Learn Web Design

What is a domain name?

Millions of domain names have already been registered and finding the 'perfect' domain name will be tricky. Unless you have a deep pocket and bother to buy a very very brandable domain name, you'll have a hard time getting the best domain.

Here a a few things you need to consider when picking a domain name.

Branding and SEO

In business, branding is the representation of what a company or organization stands for. It is also the same for a websites.

Choose a domain that is well brandable - It should be conveniently easy to associate it with any product or service you are offering. For a blog, it should be very easy to connect your domain name and your content.

Your domain should be short and memorable - A very long domain may cause your readers to forget and the chances of word-of-mouth marketing gets lower. The easier people remember your site, the better.

Go with a .com domain name - People always assume that a website always has a .com extension. You probably know why I have the .org extension. (hint: the .net and .com versions have already been registered)

Choose a very 'typable' domain name - Imagine yourself typing, "forxchngtips4u.com". Ok, that's a bit sarcastic but you know what I mean.

Your domain should be unique - I cannot tell you how difficult it will be if you have a similar domain name with a popular website.

Although there are successful bloggers who have parodied famous domain names, I still believe that you should choose a unique domain name.

Have keywords in your domain name - Having your exact keywords in your domain name will help with search engine optimization.

Country specific domain extensions - If you are targeting a country specific audience it would be safe to register country specific domain name along with the domain name with the .com extension.

Hyphen-filled domain names - Domain names that have more than two hyphens may be regarded by users as spam sites and quickly forget about your website.

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let's just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site's existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site's content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it's not, but if it's related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.

Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.

2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.

Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be

3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine's will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).

4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.

5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.

To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine... say Google... and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.

You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail's from people requesting links because they don't see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.

Important note: When looking for link partners don't just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn't look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.

This article describes in simple terms, practical and effective tactics used to optimize your website. Following these suggestions, will result in a more enjoyable visitors experience and traffic. At the end of this article there is a Reference and Resources section where you can find supportive information and services related to each topic.

Compatibility With Web Browsers

It isn't a surprised for website owners, webmasters and others who are involved in their websites optimization, to see how different the web pages are displayed in various web browsers or between different web browsers version.

Displaying differences it's the result of how the various available web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.), or their versions, handle HTML code, HTML errors or computer screen resolution used.

Title and Meta Tags

Meta tags are information inserted into the [HEAD][/HEAD] section of the HTML code of any web page. There are many type of meta tags. We will be considering only two of them and the [TITLE] tag.

From the visitor's point of view, the only tag visible within the head section is the title tag, which is not a meta tag itself, but a stand alone tag found in the head section of the web page. Think of the title tag as the subject of an email message.

Two of the most important meta tags are the keyword and description tags which are invisible to the visitor's eyes but should be also included if you want your page information (title and description) to be properly displayed on the search engine result page (SERP) listing.

In the early days of the Internet, one could influence the search result by including keywords within the meta keyword and meta description tags you wanted the search engine (SE) to classify your page for, today you cannot influence the result of the SE by just adding desirable keywords anymore.

Keyword tag should contain between 5 and 10 keywords that appear on the body of your page. You should never include keywords in the tag that do not appear on that page.

The Importance of ALT Tags

Many web surfer and visually challenged people browse the Internet with the image viewing option of their web browser turn off or using text readers respectively. When one of these surfer visits your site containing lot of images, they won't be able to read the content of your pages if the images do not contain the ALT="your image description" tags.

Browser Safe Color Palettes

Computer platforms handle color differently, and the web browser limits colors significantly. In order to move through the digital world with consistency, the web page designer must be well aware of this fact.

While in the real world all colors are the result of some subtractive combination of three primaries colors: red, yellow, and blue. In the digital world all colors are the result of additive color synthesis or combination of three primary colors: red, green, and blue, referred to as RGB for short.

RGB values are derived from a method that numerically determines how much red, green, and blue make up the color in question. Each color contains a percentage of red, green, and blue.

