Are Links Important For Search Engine Rankings

The amount of quality links pointing to your website determines the popularity of your websites with many of the search engines, so it is very important to obtain quality links. However, you need to know where your website stands in the search engine rankings in order to see how much work you need to do to increase and maintain that popularity rating.
Another way to build links is through free content creation or free article submissions. When creating your website you will need to fill your site with fantastic content and make updates so other sites want to link to your site. Search engines are now smart enough to know that content is related, so, links from relevant sites are more important then links from sites which are irrelevant.
The assumption still is that if a site has valuable content or services to offer that other webmasters will link to that particular site. Most importantly, work on your content for natural linking from other websites. It is hard to get one way links but if you have good content that goes far beyond other sites people will want to link to you, it is still harder to get one way links than it is to get reciprocal links.
Since page rankings is very important to the major search engines, and links influence this, it is important to create a game plan on how to build links to your site. A well laid out plan will help in establishing the overall link plan and strategy to drive traffic to your site. As time goes on your site will grow and your page rank will get better and you will have better chances securing quality links. As you website continues to grow and build in popularity you will need to quality links from other sites pointing to your site to keep your rankings. Link building never stops, if you stop link building and other sites stop linking to you, you could possibly lose your ranking on the search engines.
The amount and quality of links you need will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword phrases for which you are optimizing. If you put in the time and work on your link building efforts over time you will see results in the long run.
Article directories work with many different partners and by writing articles your articles can show up on many different sites. Your best bet in these times is to write articles and submit it to article directories. By using article submission services and directory submission services you are able to increase your ranking to your website, by submitting you are creating one way links back to your site.
Using automated tools are not link farms, the reason for this is because you decide who you want to trade links with each and every week. Continue building quality links and you will see that in time it will all pay off.
Getting the one-way link is more difficult to obtain than reciprocal links, but the pay off will come if you get solid long-term links and you will see the search engine ranking results increase.
David Marc Fishman is the owner of http://www.linknetics.com and article submission site The link marketing software that promotes http://www.linknetics.com/link-exchange.html

Establishing Internet Traffic

One of the best ways to get high targeted traffic and one way links to your site is to write articles and submit them to Article Directories, Ezine Publishers, and High traffic websites that accept article submissions.
Keep you web site content fresh and exciting to your viewing audience. When search engines rank sites they look at many different factors, they look at content, links, continuous content that keeps visitors coming back for more, concentrate on this points and your site will take off. Good web site content (next to keywords) has been and always very important for marketing your website and being successful, if you don?t market your site will suffer. When you're trying to develop a successful web site you soon realize that your web site content is an important part of your success strategy. If you are looking to get traffic the natural way via the search engines and you have a lot of patience it will take time to get traffic, but if you have money to spend you can shortent the time to get traffic, it will cost you but the traffic will come quite quickly. Warm up your customers by providing great content and they'll be more likely to make a purchase.
Another important factor is on page keywords, you need to choose relevant keywords and put them in the body of your text of the site, when you choose the right keywords they become relevant to your site and search engines favor this, the relevant keywords are keywords that are found in the body of your text on your website, keyword weighting in the body of your content is important and, keyword proximity is going to be the difference of your site being listed on page 50 or on page 1 of the search engine results. Put keywords in the headings and sub headings so that the Search Engines have an easier time indexing your pages.
Reciprocal linking involves you trading links with other webmasters, be sure that your website topic is relevant to link partners site. Depending on the conditions, some Adwords members pay more for actual purchase made from links from Adsense users. Websites with PR3 and over that have high traffic and exchange links with them. This includes your bio, contact information and links to your site.
When looking at how much time you spent on promoting and marketing your website, you could make a graph to show the sites growing traffic and the effort you put into your site (link building, article writing, optimization and reciprocal link exchange) the curve of the graph would be an exponential curve. This is why so many people give up in the early phases of search engine optimization and traffic growth ? they simply don?t see the results that they feel their effort should have earned them. Ad website optimization techniques, promotion and submission to all types of search engines and you can find your marketing techniques will boost your traffic.
In order to drive traffic to a website, getting the website listed in the search engines, either through search engine optimization or through pay-per-click advertising is pretty important.
David Marc Fishman created Linknetics, submit article and web directory site. He offers free membership to create one way links

