Getting into the Top 10 in search engines is what most online businesses owners would like to bring their sites to. Therefore, the importance of using Search Engine Optimization (SEO), knowing what techniques, where and when to use them are considered primarily. One of the major parts is choosing keywords.

Of course, the words that you put on your website are eventually going to be indexed by the search engine. However, it must be unfriendly to internet users who could be your target audience to find that your website was just stuffed with keywords. In that way, they would just end up shutting the page down. The selection and proper application of keywords, thus, plays an important role to get your website high positioning, more traffic and more clients.

Choosing keywords for which people are actually searching is the most basic idea behind selection the right keywords. Think like you are the audience, not like someone expert or professional, you will find that only simple words, not technical words, would be used to search. However, it is important to note that choosing keyword which is too general will result in a high competition. You will find a ton of sites in the same field which are not actually related to what you are searching for. For example a website for a private hospital, you would not optimize a single keyword like “hospital”, With all the specialized areas in the medical industry you want to target people searching for specific services the hospital provide or specific health care the hospital is specialized.

To develop website content from the keyword lists, it is essential to focus on phrases instead of single words and create content that informs, educates, entertains, and stimulates perspective clients to patronize your website. When you do this you will be driving people to your website who are looking for precisely what you have to offer and you will be avoiding people who are not looking to buy your product or service. Now if you provide your new visitor with exactly what they want, you have a highly motivated potential customer right on your website.

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Currently, more websites are created by CMS like PHPNuke, Joomla or WordPress since with the use of CMS, contents are more effectively manageable. For example, contents can be added to the website by someone else such as copywriter rather than webmaster only. Another example is that adding contents to the website can be done via a browser, which means you or your copywriter can add contents anywhere having Internet access. However, URLs of your web pages generated by CMS are initially dynamic, URLs that contain some parameters.

http://localhost/phpnuke/modules.php?name=Addon_Sample&file=index&func=one

This kind of URL is not preferred by search engines and they may not index these pages. Therefore, today I will tell people who created their websites with PHPnuke, Joomla and WordPress how to convert the dynamic URLs to static ones.

PHPnuke : For PHPnuke, I downloaded a tool call Googlifier that you can search from Google. After completing download, you have to extract the zipped file. Then, you have to upload 3 files, which are .htaccess, header.php and footer.php. However, I recommend you better backup these 3 files first and that’s it. If it is not working you may try to restart your web server. Moreover, if you still want to customize your URLs, you may use Mod Rewriteto do so.

Joomla : The version I use is 1.5.9 and what I have to do is very simple. Go to the menu ‘Site’ and select ‘Global Configuration’. In the section ‘SEO setting’, I have to check yes at the menu ‘Search Engine Friendly URL’ and ‘Use Apache mod_rewrit’. However, you have to check first if mod_rewrite module is loaded.

WordPress : With wordpress, you have the following options to convert your URLs

http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/2009/05/14/post/

http://www.yourwebsite.com /blog/2009/05/post/
http://www.yourwebsite.com /blog/archives/123

http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/post/

What you have to do is going to submenu ‘Permalinks’ under the menu ‘Settings’. Then, select the option you prefer your URLs to be. If you want the last option you have to select ‘Custom Structure’ and fill ‘/%postname%/’ in the field.

Alright, these are the ways to convert dynamic URL to static ones of 3 CMSs mentioned above. Moreover, if you guys know how to do this for other CMSs like Drupal, etc. Please leave your comment here and I am sure that it will be very useful for other people.

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Webmasters or online marketers doing search engine optimization normally need to track how successful what they have done is. There are so many tools helping you this. Some of them are free whereas some of them are not. Moreover, some of them are web-based but some of them need to be downloaded and installed. Many web-based ones require the registration from the users or at least their emails. For the ones that need to be installed in users’ computers are mostly shareware. Therefore, today I will recommend you some Firefox Add-Ons that can help you track your Search Engine Optimization performance.

- Rank Checker
- SEO Quake
- SEOHand
- SEOpen
- SearchStatus

In order to use these Add-Ons, firstly you have to download them from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/. After completing installation, the browser will ask you to restart your Firefox. When your Firefox has been restored, these Add-Ons should be ready to use.