If colors outside the safe palette are used, many web site visitors will see the color the computer has available instead of the color you have called for.

Check For Broken Links

Broken links are links that lead to nowhere, and clicking on the link will show you a 404 error code page. It is said that about 5% to 7% of all links on the Internet are broken.

A site that contains broken links, including missing links to images, gives a very bad impression to potential visitors and it is a frequent cause of lost visitors.

Check Web Pages Load Time

Many Web surfers today browse the Internet through a high speed broadband connection, but a significant percentage of those Web surfers still use slow speed dial up connection to access the Web.

Surfers are known for having a very short attention span and will leave your site before the page finishes loading. Generally speaking, the maximum accepted time for a page to load is about 10 seconds, and it is recommended that your page to be around 25Kb in size.

Decreasing the loading time of a web page can be easily achieved by both, compressing or shrinking the size of your images, and reducing the size of your HTML code.

HTML Code Optimizer

An HTML Optimizer removes all blank spaces in your HTML code, and this is another way to make your page load faster. The result is shorter downloading time. Pages will be shown in a client's browser in exactly the same way, but the file size will be smaller.

Make sure that the HTML optimizer you use does not compress embedded script codes within your page, which might be rendered unusable if they get optimized this way.

BORDER, HEIGHT and WIDTH Attributes

The attributes used with the [IMG] tag to specify an image width and height are the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes indicating the exact size of your image in pixels. The other attribute that influences the way an image is rendered on the user's screen is the BORDER attribute, which should be set to zero if you don't want your hyperlinked image to show a blue border around it.

One interesting advantage to adding the height and width attributes to an image tag is that when you do specify the image size for all of your images, browsers take a lot less time to render your page. To find out the width and height of an image, just open it with any image editor and look for its property.

Validate Your HTML Code

Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using markup languages like HTML may, for numerous reasons, not be following these rules. The process of verifying whether a Web document actually follows the rules for the language it uses is called validation.

Different browsers, or versions of the same browser, will make different guesses about the same illegal code; even worse, if your HTML code is really bad, the browser could get confused and produce a mangled display mess, or even crash. Validating your HTML will help ensure that it displays properly on most browsers.

1. Focus your page

Each page should focus on one keyword or key phrase. Your keyword should appear in the title, the heading tag and one in bold on the page. You can bold one other closely related keyword or phrase, but do not overdo it. Check the keyword density of the page. There are plenty of free online tools to check the keyword density. It should be between 5% and 15%. If the density is higher than that then you run the risk of being penalized by the search engines.

2. Choose the proper title tag

Your title tag is the first thing a search engine spider sees, so it is on of the most important SEO tools you have. You title should consist of only 1 thing - the keyword of your page. The title tag is the text that will appear in the title bar of the web browser when someone is visiting your page. Take a look at the title of this page.

3. Design your site for your visitors AND search engines

Many experts advise designing your site for your visitors and not worrying about the search engines as much. However, with today's tools, it is very easy to design a site that both your visitors and search engines will like. Make sure to use ALT tags for all of your images. Avoid the use of frames, flash and javascript. Have someone other than your mother or your spouse give you an objective opinion about your site. Is it is pleasing to look at? Is it easy to navigate? Would they come back?

4. Use unique content: Search engines like unique content

Do not fill your website with articles like this that you found on a free article site. It is fine to use some of them, but you must have content that is not found anywhere else on the web. Ideally, all of the content on your main page should be unique as this is the first page the search engine will come across. But if you want some individual pages indexed for a particular keyword, then at least the top content of the page should be unique.

5. Use backlinks effectively

A backlink is when another website links to your site. There are many ways to obtain backlinks (which is a topic for another article) but once you have the opportunity for a backlink, you should use it wisely. Make sure that your keyword is in the text of the link. For example, if the link text is "click here" the link will not carry as much weight with a search engine as the link text "Cookie Recipes" will - assuming the linked page is about cookies recipes.

Search engine optimization is very important part in online. In short form it called SEO. Search Engine Optimization stimulates a website which is the right words in copy and the right words in HTML code and structuring site properly then designing site properly.

