I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me, “How to do I get my site to come up in the top ten of the search engines so I can get hits and sell my product?”

What they really want to know is, “How can I get people to show up to my website without spending any money on advertising my site!”

People usually don’t like my answer because accomplishing a “top ten ranking” on any search engine always requires careful thought along with a significant amount of work.

Three types of “Search engines” abound on the Internet. They include true search engines, directories, and links pages.

At last count approximately 10,000 sites referred to themselves as search engines, though only about a dozen sites rate your attention since they drive 97% of the Internet’s search traffic.

These sites include Google, Yahoo!, Overture, MSN, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Lycos, DMOZ, and a few others.

When a visitor logs onto a search engine looking for information, they enter “keywords” about the subject in hopes of obtaining a list of relevant websites.

Each search engine or directory operates with its own rules about judging a site’s relevancy to a keyword search.

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Three Ways on How Content Can Attract Free, Long Term, Targeted Traffic to Your Website
 by: Mohamad Zaki Hussein

Many people out there said that “content is king” when it comes to web traffic generation. Even though, IMHO, content is not the only king, I tend to agree with them. If done properly, content can attract free, long term, targeted traffic to your website.

Here’re three ways on how content can attract free, long term, targeted traffic to your website:

1. Content attracts free search engine traffic

It has been well-known that the search engines love content. The more content you have in your website, the more keywords you can rank for, and thus the more traffic you can get from the search engines.

However, not every content can do well in the search engines. The search engines have sets of rules (also known as algorithms) to rank websites in their indexes and some of these rules go beyond content (off-page factors). You need to “optimize your site” to meet these rules if you want to rank well in the search engines.

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If you do business as an affiliate, then you’re constantly concerned with getting your name and your business information out there. You probably send a lot of e-mails, post on message boards, and submit articles to business e-zines. These are great techniques for making contacts, but are you taking full advantage of the visibility these forums create?

One of the best ways of creating new business is to include a Signature File with everything you post, send or submit. What exactly is a sig file? It’s that little paragraph beneath a person’s signature at the end of an article, posting or e-mail. This is your opportunity to let people know who you are and to direct them to your business.

Now you may already include your url at the end of your correspondence. That’s great, but is that enough? Not quite. Of course it’s great to have your url so that anyone who’s interested in what you’re saying can immediately check out your business site, but wouldn’t they be more likely to click if you included a short description of what you do? For example, rather than closing an e-mail or posting with:

Manny Jackson

http://rockoutandrollover.com

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You won’t be involved in Internet marketing long before you see the term "Joint Venture." Perhaps you are familiar with the term from its application in the business world but don’t see how it would apply to Internet marketing.

Actually, it is one of the most exciting ways to generate targeted web traffic that you will find.

For purposes of definition, you could say that a joint venture is an operation involving two or more Internet marketers, each contributing unique resources for their mutual benefit. That may sound a little stuffy, so look at it this way. Say you and your neighbor both need to plant trees in your respective backyards. He only has a wheelbarrow and you only have a shovel. Neither of you can do the job effectively by yourself, but together you can accomplish the job for both of you. That’s a joint venture (backyard variety!).

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How I Boosted My Monthly AdSense Profits from $673 to $21,398 in Just 6 Months
All of my keyword research/analysis and search engine optimization skills suddenly came together in October 2004.

I had just written my first book, and I just wanted to get some free traffic to my website so I could start selling the it.

Triple Your Income with Ad Layout Changes

I had been making about $600 per month from Google AdSense for a long time. As I was researching traffic and revenue techniques, I ran across a tip on how to triple your adsense income (by tripling clickthrough rate).

I implemented the change (relax, I’ll put all the tips below) and it worked! I went from $20 per day to $40, $50, and $60 days, with the same amount of traffic! My click through rate actually quadrupled in 10 days.

I then wrote keyword-optimized articles on 90 keyphrases I had found. This led to a 150% increase in traffic - no small feat considering that my website already had 300 articles.

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Keyword analysis is a major part of search engine marketing. Choose the right key phrase,check the market and calculate the ROI in terms of time and money.

I am just trying to redefine “The Boston Matrix” in terms of keypharse analysis, hoping that it will help in your investments.