Search Engine Submission Tools Open Traffic Floodgates To Websites

Search engine submission tools are excellent tools when it comes to getting our websites indexed in the search engines. Such tools can either be provided by search engine submission services or in the form of software. What they can do for us is rather straightforward ? submitting our website details for inclusion in the search engines. Why is it so crucial that we make use of these search engine submission tools?
There are a few reasons why we submit to search engines. One reason is to get our websites indexed as quickly as possible. Indexing is important so that people can locate our websites in the search engines. Websites that are not indexed cannot be found at all, so it doesn?t matter even if we have built a 1000 page website. Indexing in search engines is powerful because search engines network with one another. Once it is picked up by one search engine, the rest would slowly catch up. One trick is to submit your website to MSN, as they allow you to suggest websites for their search engine spiders to explore. MSN tend to index websites faster than Yahoo and Google. Once your website is accepted and indexed in MSN, the rest would follow shortly.
Another reason why we submit to search engines is to optimize exposure of our websites. There are literally hundreds to thousands of small search engines which you may not have heard of. Some of them are in collective partnership with the major search engines, so there is an intricate network of search engines that interact with one another. Pitting yourself against big-timers or established websites in the major search engines can be a draining and most of the time, unrewarding journey. Submitting to the small search engines and getting them indexed gives you greater opportunities to rank high in them.
While submitting to smaller search engines is an excellent idea, webmasters also understand it is a chore to submit to the search engines one by one. It feels like eternity to submit to hundreds of them. People by nature don?t like repetitive tasks especially you are one of those who hate to perform data-entry tasks. The solution is therefore to employ the services of search engine submission tools like search engine submission services or software.
There are many choices in the internet but unfortunately, some of them charge an exorbitant fee to submit your website. Unless your pockets are deep or your returns from search engine submissions far exceed your expenses, you would find using search engine submission tools barely a good investment or website promotion method. Naturally, there are also some unscrupulous services that employ unorthodox or blackhat search engine submission tools to spam the search engines and their network partners with your website details, getting you banned rather ranking well. Discover what the cheap yet effective options are at my blog if you are looking for affordable search engine submission tools.
This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author's name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.
Davion is a successful webmaster and author. Read more about search engine submission and reviews of search engine submission tools and find out how these tools can automate search engine submission for faster indexing, instant traffic and more sales at Search-Engine-Submission-Tools.blogspot.com.

Top 10 FREE Traffic Generation Tips

The reason that most people fail online is that they simply can not attract enough traffic to their web site and as we all know, No Traffic = No Sales.
So just how can you get more traffic to your web site and how much is it going to cost you? The answer is zero, zilch, nada, nothing, also known as ?Free?. So here they are, my Top 10 FREE Traffic Generation Tips:
1. Write and submit articles. Write quality unique new articles, not articles that are rehashed or provide no insight to readers.
2. Write and submit press releases. This is nearly as good as publishing articles.
3. Write and ping blogs. Always link back to your website with your blog posts. Make multiple blogs and have them all link back to one primary site.
4. Make sure that your web site is listed in DMOZ: http://dmoz.org
5. Advertise your web site in the appropriate categories on http://craigslist.org. Post your ads in the largest most populated cities in the world.
6. Use your signature (with your web site URL) in niche related discussion boards and forums that you frequently visit if they allow signatures.
7. Review related products on http://Amazon.com. You can try and direct some customers to your web site from your competitors by providing your own web site URL if the product is similar.
8. Review websites in your niche on http://Alexa.com to try to direct some of their traffic to your web site by including a reference back to your site.
9. Review some related products on http://epinion.com
10. If you buy a product that you actually like, then leave a testimonial (with your web site URL). You should get some traffic from that web site if your testimonial is left with a URL.
These traffic generation tips are provided to you courtesy of John Spohr, M.S.M. of The Wealth Formula and EDC Gold.
Also see ?8 Ways to Promote Your Business or Website?.
This upcoming article will additional offer tips on the best way to promote your site free or very inexpensively.
John Spohr, M.S.M is a 27 year veteran of the Computer industry specializing in B2C eCommerce systems. For more information on EDC Gold visit his site online at http://www.the-wealth-formula.com

