Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization: How to Generate Free, High Pagerank Links Quickly and Easily

Here's a quick and easy search engine optimization (SEO) technique that anyone can use to generate free, high Google pagerank links to their site.

SEO in a nutshell: get quality links to your site; the higher the pagerank, the better.

The problem is that if you submit your site to a high pagerank directory or search engine, it can take months for your site to appear. Moreover, many high PR directories and search engines charge big bucks for the privilege of getting listed with them. For example, the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) directory takes several months or more to list a site. And Yahoo charges $299 per year for a commercial site to be listed in their directory.

While it's great to be listed in these directories and search engines, many will automatically find and list your site free if you have good quality links to your site. High pagerank links to your site indicate to many search engines that other sites that they rate highly link to you. Therefore, they conclude, your site will probably be useful to their users. So you deserve a higher pagerank, according to Google. And the higher your pagerank, the better your search engine visibility. It's part of the SEO game and you can learn how to play.

Now here's my secret to getting some high pagerank sites to link to you immediately and at no charge.

First you need to create a web page on your site with a list of links. You will be adding links to other sites on your links page in exchange for these sites adding your link to their link pages. So let's call this page a reciprocal links page. You don't just add any site to your reciprocal links page, however. You will be looking for high pagerank links to add to your links page. It's better if you include links to sites that are related to your products or services. To make search engines happy, limit each of your reciprocal links pages to about 50 links.

Many sites maintain their reciprocal link pages using the free LinkMan script from PHPJunkYard. If you wish, you could do the same, but it is not necessary. You can download this php script from http://phpjunkyard.com

The LinkMan script allows a site's visitors to add their links immediately after they add links to the site on their pages. So all you have to do is to find sites using this LinkMan script, add their link to your reciprocal links page, and you can immediately add your link to theirs.

Because the LinkMan script is free, the developer requires the following notice on the links page: "Powered by Link manager LinkMan 1.02 from PHPJunkYard - free php scripts."

You can find sites using LinkMan then by searching for the exact phrase "Powered by Link manager LinkMan 1.02 from PHPJunkYard" on Google, for example. Note that there are other scripts named Linkman, so you should not just search for "LinkMan". Play around with your search phrase to find also sites using earlier versions of LinkMan.

Visit some PHPJunkYard LinkMan link pages with a browser showing the Google pagerank. You will very soon come across a site using LinkMan that has a high Google pagerank. Bingo! Add their link to your reciprocal links page and then add your link to theirs. You immediately have a free link on a high pagerank site. Free instant SEO!

And that's a quick and easy search engine optimization technique you can use to generate free, high pagerank links.

The What, How, And Why Of Keyword Densities

Keyword density is an important concept for website owners to understand. Keyword density, in today's Internet, is what will ultimately improve your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. The importance of having a high SEO rating is absolutely critical if you wish to have high volumes of traffic to your website.

Let's talk first about SEO and what it does. If you type a search into google, yahoo, MSN, or any other major search engine there are likely to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of results come up on the search engine. So let us imagine that you sell ceramic dolls on your website. Now someone types "ceramic dolls" into a search engine, where in those thousands of website results does your website fall? Does your website rank on the first page? If you are like most websites, your ranking is probably somewhere in the depths of the results ranking well over number 1,000. Imagine a customer seeking what you sell, but not being able to find your business. Do you really think that someone is going to sift through the first 1,000 results to find yours?

Search engine optimization (SEO) simply means that you are going to employ methods that will move your website up in the search engines results for "ceramic dolls" or your own personal keywords. Research and common sense tells us that if a potential website visitor/customer does not find your website within the first 20 results, he or she will move on and try a new search or simply use one of the first 20 websites that he or she has found. This is where keyword density comes into play.

In years past I can remember finding web pages that had hundreds of words listed at the bottom of the page, this was a common practice. The reason for this was so that the search engines would place this website on the results page if a web surfer typed in any of those hundreds of words. Times have changed and so have search engines. Today the search engines are much more sophisticated in how they locate websites to list in their results.