SEO is the development of making website changes in order to ranking higher in the listings of search engine keyword search results. SEO monitor use the right words on website and get lots of relevant sites to link and use the right words in those links then have lots of content on particular site and add more regularly then the website achieving a high rank naturally.

Page Rank is estimated separately for each web page and is determined by mention of other pages referring to it. Page Rank is a kind of honorable. In the case of Page Rank, it is the possible frequency of visits to a page. Page Rank does not give accurate information about referring pages, but it allows to rapidly and without difficulty get a feel for the sites popularity level and to follow trends that may result from SEO work.

Page Rank 4 and 5 is characteristic for most sites with normal popularity. PR 6 indicates a very popular site while Page Rank 7 is almost out of the way for a regular webmaster. Congratulate able if manage to achieve it. Page Rank 8, 9, 10 can only be achieved by the sites of great companies.

SEO is an online marketing approach too. SEO is best a part of Promoting a site in search engines and keyword related marketing can be counted for 85 to 95 percentage of largely web traffic. Raising the density of keywords on site is one of the best and simplest ways to amplify chance of site's visibility in the search engine results. Search engine promotion for that matter, is a way of a business strategy. Search engine marketing as a larger umbrella under which search engine optimization fits. It is possible that numerous who alert mainly on SEO in the past are incorporating more and more marketing ideas into their hard work, including public relations policy and accomplishment, online display media trade, web site modify SEO, web trends data analysis, E-mail campaigns, and business blog consulting making SEO firms more like an ad agency.

Business Perception facilitates to identify not just what technologies are in place today but more emphasizing where to they are headline. The web pages, which may be in place 3 months at the base of line when pages to conclude are entirely cataloged. Higher details of this analysis, they will submit to a keyword as a language that characteristic web surfer will input in the search box when finding for particular information about a product.

Highly developed technologies are always there to determine, understand and calculate from head and end of the search business. Search Engines accumulate details about a site that is ranked according to the automated criteria that the programmers decide upon known as an algorithm. Algorithm is the regulation which determines how a web page will rank the search outcome pages of a search engine. A web site is shaped mainly for search engine ranking purpose that consists almost completely of a long list of dissimilar links. These types of pages are punished by approximately all search engines. An additional fundamental thing for search engines is the effect of sand box for listed sites. Sandbox is purportedly used by one large search engine as an experimentation stage for new sites. Achieving a high PR is kept throughout this time.

We all do this - when we need to look something up on the Internet, we automatically fire up our favorite search engine. For many web surfers, their home page is already set to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. In that search engine we punch in a few words that relate to the information we need. Almost immediately we are overwhelmed with a batch of results. But how much of these results do we actually read through? The majority of web surfers scan through the first page or two, and perhaps even through page three. If a web site is positioned beyond page three they are basically out of luck. When web surfers punch in keywords related to your products and services, does your site come up within the first few pages of the search results? If it does, you're likely running a very successful business in which visitors come to you without much need to advertise.

Most web site owners haven't built their website with reaching search engine users as one of the site's goals. In this article I will pretend that you own a shopping web site called PrettyDresses.com. Your web site is very lovely, full of pictures of dresses in all the latest styles and trends. Anyone who has found your site is very impressed with the selection of products and beautiful pictures. But you ask yourself, why is your traffic so low? Why isn't anybody finding my site? What can I do? The answer is quite clear and the problem is quite easy to solve.

Almost without thinking, web surfers (more specifically web searchers) will pop open their search engine and type in something like 'evening gown'. As this is their first thought, it should also be yours. Does your web site contain the words and phrases that web searchers are using to find your products and services? Are those words found on your website many, many times, only a few times, or not at all?

On regular intervals search engines crawl the web, reading and collecting information on the sites they come across. As they come across your website, they look for what the most frequently used words are phrases are to determine just what it is that your web site is all about. The better your web site does at effectively using the phrases that are being searched, the higher up the list your web site will be displayed on web searches. If your web site's content does not match what is being searched, it will not be found. It is a simple as that.