There are three steps to it,

1. Market

2. Competition

3. Conversion Ratio

Let me explain it one by one:-

Market:

Check different key phrases using suggestion tools like word tracker,inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ or www.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp , it doesn’t have to be perfect as we are just looking for keyphrases with high search shares.Choose as many as possible with promising market.Google’s Adword can also be used.

Competition:

Search in Google or yahoo and see how many sites are listed under respective key phrase search.For example when I search for ‘key phrase’ in google it says, - Results 1 - 10 of about 4,800,000 for ‘key phrase’- this gives the primary idea of the competition. Take the first ten websites in SERP and check the following factors:-

1. Back Links (directly proportional to PR)

2. Saturation

3. Ranked Page’s onpage attributes like Title, keyword density e.t.c

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Searching: Past To Present
 by: James Trivolette

I’m 30 years old and have been online ever sense the old commodore 64. When I first started surfing the net on my brand new Compaq, I used yahoo to get me where I was going. Then, I found Google. Google has been there for me ever since. I loved the way it’s clean interface would load up minutes quicker then yahoo on my 56k dial up line. I loved the way it seemed to pick out the sites I was looking for. Google would reign supreme for some years (at least to me).

In recent months with the search engine wars swinging into full effect we have seen many changes in all of them. MSN and yahoo wanting to become more like Google while Google tries to become more like them. Google has released many new products, some good others not so good. They wowed us with Google map. They gave us another option with G-mail. They tried to make buying retail easier, with Google local search. This would have been a great way to start things except they didn’t stop there. Now, G-mail has been hacked (they have since fixed the security of the mail system). Google analytics was the big talk of the town being able to show web site stats in real time. Real time? When it first came out Google analytics did not update real time instead it took 72 hours. Even now Google analytics only updates once a day and is no longer accepting new accounts. Another amazing product released to early? There were a couple other bombs release by Google as well.

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I am not one to have New Year’s resolutions, but I do plan ahead. As we reached the last quarter of 2004, I decided that 2005 would be, for me, the year of article writing and RSS.

I have kept to my plan, but what has been happening on the RSS front? I have dutifully been using Blogs and RSS throughout 2005 to date. What about everybody else, though? Has this been the year when RSS has taken off?

One thing for sure is that there has been a lot of activity amongst internet marketers. According to Overture, they had 43,947 searches for RSS in April 2005. Out of interest, that compares to 825,674 for internet marketing. It is unlikely that an ordinary consumer would search for RSS; they are interested in the subject rather than the technical delivery term. Over 40,000 searches is high, and I think it is a fair bet that a majority of those will be marketing people trying to get up to speed and trying to understand what all the fuss is about.

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The results of the social bookmarking experiment I have been carrying out are materialising. There have been some surprising results and some results that have restored my faith in the browsing public. I have been pondering whether or not to release the results as I do not want the spammers to tarnish something that is still relatively pure. But as you can see I finally decided to go ahead and publish.

I have mentioned before that I have been looking at social bookmarking as a way to drive traffic to websites. The idea behind social bookmarking is that you share your favourite bookmarks with others, the idea being that if you found these links useful then others might too. Some social bookmarking sites also allow visitors to rate the usefulness of your bookmarks, this allows the truly useful bookmarks to become the most popular. So in theory spam should be removed by natural selection. To carry out my experiment I created three articles. Two of these articles were good well researched pieces, whilst the third was self promotional spam, but not too obvious. I posted these articles to twelve social bookmarking sites and then waited for the results. The results were to be measurable traffic to one of my sites.

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Article Marketing Creates a Steady Flow of Fresh Content

Article writers, website owners, and site visitors all benefit through articles posted online. Simply put, the author’s message gets broad exposure. Sites display their articles (some permanently), along with a link to their website. The ezine or website owner gets constantly updated content (site pages) without paying for it. That makes their website sticky - encouraging visitors to stick around. And readers get fresh, useful information on any topic imaginable.

Plenty is written to help authors write and submit their offerings (See the extensive free how-to collected at http://www.promotewitharticles.com). Yet almost nothing tells website owners or editors the best way to handle articles they use. Merely slapping a slew of articles onto your site won’t bump your search engine rankings and traffic much.

Respect the Whole Article Marketing Process

1. Respect the Article Writers

- Request permission before posting their article(s) - unless it’s from an article bank or permission was specifically granted

- Include the writer’s Sig (signature) file at the end - Ask if that’s their current or preferred Sig

- Create a live (clickable) link to the author’s website

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