Valid HTML code is crucial to Search Engine Optimization

Why valid HTML code is crucial to your web site's search engine optimization efforts and subsequent high rankings:
Many webmasters and newcomers to web page design overlook a crucial aspect of web site promotion: the validity of the HTML code.
What is valid HTML code?
Most web pages are written in HTML, and as for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and each document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.
Like any language, HTML constantly changes. As HTML has become a relative complex language, it's very easy to make mistakes ... and we do know by now the favorable weight the new MSN.com beta search engine places on proper coding practise.
HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code. Why is valid HTML code important to search engine optimization and your whole marketing effort?
Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find the content on the page, and there ends your seo efforts and quest for high rankings of that page.
Search engine crawler programs obey HTML standards. They only can index your web site if it is compliant to the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might lose what they've collected so far because of the error.
Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason your web page cannot be found in search engines.
If you don't close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.
How can you check the validity of your HTML code? Fortunately, there are free services that allow you to check and fix the validity of your HTML code.
The search engine optimization community's HTML validator is the W3C HTML Validator.
It is the service that checks HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.
To correct the errors outlined by the W3C validator enter the address of your web page at the Netmechanic in-valid HTML repair page where you have the option of automatically fixing the errors on that page. This Netmechanic resource does have a demo evaluation mode which enables self-application of the referenced alterations.
Although not all HTML errors will cause problems for your search engine rankings, some of them can keep web spiders from indexing your web pages and spoil your search engine optimization efforts.
Valid HTML code makes it easier for search engine spiders to index your site so you should make sure that at least the biggest mistakes in your HTML code are corrected.
.. run your web pages through the W3C validator, make the recommended alterations and the new MSN.com beta search should reward your efforts with a top ranking .. the MSN search engine places a high value on proper coding practise.
Entire article available at: Valid HTML code crucial to SEO
Copyright 2005 Marketing Defined. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced in its entirety, with no alterations. The Resource boxes, live URL's and Author Bio must be included.
Roseanne van Langenberg is a Marketing Consultant and Publisher from Melbourne, Australia. Roseanne shares her findings on legitimate back-door search engine optimization and internet marketing techniques, for online blogs, which earned her a No. 1 listing at the new MSN search engine, at the Marketing Defined seo and internet marketing Blog.

7 Benefits of HTML Validation

You may not bother with html validation or writing simple and clean code when designing your web site. Later you may find your site is slow loading, appears incorrectly in the main browsers and does not rank well for the major search engines.
Now there are sites that still do rank well even though the html code has many errors. This is because most of the current major browsers are still very forgiving of html mistakes, however future browsers will become more html compliant as the Internet advances. Sites that have not bothered with html code validation will then fall by the wayside or take time and money to be corrected.
That's why you should take the necessary steps NOW to make sure that the code on your web site is validated.
What is HTML validation?
This is the process that analyzes an HTML document in comparison to standard HTML rules, identifying errors and non-standard codes. Web pages are rendered using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). As with any language there are rules and standards that should be followed. For example the HTML 4.01 Specification (rules and standards) are available at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/. You can check the html validation of your web page by entering your url at: http://validator.w3.org/
7 Benefits of HTML validation
1. Web Site Accessibility - validating your html code helps to pinpoint areas of potential blockage that could prevent search engine spiders or visitors from accessing your website. When you run your site through a code validator it may produce many errors that need to be corrected so your pages will render well. ie include text with your "alt" tags for every <> tag.
Why should you do this?
-Allows your site to be accessible to a larger audience (vision impaired, motor skill impaired, cognitive impaired)
-Allows your site to be accessed by wider range of devices (hand helds, screen readers, text browsers, search engines)
-Is a requirement for Federal and State Government sites
2. Search engine friendly pages - clean and simple code enables search engines to spider your pages more quickly and completely.
Here's an example:
What's wrong with this code?
< p keyword1 sentence, well written copy, etc.
<> keyword2 paragraph with more choice content.
This code is missing a ">" The issue is not that the page will necessarily get skipped altogether but that the "keyword1" sentence looks like part of the tag - like a tag attribute. So the words in the "keyword1" sentence probably won't be included in the search engines computations, even though the page itself will be indexed.
Once a spider sees a correct tag further along in the page, then it's back on course. So, the keyword2 paragraph would make it.
3. Faster Loading - if your web page contains html errors it will take a longer time for the search engines to spider it, therefore slowing the loading time. If your page doesn't load in under 10 seconds your visitors may click away to your competitors' sites.
4. Less load on servers - clean and simple code won't tax your server as much as a site which has complicated code or contain many nested tables. Cascading style sheets (CSS) will greatly reduce the amount of code within your web pages. This will also cut down on the amount of web space and bandwidth used thus saving you money for hosting your site.
5. Easier to update and maintain web site - with no mistakes in your html code it is easier and faster to make changes to your web pages. For web site designers, this means you will save time and money when maintaining clients' sites.
6. Browser compatibility - validated code ensures your site is compatible with the current browsers and future browsers. You might say "well, it looks fine in Internet Explorer, so why bother with any other browsers?" Current browsers will continue to update their rules and future browsers will make sure they are html compliant.
7. Access more visitors - if you ensure your web pages appear correctly in all the major browsers you will be able to reach a larger audience which then increases the potential of your site to make more sales.
Part 2 of this article will discuss:
What documents to validateThe validation processValidation toolsCommon validation errors
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com - Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. Read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Should You Bother Learning HTML to Build Webpages?