It should be clear by now that you should be starting to put together a list of keyword phrases to include within your web site. This list should include your products and services and any related items. There are many people searching for dresses as you are reading these words. Do they all use the exactly same phrases - of course not. Your mission is to discover as many of these phrases as possible and which phrases or words are used most frequently. The list should be prioritized based on which words are used in searches most frequently.

Brainstorm. Sit and think about what your web site is really all about. Close your eyes and picture your website as a store with customers looking around. What are they looking for? What are they asking you for? "Excuse me, I'm looking for a..."

Think about which words relate to your products and services. What is another name for dress - a gown, evening gown, sun-dress, a cute black dress, etc.

Be sure to ask family and friends, and clients and associates. Which phrases or words might they use when looking for your products and services? You are soon to discover a pattern. The most commonly used search terms will start to emerge.

Which keywords do high end competing web sites use, that carry products and services that are similar to yours? Their research may save you some of your own.

Pretend to be different types of customers. Be a customer that knows exactly what they want and jot that down. Also be the customer that is just looking around, or looking for ideas. This second customer may use more generic terms, while the first customer may refer to specific items. What other types of shoppers can you pretend to be? What about a wealthy shopper versus a bargain hunter?

Are some of the words on your list often misspelled? If so make sure to jot down the incorrect spelling as well. Poor spellers also have money to spend.

Are your products or services focused on a specific geographical location? If so, be sure to jot down the neighborhood, quadrant, city, state, and even country. A visitor may not want to drive too far from home and may therefore search for 'dresses in south Dallas'.

Also be sure to include the different variations of your selected keywords - for example: dress and dresses.

Like many of you, I am always trying to find as much information as I can on Search Engine Optimization. And also like many of you, I am doing it myself. I read online and buy books on search engine optimization and many of them all say the same things, just in a different way.

Sadly with most search engines the solution is simply the number of links pointing back to your site. The search engines feel that they can control the quality of their search results by focusing on the websites that have a large number of links pointing to them. Simply put, it's a popularity vote. Their reasoning is that if nobody else thinks your site is important, why should they index it.

That doesn't mean you can't get your site indexed though. In 2005 Google created a submission system called Google sitemaps. Yahoo soon followed with one of their own as well.

Aside from taking advantage of this tool to insure your site indexing, Google sitemaps also provide a variety of statistics related to your site. You can see what the search engines see in regards to pages that they can't find, your page rank and even search statistics.

"That's really great Ben, but my site is HUGE and I don't know anything about xml and how to format these things". Well I had the same problem, I have sitemaps with over 6000 links in them, and frankly I was not about to try and manually create a sitemap with all of those links, I just don't have the time. So I went ahead and created a smaller sitemap of all of my sites with a dozen or less elements included so that I would at least get something indexed.

That was until I stumbled over a sitemap generator that did all of the work for me. There are others out there but this one has a web page that you can go to and have them generate your sitemap, as well as a desktop version. It's called the ROR Sitemap Generator. And all you have to do is key in your domain name and let it do the rest.

There is also another great tool which also handles the Yahoo sitemap and that program is GSiteCrawler.

Save the sitemap to your directory, and viola! I used the desktop version personally because I've found that it performs quicker and doesn't hang up on sites with thousands of links. They also have the "ROR Feed Generator" which I've used with equal success.

Oh Yeah, and the best part, these tools are free. You can find them at www.rorweb.com and www.gsitecrawler.com. You will be able to let this tool create your sitemap, save the generated map as sitemap.xml, upload it to your website root directory, then log into your Google Sitemap account and enter the path to your sitemap and let google do the rest.

I recently did this for a friend and his site was indexed in 3 days. That's uncommon, it might take up to 30 days, but you'll get your pages indexed on google, and many of the other search engines will be able to index your site now too. Is it guaranteed? No. But I've had 100% success getting my pages and sites indexed personally.

