Google’s search engine originally worked according to a simple principle: web pages were ranked according to the number of links they received from other sites, with each link weighted to reflect a site’s popularity. That principle is still part of the equation, but Google’s software has become much more complicated over the years taking into account more than 100 factors in its algorithm.

According to Wikipedia, “a search for ‘miserable failure’ or ‘failure’ on September 29, 2006 brought up the official George W. Bush biography number one on Google, Yahoo! and MSN and number two on Ask.com.

On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have “an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.” The algorithm change had an immediate effect, dropping the well-known ‘miserable failure’ link to the White House off the front page. Instead, the page contained mainly pages which discuss the miserable failure bomb.

What does this mean for online marketers? Probably not much to most- but to some of the “big guys” it means that Google now has a means to manipulate search results by hand, something which in the past they had no ability to do. It also means that if you work hard to get in the top Google results for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, that you could potentially be removed because someone decides you shouldn’t be there.

In my opinion, it’s just another step Google’s taking towards becoming the Ultimate Super Power.

Under no circumstances should you ever purchase a CD of millions of email addresses. These emails have been harvested from the internet and if you contact anyone on these lists, you will be spamming them. Also avoid opt-out lists where recipients are placed on a list involuntarily and then invited to unsubscribe if they want to.

It’s important to note that the lists are always rented, never bought. The list owner is the only person who ever sees the actual list. You rent the one-time use of the list, send your promotion to the list owner, who in turn sends it out to the list.

Since you only get the one-time use of the list, instead of trying to directly sell the recipients a product or service, pull out all the stops to try and collect their email address. Since most people are unlikely to buy from the first contact, this allows you to contact them again and again until you eventually sell your product or service to them. Offer a free gift or ethical bribe, get their email, then sell to them later. This way, not only can you try and sell one product to them later, but over the span of their lifetime with you, you can sell to them again and again,

The average list rental will usually cost between $0.01 and $0.50 per name with an average of about $0.20 per name. Additional specifications, including postal/zip codes, ages, gender and job types carry an additional cost of about $0.05 per name. A typical response rate from a rented list hovers around the 0.5% mark; of course it depends on the list, the copy and the offer, but 0.5% is average.

List Brokers

It’s not always a simple and easy task to find the right opt-in email list to rent for your business. In fact, most of the time it’s a very difficult task and takes lots of research, patience and time. That’s where a list broker can help. Their job is to help you chose and acquire the properly targeted list at the right price. They will even sometimes negotiate for you with the list owner. And the great news is that it won’t cost you a thing. The broker earns an industry standard commission of around 15-20% from the actual owner of the list. Most brokers have a minimum order value of $1,000 (or 5,000 names at $0.20 a name) to make it profitable for them.

Since list sales reps usually work on commissions, they may sometimes try to sell you more names than you want or need, instead of the best names for your campaign. However, you should remember that it is list quality, not quantity that counts.

Here are some tips on choosing a list broker:

• Make sure you have a specific definition of your target audience for them to work with.
• Having a budget in mind will help as well.
• Find out if the list is single or double opt-in. How did they opt-in?
• Ask the list broker if they will review your offer / copy.

Although they will most likely not be a copy editor, they should have a good idea if it will be successful based on previous offerings.

It would also be worth it to insist that there be a warranty built into the contract that will protect your business should the rented list fall foul to spam or data protection legislation.

Perhaps the most important thing about purchasing email lists is to test them first. That means sending a test email to 5-10% of the list before purchasing it to test your response. Be wary of list owners that won’t allow you to test their list. Most will charge you for it (or include the initial rental charge if you do decide to rent the list) so don’t expect it for free. It’s also not a bad idea to send a couple of test emails testing different elements of your email before you blast it to the entire list.

If you’re just starting out, or looking to grow quickly, purchasing a list can be a very viable option. Always remember to research list owners to make sure they are reputable. If they have testimonials, or email/phone numbers of past clients you can call, all the better. Just remember, you’ll get what you pay for.

1. Meta tags and titles: Meta tags have been one of the oldest methods of SEO, and it’s quite simple to do. As a web site owner, you can ask your web designer to insert relevant keyword and description meta tags on each of your webpages, or even do them yourself with the help of an HTML editor, or online meta tag generator. Relevant keyword rich page titles should also be used.




2. Keywords: Choosing the right set of keywords for your web site is extremely important as it helps focus all search engine optimization activities in the desired direction. You can choose keywords based on your products or services or research them online with tools such as www.wordtracker.com and develop a keyword list most suited for your web site and easy to promote. Once you have your set of keywords ready, you can put them in your meta tags, on page titles and even on the web page content. You can even create articles based around this set of keywords and feature them on your web site for faster search engine optimization.




3. Content of the page: The content on key pages of the web site is also extremely important as many search engine spiders (a smart piece of software which trolls through content and picks up keywords) tends to feature websites which have the keyword well placed on the site content. Your main keywords should be featured within the first line of content, page titles, headers and throughout the rest of the page. Content is very important for search engine optimization of a website it is recommended that the content be featured as early in the page as possible and be repeated up to 5 or 6 times to maximize exposure.