Basically, what these Add-Ons can tell you are the followings;

- Your Rankings : RankChecker, for instance, can be used to check your keyword positions in three search engines, Google, Yahoo and Live. What you have to do is selecting ‘Tool’ menu. Then, you choose ‘Rank Checker’ and submenu ‘Run’ if you do not need to set anything. After that, you have to fill your domain and add your keywords. When you are done, you press ‘Start’. The result can be exported as a CSV file.

- Links : This includes internal links within your site, external links linking to other sites and incoming links from other websites. Also, it will you if your website got any links from social media like Del,icio.us or Digg.

- Indexed pages : This is a number of web pages that have been indexed by search engines.

- Domain Age : This tells you how old your website is.

- Alexa Ranking : This is the ranking of your website by Alexa.com based on the number of your website’s visitors.

- Google Page Rank

This basic information should be useful for online marketers. At least, it can be used to evaluate your works on search engine optimization. As well, if you guys know any useful tools, please share us here by posting your comments and we will appreciate your kindness.

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Do you know that Search Engine actually sees things differently from people do, especially the contents in your website? Contents that can be read or viewed by people or users may be invisible to Search Engine. If you want your website or web pages to be ranked with your desired keywords, you have to let Search Engine see your contents to determine what your website is about. Therefore today I would like to tell something that can make your contents invisible.

- Flash : Currently, more websites are totally built by Flash since Flash can make your website more enticing and interactive with users quite well. I can see a lot of these websites in interior design business. Although, Flash can make your website very cool in users’ sights, it is not search engine friendly since Search Engine cannot see the contents in such these websites. I heard someone said that now Google can read the contents in Flash but it is not 100% confirmed. Indeed, you can have some Flash elements in your websites but what you should not do is making your website entirely Flash.

- IFrame : IFrame is normally implemented for displaying the same content in multiple HTML pages or making web pages fit with the required size. Although, using Iframe can make your website easier to maintain since for example if you want to edit the special promotion displayed in every web page, you just edit it in one place instead of editing it in every web page, Iframe can also make your contents invisible to Search Engine. You may consider using something else like include file instead.

- JavaScript : JavaScript can be used to displayed various contents. For instance, I have seen some webmasters use JavaScript to display News fed from other sources in their websites so News will be automatically updated according to the original sources. However, these news are not viewable by Search Engine since they are displayed by using JavaScript so in this case webmasters may consider using RSSParser to display the fed News.

- Images : Some webmasters publish contents in their websites as images and I am not sure why they did that. This is probably because they already have some paper based materials like fact sheets, brochures, leaflets that contain the information about their organizations so they may just scan these papers and put them in their websites. With this, the contents can be read by users but Search Engines. Some of them may say they can put the contents displayed as images in Alt Tag since Search Engine can read contents in this Tag. However, Alt Tag is supposed to use to describe the image not the website. Moreover, you should not put too many words in Alt Tag.

If you want to know how Search Engine see your websites, you can find many tools by searching in Google with keyword ‘Spider Simulator’.

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Search Engine Marketing
Just having an attractive website is not enough; you need traffic to your website, who are looking for your products and services.

Today, most businesses have a decent website, but the problem is that no one can find it. And if your site can`t be found on the first page of the search results, the prospect finds your competitors.

The process of getting traffic from search engines is called Search Engine Marketing. And there are two ways to bring your website to the very first page of the search engines so that you can be found when someone searches for your product or services.

Search Engine Optimization
Optimizing your website pages for search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short. SEO gives your website a rank in the organic listings of the search engines.

SEO is the use of various programming and scripting tools to assist search engines to rank websites in order of relevance to given keywords. Without SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, companies have a hard time using the internet as a marketing tool as they cannot be easily found on search engines.

It is a service that we provide, and we can help to bring your website in front of your prospects and customers. We have done SEO for a number of our customers already, and they are enjoying the extra exposure, extra traffic, and more visibility. SEO doesn’t happen overnight, this is an ongoing process which takes months to bring your website on the first page of the search engine if optimized effectively.

Pay Per Click Advertising
Buying sponsored advertising on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines for popular keyword searches is called pay per click advertising. Your ad can be shown hundreds of time, but you only pay if someone clicks on your ad, and lands on your website. This way, you get targeted leads and reach to your prospects and customers worldwide at a very low cost.

Your website can instantly receive top positions, highly targeted website traffic and sales using PPC advertising in Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines. At the same time, since your advertisement will get charged per click, this could easily make or break your budget if your campaign is not optimized and tracked correctly.

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