Just in case you need help with Google Sitemaps, here's how you want to do the complete process.

1. Set up your account with Google Sitemaps at www.google.com/webmaster/sitemaps
2. Generate your sitemap.
3. Place your sitemap in your root directory of your website.
4. Log into your Google account.
5. Click the "Add" tab to add a new sitemap with your account.
6. Select the "General Website Sitemap" option.
7. Click Next.
8. Put in your domain name and path to your sitemap.xml file.
9. Click "Add Web Sitemap" 10. Take a deep breath, let out a big sigh, let the dog out or take him for a walk.

Now you've taken a major step in the right direction with search engines and utilizing Google Sitemaps with your SEO strategy. I hope this helps anyone trying to increase their site visibility using the D.I.Y. method, which is all many of us can afford.

Thanks for reading and much success.

We have been hearing a lot about SEO or the so called Search Engine Optimization. Have you ever thought were Search Engine Optimization started?

For the benefit of those people who are not yet familiar what Search Engine Optimization is, well here's a description I got for you to give you few information's regarding SEO. Search Engine Optimization is defined as a subset of the search engine marketing. It is a process of making improvements on the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural search results.

The SEO can target searches like the contextual search and local search and the industry-specific vertical search engines. Search engine optimization helps the internet users and visitors understand how search algorithms work and what internet users can search for, help them visit sites which make it interesting for them. Some search engine optimization helps in the optimizing of the site's coding, their presentation and structures. It also fix problems that may keep search engine indexing programs from fully speeding a site's also helps the content pages of the site to look more appealing to the users and visitors.

To make you more familiarize with the search engine optimization I'll give you a brief history about the origin of the search engine and what is the relationship of Search Engines to Search Engine Optimization.

Well to start of the origin of search engines, in the mid 1990's Webmasters and the content providers started optimizing their sites for the search engines. Before the responsibilities of webmasters is to submit a page or URI to other different engines which would send a spider to look a certain page, extract the links from the other pages and get the information's found on the page to be ready for indexed. What the spider does is simply download a page where certain information's will be stored on their own server where an indexer, known as second program extracts the information gathered. Time came that site owners are starting to recognize the importance of their site to be rank highly and visible in search engines. On the year of 1996 emails regarding SEO services were sent as spam which was posted at the Usenet.

Because of too much reliance on factors that are exclusively within the control of the webmasters early search engines started to suffer from manipulation of abuse ranking. Because of this site owners thought that they should think ways on how to provide better results to their users... Because of the high value and targeting of search results, a big potential for an adversial relationship between search engines and SEOs.

Then time came search engines also began reaching out to the SEO industry and are regular guests to the SEOs conferences, seminars and trainings. Then the rest was history.

Then in the year 2005 AirWeb, an annual conference was created to discuss certain issues about the damaging effects of web content providers who are known to be very aggressive. Because of these site owners and SEOs simply thought of ways or different techniques to improve their site for the users through the help they will get the domains which are banned from search engines.

SEO has the goal to give better results and reliable accurate information's to their online users and visitor.

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let's just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site's existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site's content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

SEO means your website has been fine tuned to satisfy the needs of both search engines and people who do the searching.

SEO is more about doing the technical things in website design than providing content that will bring in targeted traffic to your website. Some things you need to do for your site for good SEO include:

1. Title tags - each title tag should be different. The description tag should entice the searcher to click on the link. SEO experts know that this tag should contain very specific keywords as they relate to that page's theme. He also knows that search engines don't want us to spam them with too many of the same keywords on the page. You get penalized for such spam.

2. Attention to keywords and key phrases - each page should have a specific focus on the idea you want to impart there. Perfecting key phrases is the work of SEM.

3. You want to be sure you do not confuse the search engines by overusing website technology. The search engines are getting better about handling flash presentations, for example, but I would not depend on flash entirely. CGI scripts can cause a web page to open slowly. Use scripts sparingly.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM includes SEO since it strives to bring in good traffic. However, SEM addresses the content of your web pages more than the technical aspects.