The most popular method to build webpages today is to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver are prime examples of WYSIWYG software. Both programs allow you to create webpages as though you were creating a document with your favourite word processing software like Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. Its as simple as entering paragraphs, headings and inserting clipart or images.
WYSIWYG software like those listed above are prefect for beginner webpage builders who want webpages constructed quickly without having to learn HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).
All webpages are brought to life using HTML codes, regardless what webpage building software is used. WYSIWYG programs simply create the HTML codes as you construct a webpage (in the background, without you knowing), so you don't need to understand them.
This is without a doubt the biggest advantage over any other type of webpage building programs. It means that if you can press keys on a keyboard, you have what is required to create your very own webpage!
However, most WYSIWYG programs don't give you absolute, total control over webpage design (ie, exactly the way you want the page to look). There are design limitations.
For example, you may want to place headings, sub headings and a navigation menu in a particular arrangement on the webpage, but no matter how many times you try, the program won't permit such placement or position them correctly. This is one big disadvantage of WYSIWYG programs if you desire a custom look to all your webpages.
Knowledge of HTML, however, can assist you to overcome such design shortfalls in WYSIWYG programs. How is this possible? Let me explain.
If you understand HTML codes, then you understand why webpages appear the way they do in a web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. This is powerful stuff because the moment you change/modify HTML codes, the webpage will take on a new design/appearance.
And don't forget that HTML codes are exact, giving you total freedom over how everything appears on the webpage. Most WYSIWYG programs allow you to view and modify the HTML codes. As you can see, knowledge of HTML is beneficial.
The downside to HTML is the learning curve. It takes time to understand how HTML works and why, but once you know, using HTML to create totally custom designed webpages is easy. For the beginner, HTML can be challenging, but don't despair because there are HTML tutorials available that teach you basic and advanced HTML in a matter of days!
So the question is - Should you bother learning HTML to build webpages? The answer - yes and no.
It is obvious that WYSIWYG software speeds up production of webpage development regardless of your knowledge on how to build webpages. However, to further refine and tune your webpages exactly to your liking, it is usually necessary to add and modify HTML codes. So yes, HTML is worthwhile learning if you are unsatisfied with the webpages produced by WYSIWYG software.
There is little point learning HTML if you are 100% satisfied with the webpages made with WYSIWYG software.
One thing is certain. Using WYSIWYG software and learning HTML codes is the answer for those of us who want webpages made exactly to our requirements. Learning HTML is not as hard as you think. To get started, simply search any major search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN using the search phrase "html tutorials", its that easy!
Les Pinczi is the creator of interactive HTML learning software to help you learn how to build a web page in hours!