as you probably know, two ways of doing things, namely the right way and the wrong way. Now, although the wrong way is clearly wrong it is of some importance that we know it thoroughly so as to avoid it completely.

Following are, to put it politely, the avoidable ways of getting listed on Google.

Google provides it's users with a way to put their URL's in queue for crawling at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Now the utter failure of this method probably has a little to do with the mechanics of the process. You see, once you have typed your website's address into the space available here it is put in a queue (behind oodles and oodles of other pages) for the GoogleBot to, well, crawl. Anything can happen after this. For one, your site might not get crawled, or suppose it dos get crawled (which in itself is about a million in one possibility) it might not be indexed by Google (!) So ultimately there's no telling where that URL of yours will end up going. But I am guessing wherever it goes it won't go anywhere near the first few pages of search results. So in other words this way is a complete waste of time. No one has really benefited from it, and if you ask me no one ever will.

And now the more likely way to be listed by Google.

If you want to notch up to that coveted spot on Google then simply crawl another site. You know what they say about girls, go gaga over them and they don't cut you an inch of slack, but ignore them and go to someone else and they'll be eating right out of your hands, well believe it or not that principle works here too, only in a less jealous fashion that is. Once you put up your URL on some other site it might chance to be spotted by GoogleBot and followed upon. That chance following up will be your golden ticket to Google.

So, here's what you can do, you can either put up your URL in like a million different sites or you can use a little sense and put it up on a few popular sites which will fetch you the sort of traffic even a couple of dozen others won't. Pick a few sites like Amazon.com to plant your flag into, and soon you'll sink your teeth right in to Google itself.

I know what you are thinking; you are probably wondering just how you will manage to get these larger sites to put you up and in the course grudging me for putting you on the same chase yet again. But don't worry I promise it's not as hard as it sounds. Just get yourself into a few discussion sites and forums and get involved in discussions about related topics; only put your hyperlink along with your signature.

Statutory Warning: don't try and get prompt results by pulling smart alec'ish tricks like typing in your hyperlink and adding a jerky GO HERE! caption. That won't help you earn anything besides a good whack from the moderator's of the site. Invest some time into this and really participate in the discussions, once you do that you will earn the liberty of sharing your URL with others.

If you have a certain amount of flair for writing and are proficient with words then you have an advantage over others like you. Believe it or not you can put this talent in line to work on your behalf.

Write a few well researched well planned out articles about topics which might appeal to your targeted market. As in the previous method there are no shortcuts here and nothing, absolutely nothing, besides quality content will do you any good. Try and act smart, copy paste from elsewhere or simply try to get away with a badly done job and you will be at the receiving end of a royal brush-off from readers and editors.

Writing an article is really not as hard as it sounds. Since it's about your specific line a little research wouldn't really cost you much time or labor. Record your results, go ahead experiment with a few situations, come up with hypothetical situations to explain particular problems and provide your analysis or solution for them. Once you have done a good job (and believe me when I say you will know when you have done a good job) proudly provide your own name and hyperlink of your site at the end of the article.

If out of the two procedures we have discussed today you choose to use the second one, that is to write articles, then here are a few additional tips. A common phenomenon seen amongst most first time writers is their propensity to quit after writing the very first article, which usually convinces them of how completely incapable they are of the task. Do not get bogged down by similar thoughts. Keep writing even if you think your efforts are not as good as you would like them to be. The more you write the finer your skills will get, the easier it will be for you to express yourself and in no time your articles will be scooped up by editors for their own sites. The more number of such sites you are included into the greater number of means of letting your link be known to people. As your popularity increases so will your chances of being put up by Google. Good Luck.

SEO Tips for Blogs

Originally conceived to be something like an online journal for individuals has become yet another tool businesses can use to market themselves online. Web logs or blogs are now being used not just for the sheer purpose of writing, but also as means SEO (search engine optimization) experts use to increase a website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERP).

An interesting thing about keeping and maintaining a blog (also known as blogging) is that anyone can blog. What will make a blog more successful than most is simply a keen sense of its target readership. Of course, it will not harm the blogger (a person maintaining a blog) to possess a few basic skills navigating the Internet and creating links to other websites and blogs.

Bloggers today are finding that they can not only write and publish their thoughts for free, but also can find themselves getting compensated for writing. This is because one of the techniques in SEO is to create content that is rich in keywords, which is basically what search engines look for in ranking web pages in its SERPs.

That said, here are some tips to make your next blog an effective SEO tool.

1, Choose a Theme (and Stick to It)
Most blogs never gain a real readership because it simply is a mishmash of a writer's thoughts, with very little coherent theme to bind the entire blog together. If the blogger does it for the sheer purpose of a journal, there's really nothing wrong with that.

However, as an SEO, a blog has to have a theme that will tie all the posts (individual articles) together. This is because instead of just looking for keywords, a search engine will also assess whether the page just happens to have a lot of keywords mentioned in the post or whether the entire blog is about the topic it is searching for. The former will rank less than the former in the SERPs. Given this point, it will do you well to pick a theme that you are interest and won't tire of writing about.

2. A Place You Can Call Home
Working alongside the idea of a theme, When creating your blog (whether with your own domain name or an a free blog site), give it a URL that has words related to the theme. For example, if you are going to blog about bonsai making, try to use words that are related to that in your blog's URL (such as www.bonsaienthusiast.com). Name your blog using words that are relevant to your theme as well. Search engines look at these things as well to determine how high your blog could possibly rank.

If you are blogging on a hosting site, it is possible to have your blog delegated into a proper category. This will help make a search engine easier to find your blog given that the category is strongly related to themes and search keywords.

On a related note, your individual posts should also be titled with words that are closely related to your theme. Again, working on a blog with a bonsai theme, one post could be titled "Miniature Trees: How to Get Started" while another one could be "Selecting the Right Pot for a Bonsai". This will give your posts a URL that is rich in keywords, which helps in a page's ranking on SERPS (but you already know that, right?).

3. Link And it Shall Be Linked Unto You
Another thing about blogs that SEO experts are finding to become a great advantage is the fact that blogs make it easy to link to other blogs, which in turn makes it easy for other blogs to link to you.

This is yet another criterion a search engine uses to rank a particular page in the results pages. The more incoming links it possess about the keyword in search will increase ranking status because the page shows that a lot of people think what you've written is a good source of information.

So when writing on your blog, be sure to take the time to read other people's blogs and other online articles related to your theme. Create links to them so that you point your readers to more information. This will increase the chances of other people creating links that will point to your blog.

4. Keep it Coming
Since blog content is so easy to create, search engines scour blog sites very regularly. That means if you keep on creating new content on a regular basis, search engines will have to keep up with what's new on your blog.

By regularly creating fresh content on your blog, search engines will tend to look to your blog first before others that are not maintained and renewed as regularly as you do. It helps in the rankings as well, which is the whole point of this article, right?

These tips are just to get started on using a blog for SEO. As you go along, you'll find more tricks of the trade that will help you push you up the ranks on SERPs. Of course realistically, don't expect to rank on the top 3 pages on your first try. But give it a few weeks. And for as long as you keep to the tried and true principles, it may not be that far until you've captured a good ranking for your blog.