First, we need to define "traffic"? Simply put, traffic is people who visit your website. How they get there is another issue. There are different types of traffic. Essentially there is lousy traffic and good traffic (also called "targeted traffic" in SEO lingo).

People who search for something but are surprised that what they see on your site has little or nothing to do with what they wanted to find are obviously not the kind of people you want. This is the least effective type of traffic to promoting your product or service.

Then there are people who arrive at your website and spend some time there because you are offering something very much in line with what they were looking for. If you are an expert at editing online articles, for example, and a searcher searcher was looking for someone to edit his new book he may have typed in "editor". He would quickly leave your site after he discovered you only edit online articles.

But if you did edit books for a living, he would be an excellent prospect for you. People these days are more apt to type in "search phrases" instead of one word generic terms because they are internet savvy. They know they will get poor results from one word searches.

There are quite a few valid ways to steer traffic to your website. SEM addresses how to get people to your site directly through the search engines rather than through bulletin boards or through social networking, for example.

SEM experts will often recommend that you employ Google Analytics or similar tools. Analytics will tell you what people do after they get to your site. Which page do they most often leave on? Can you improve that page? What do people do before they buy your product?

SEM experts know the value of reciprocal linking and how to get people to link to your site. Some say that reciprocal linking is a dead issue while others understand that it can strengthen your site.

A SEO sage's advice should be heeded, in my opinion. Jill Whalen of High Rankings says it like this: Put up content for your visitors, not for the search engines. Make a great site and you will be very happy with the results. Good advice.

Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it's not, but if it's related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.

Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.

2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.

Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be

3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine's will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).

4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.

5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.

To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine... say Google... and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.

You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail's from people requesting links because they don't see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.

Important note: When looking for link partners don't just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn't look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.

So if Google one day decided to link to a website that was just created and this website has a page rank of 0 and has a domain that goes something like this: mywebsite.geocities.com it's page rank wouldn't increase even though Google's page rank is 10, it's rank would still be zero because it would only have that one back link.

The Domain Selling Business. A real business where insight and timing are critical. Where smart people can make money by making smart moves. In other words, a true Internet business that could make you a millionaire. If you have the skills, the smarts and the moxie, and the key insights.

Why do People buy domain names? Everyone in the business industry is aware of the value of the right domain name. It is the company's brand name and it is critical to driving traffic to the home website. The right domain name is worth hundreds, even thousands of dollars to a business. The right name is so generic that a user might type in a random phrase and add .com or .net and land on that respective businesses site. Check out what some very recent domain names went at public auction.

Lips.com sold for $135,000 on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Note.com went for $115,000 on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Forest.com for $110,721 on SEDO. And Coed.com for $88,240 on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

How to really make money on selling Domains? That's some serious money. Imagine where you would be right now if you had purchased any one of these a few years ago when domain names were so cheap people could buy these basic names at less than $10.00 per name. Better yet imagine where you would be if you had the foresight to have purchased any two of these basic domain names. Here is how lucrative domain reselling can be - these six entities each sold for $10,000.00 at the recent

TechnologyFund.com on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C. PinkRoses.com on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Pensions.net on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C. FreeSoft.com on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C. EatFree.com on Afternic/BuyDomains 212.net on Moniker T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

Four of these break the rules of a single word domain name yet they met the needs of a specific company and were worth the thousands that the right company put forth to secure the name

A wealth of web sites exist devoted to the marketing and sales of domain names

Moniker.com

Moniker is the only provider of the trademark Domain Asset Management services. The company provides a single-point-of-access to manage domains and maximize the selling of those names. Moniker is the company that recently handled the sale of the domain name Porn.com for $9.5 million. The company also handled Sex.com which sold for $12 million in cash and stock. How about Autos.com for $2 million, Cameras.com at $1.5 million and Scores.com for $1.2 million? Moniker also handled the sales of student.com, ethanol.com, cardiology.com, and more.