Keyword articles (adhering to certain keyword densities) dramatically improve a websites SEO ranking. Going back to our ceramic dolls example, this site would want a keyword article written with the keywords "ceramic dolls" inside the article. This way when a web surfer types in "ceramic dolls," the site will come up much higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP's).

The search engines use certain algorithms that "read" these keywords for the surfer. If you go and type in any phrase into a search engine you will notice that the results show those keywords highlighted in bold. They show you how the keywords are listed in those web pages. Placing articles on your website that contain the keywords your customers are looking for will help your search engine ranking for these specific keywords.

Now, you cannot simply type the "ceramic dolls" over and over again on the same web page. With the sophistication of today's search engines, doing that would actually harm your search engine ranking. You need to provide articles that not only contain the keywords, but articles that also contain some relevant information as well.

There is great debate over what density to use in a keyword article. Suppose you want a 500-word article written on ceramic dolls. What percentage of the time (density) should the phrase "ceramic dolls" be used? Should it be in there 4% (20 times) of the time, 7%, or 12%? You must be careful because using the keywords too often hurts your rankings, while using too little doesn't improve your ranking enough. So what is the answer? The answer is that only those that develop the algorithms for the search engine companies actually know.........and they aren't talking. Most people use anywhere from 3%- 15% keyword densities. Some people believe that having the keyword phrase in the title and as the first word of every paragraph helps. Some believe that using "dolls that are ceramic" 18 times and "ceramic dolls" 2 times in a 500-word article with 4% density will work.

Here is what everyone does know, if you are not utilizing keyword rich articles on your website (regardless of the density you choose) you will not be very highly ranked in any of the search engines. Keyword rich articles are one of the best ways to advertise your site. If you want more visitors to your website, who translate into more customers, you must utilize keyword articles to improve your search engine rankings so that people can find your website.

Search Engine Optimization - Site map Optimization Technique

Site Maps can be a great tool for making search engines crawl through your web site in a much more effective manner, thereby helping you get more pages indexed, and ultimately getting you more visitors. Most people know what site maps are, as they can be seen on many of the major websites, although for those who don¡¦t, ¡§a site map is a page which contains a list of all the links within a website, under different categories and headings, just like a table of contents of a book¡¨. Now when a search engine hits the site map page, it gets to see all the links within that website and this enables it to crawl through those pages. It¡¦s just like guiding search engines with the help of a map, in this large universe of internet.

Site maps also help visitors to get an overview of the entire web site, and hence act as a great navigational tool. It helps visitors find specific pages through a single page, for which they might have had to follow several links to reach the desired page. Here are some examples of well designed site maps.

http://www.google.com/sitemap.html
http://www.lycos.com/sitemap.asp

This leads us to the next question, i.e. how should site maps be designed. Designing a site map can be as simple as designing any other static pages without any pictures, graphics, etc. But all effort should be made to keep the structure logical and simple. Its best to browse through the web, and check out a variety of site maps before you decide on what kind of structure you want to follow.

Here are some things you should keep in mind, before designing a site map.

Homepage Link: It is important to give a prominent link from the homepage to the sitemap page, so that visitors and search bots can easily hit the site map page. In fact, preferably there should be a link to the site map page from every page of your website.

Text Links: Plain text links should be used for all the links, as some search bots can have problems crawling through ¡§JavaScript¡¨.

Categories: It is important to organise the contents into well defined categories, and even sub-categories for easy navigation of the user. Although this doesn¡¦t have direct SEO implications, it makes more sense to the user.

Descriptive Content: It is ideal to add some content describing the links, as search engines tend to ignore pages, full of links. It is also important to use your targeted keywords in your descriptive content as well as in your anchor text.

Anchor Text Link: It is important to use page titles as your anchor text, so that you can increase your anchor text back links. This is helpful for search engine optimization as it increases your link popularity.