Bill Hartzer

A linking campaign is a necessary step in the overall success of your website. You can put up a website, have great web design, and have great content; but without other websites linking to your website no one will know about it. Furthermore, the search engines rely on links in order to find new websites and new web pages. A proper linking campaign will not only increase your websites online visibility and traffic, it will allow the search engines to find your site and help your website get indexed.

Although your corporate website does not allow customers to purchase products or services online, your company can benefit greatly from optimizing your website for the search engines. Ranking well in the search engine results will not only increase your businesses brand awareness, it will bring increased sales leads, which will lead to increased ROI from your corporate website.

If you run an ecommerce site, then you know that its important to make sure that your products show up in the organic search results ahead of your competitorsespecially if your competitor is selling the same products. Optimizing your ecommerce web site for the search engines can be tricky at times, so well examine whats really required in order for your products to rank better than your competitors products in the organic search results.

Whether its a corporate blog, a news-type blog, or even a personal blog, optimizing your blog for the search engines is a must. There are some simple changes that you can make to WordPress and Moveable Type that will make your blog more search engine friendly and make the search engines beg for more (more post and content, that is!). Optimizing a blog is just like optimizing any other website. The content and pages (posts) must be unique, they must be search engine friendly, and it needs links from other websites. If its a new blog, then you first need to make sure the blog software youre using is set up so that it takes advantage of all of the possible optimization features. Then, announce it to the world, work on getting some links to it, and start making posts.

Translating a web site into another language may sound easy--and it can be done without even knowing the other language. However, its not something to be taken lightlythere are a lot of other considerations if your online business in that language is going to be successful.

Are you using search engine optimization tactics that lead to SEO overkill You may not think so, but according to several SEO experts at the Search Engine Strategies conference held recently in Chicago, Illinois, you might be using what is called SEO Overkill. Michael Murray from Fathom SEO, Matt Bailey from the Karcher Group, and Heather Lloyd-Martin from SearchEngineWriting.com all discussed SEO Overkill.

The Best of the Web, one of the Internet original website directories (created in 1994), has decided to tackle the blogosphere in a big way by introducing a hand-edited blog directory. Although the directory was soft launched on November 12 of this year and officially launched November 15th at the WebmasterWorld Search Engine and Internet Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, the directory boasts over 5000 blogs. The Best of the Web blog directory is located at blogs.botw.org.

Does the length of your website's domain name registration affect the search results at Google This question has come up recently and a lot of website owners have been wondering about it, especially since it was mentioned in a patent awarded to Google in April. According to the patent, "Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith." According to this statement in the patent, domains that expire in 10 years are more valuable and legitimate than domains that will expire in less than a year.