SEDO.com

SEDO has more than 500,000 members trading domains around the world. SEDO currently has more than 8 million premium domain names available and is working globally in more than 21 languages. SEDO offers it users all of the tools necessary to buy and sell domains including domain name appraisals, brokerage services, promotion, and a domain parking program.

Check out these numbers - 1,500 domain sales a month yielding $3 million in sales - 8,000,000 domains available, 3,000,000 of them parked.

Afternic.com Afternic.com is another leading domain name company that is recognized for its work in the secondary-domain-name business. Offering an extensive exchange network, the company works with partner domain name registrars and then refers buyers for aftermarket domain purchases. Afternic is another one stop shop that provides anonymous sale environment for potential bidders.

Afternic managed the $1 million sale of Fish.com. Since 2002, the company has experienced triple-digit annual growth rates.

1DollarDomainPage.com

1DollarDomainPage.com is a one stop portal that features the latest in the domain marketing field. The site advertises domains for sale by category and offer free classified advertising space, options such as hosting services, leasing, job opportunities and other items wanted or for sale. It also offers a series of live chat rooms that are available to every pixel owner including rooms that offer discussion options devoted to beginners and newbies to the domain business. The site also offers chat rooms broken out for those people who selling or buying and even offers one chat area focused solely on those who are seeking one specific domain or website.

MillionSnapNames.com, TdNam.com, GreatDomains.com, and more.

How much will people pay for the right domain name? A Lot!!

We have already talked about Porn.com and Sex.com but how about diamond.com, business.com, and beer.com? Each sold for 7.5 million dollars apiece in 1999. After the dot com bubble burst in 2001 the general consensus was that no other domain name would reach the lofty heights that business.com was able to attain. Man, were folks wrong! Casino.com sold for 5.5 million in May of this year, Korea.com sold for $5 million in January and Shop.com sold for 3.5 million in 2005.

Domain Names Have Their Own Image !

Let's face it, image is exceptionally critical to ever business and domain names foster their own image. Short, one word names with the dot com after them are in extreme demand. A domain name must be memorable because a domain name must be able to stand alone. Customer's today type in the most used domain names simply from memory. A great domain name means search engines simply aren't necessary.

Though everyone wants that one word name, it is possible to create some really useful domain options using simple prefixes. A simple example is the use of the word auto and the long ago sold out auto.com domain name. Other options can work for that same term, automart.com. autodepot.com, autoland.com, usedauto.com, etc. The trick is to be creative but to get something simple that sells the business at hand.

Do you have skills predicting future trends? What names might be big in the next few years if a woman or a black man were elected president, if an issue other than terrorism begins to creep into the world psyche? If green becomes in or America revamps its health care system what will be the key domain names that will represent the future? What names today represent a great business opportunities for you tomorrow?

With the recent decline of the U.S. economy many changes have come about with regards to business on the internet. One of these things is an upswing in the amount of expired domain names that are available to be reregistered to a new owner, once they have been determined to be expired.

There are many reasons why a person would establish a domain name and also create a website, promote it and then have to let it go. Partnership disagreements, declining business, business refocusing in another direction and the list goes on and on. With regards to these expired domain names one mans trash is truly another mans treasure, because what may have seemed like small potatoes to a well established and highly successful internet entrepreneur might in fact turn out to be a small treasure to someone like yourself.

Many of these domain names have websites that have been heavily promoted and have substantial traffic that you can redirect to other internet ventures that you currently have going. For the affiliate marketer traffic means money, because most have an established formula that dictates that a certain percentage of visitors are going to end up being buyers.

Therefore more visitors directly translates into more revenue. There are websites that cater exclusively to the person who is interested in acquiring expired domain names. One site that provides useful information is DomDat.com. It is highly recommended that you visit them to learn more about the topic before you run right out and start buying up random expired domain names.

As a general rule, the majority of passive revenue generated by an acquired domain name would come from advertising in the form of advertising clicks. For this reason you will want to give close consideration to the domains ratings in the top search engines and also the amount of links that it has.

Also, you may want to consider building a website that is based on the domain name and while this can seem labor intensive, with practice and the proper information, it is well within the grasp of even the novice entrepreneur on the net.

Of course if you have a website you are then going to have to host it but don't let that stop you, because there are many cheap website hosting services on the net and in fact there are even free hosting services but they do have some catches that you must make yourself aware of.

Still another source of revenue that can be generated from a website is by the selling of links to third party websites, but your website must be of a high enough caliber to do this. The sooner you get started having your website designed and created, the sooner you can begin to see results come to fruition.

The U.S. economy is expected to make a turn around just as it always has and for you to be able to maximize on it when it happens you must have your website up and going and have done some promotional work on it. Expired domain names are a great way to get a leg up with regards to your internet venture.

Abstract

This short article discusses two ways in which smart operators are making money from the domain names of others. Neither method is, in my opinion, unethical and can lead to a sound income stream.

Introduction

Do you know what the one thing is that online businesses need, a topic that seems to occupy more space in ebooks, conferences,blogs and fora than any other topic?

If you said, "getting traffic", you are spot on. Traffic is obtained through a variety of ways including search engine optimization, linking, advertising, running competitions, blogging etc. But, as noted Internet marketer Ken Evoy reminds us, it's not simply traffic we need, it's targeted traffic. That is, traffic looking for our products or services.

This article discusses two ways in which you can leverage targeted traffic from other peoples' domain names.

Method One

Say for example you have an online mortgage brokerage operation. You are looking for a constant stream of people comparing mortgage fees and charges who might sign up with you and earn you your commission. However, your firm is small and most of your traffic comes from advertising, which is expensive, and referrals from existing customers. You know that there are numbers of large financial institutes in your region who provide mortgages and you'd like to tap in on some of their prospects.

Here's what you do for method one. Use a domain name identical with the domain they have, but change the suffix. For example, if the firm's URL is amazingbank DOT com, buy a domain called amazingbank DOT ws or with some other suffix that is legally acceptable to your country of registration. You will need to make sure the name is not a Trademark Registered Name which it is illegal for you to use and your domain name registration authority should advise you how to do that in your country.

Next, set up a redirect page on your site. This is a page in a sub-directory called index.html which, when loaded into a browser, redirects users to the home page (also called index.html) of your main business site. And guess what? Because your domain name is almost identical with the financial institution that gets all the traffic, you will get a good place in the search engines.

Numbers of people who do a search will click on your link that will highlight the word mortgages. Others will type the incorrect domain name leading to your domain, the redirection page and eventually your home page.

What will they see? A whole lot of information about your mortgages ... just what they were looking for.

Before you do this, it will be a good idea to check out the Google Page Rank of some of the sites in which you are interested. Do that by installing Google Toolbar (free from Google) and then visiting the site. Google Toolbar shows the Google Page Rank in the toolbar. The page rank refers to popularity. Obviously the more popular the site is, the better it will be for you to mimic.

Method Two

A variation on method one is this method that relies on people making typing mistakes. Instead of typing CNN DOT Com to visit the well known media site, a small percentage of people will type CNM DOT com. You provide a domain called CNM DOT Com and pick up some of the mistake makers. However, you do need to provide a product the same as the site you choose to imitate or else people won't stay long.

So, find a major player who sells the same or similar products or services to you and register a domain name similar to theirs.

Before you do that, visit Overture or use some other method eg, the free software program Good Keywords, to find out how many searches each month are made for the original site and the misspelled derivations. Choose a domain name that reflects the one people are mistakenly entering and every time they enter it they will get your site or any site to which you redirect them. It could even be an affiliate site or someone else's sales page.

Summary

Using either of these methods will increase your targeted traffic and because the traffic is targeted, many of your visitors will buy your goods or services. If you were starting from scratch and wanted to know what type of business to go into, you could research some existing, successful businesses and check out the common spelling mistakes people make. If there were numbers of common mistakes, you could create as many domain names (these are generally very cheap) and redirect all of them to your home page with just the right products or services people were looking for.