The above tips are just the starting point or basic level of search engine optimization. Once you get started with the above recommended steps, you can create your own in-depth search engine optimization plan over a period of time. For more information on search engine optimization, you can visit websites like www.searchenginewatch.com.

It’s important to note that each search engine uses its own ultra secretive algorithm to rank sites, so search engine ranking strategies in general terms here that are likely to help improve your ranking collectively.

Keywords

One of the most important components to almost every search engine is the content of your site; in particular the keywords contained within the content of your site. All major search engines place a large weight on the keywords contained within your site and where they fins them. Some of the best places to use keywords are in your domain name, HTML page title, H1, H2, and H3 header tags, the actual content of the webpages, links, meta tags and ALT tags.

The keyword frequency of your pages is another consideration of most search engines. It measures of the number of times keywords occur within a page’s text. It’s tied to the concept of keyword density. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to make sure it’s not an isolated case. Ideally you want to choose 2-3 keywords per webpage and repeat them 5-7 times throughout the page.

Your webpage keyword density is something else that you’ll want to configure. Keyword density measures the relationship of your keywords as compared to other text on the webpage. The higher the percentage of keywords in relationship to other text, the higher the keyword density is. The recommended keyword density for any webpage is 3-7%, per keyword or keyword phrase. This means you should repeat all your keywords three-to-seven times for every 100 words of content on your webpage.

Keyword prominence is yet another part of many search engine’s ranking algorithms. Besides all of the other keyword real estate locations mentioned above, the best place to place keywords in the text of your webpage is right at the top of the main page. Most web crawlers assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention these words right at the beginning. If your navigation system currently uses text links and is at the top of your page, make it graphical so the first text the search engine sees can be relevant.

Some search engines, such as Google, also use the concept of keyword proximity as part of their ranking formulas. As suggested by the name, keyword proximity means the how close keywords are to each other. By putting your keywords as close together as possible and making sure your sentences are clear, concise, and make perfect sense you’re likely to rank better. For example the sentence ‘Internet marketing made simple’ would rank better than ‘Marketing on the internet made simple’ for the keywords internet marketing.

Domain names are another great place for keywords. If relevant keywords are contained in the domain name, it carries more weight with almost all search engines, than keywords found in the text of the webpage. Shorter or top-level domain names with keywords generally carry more weight than really long domain names.

For instance, if all other factors are the same, the domain name www.InternetMarketing.com would rank higher than www.MarketingOnTheInternet.com, for the keywords internet marketing. More recently, search engines have begun to prioritize the use of keywords in a site’s domain name, in their ranking formulas. Google and Yahoo! are two of the search engines that do this.

Also avoid search engine spamming. That is, don’t be tempted to use tiny or invisible text to put keywords at the beginning of your pages. Search engines define this behavior as spam and can reject your site for it. Also sites that list keywords and/or repeat them over and over can also be rejected for keyword spamming.

Meta Tags

The meta description and keyword tags are another great place to use keywords. They describe your site’s content, giving search engines spiders an accurate summary filled with multiple keywords. Meta tags are hidden in a document’s source code; the search engines can see them, but they visitors can’t (unless of course they view your source code). Some search engines, however, use it as a site’s summary on their results pages. If they do, the reader may actually see this hidden tag, so make sure its contents are somewhat enticing to the reader.

Meta tags are incredibly important to some search engines and others couldn’t care less about them. There are a handful of search engines that use only meta tags to rank webpages, although the weight of meta tags in general is dropping across the board. Search engines don’t penalize sites that use meta tags properly, so it’s recommended that you always include them.

The meta description tag should contain multiple keywords organized in a logical sentence. Place the keywords at the beginning of your description and close to each other to achieve the best possible rankings. Search engines vary in their preferred size for meta tags. Anywhere between 150-250 characters is the standard accepted size.

ALT Tags

Search engines don’t see images and they won’t index any text that is presented or embedded in an image format. To help fix this problem, there are ALT tags. An ALT tag provides an alternative text when non-textual page elements (images or graphics) cannot be displayed. If someone is using a text-only web browser (handheld device such as a cell phone), or on a slow dialup connection has their images turned off, or if an image is no longer available, an ALT tag would take the images place on the user’s screen. Also, if you hold your mouse over an image with an ALT tag, the tag will be displayed in a little box in the surfers browser. Search engines also don’t penalize for using ALT tags or even for packing them with keywords, so there’s no reason not to use them.

Link Popularity

Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will many search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you. A growing number of search engines are beginning to use link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Google uses it as its most important PageRank factor in ranking sites. HotBot, AltaVista, MSN and others also use link popularity in their formulas. Eventually every major engine will probably use link popularity, so developing and maintaining backlinks are essential to your search engine placement.

Search engines use sophisticated formulas to gauge how popular sites are based on more than just a measure of how many links point to your site. In general, however, link popularity is measured by the following three factors:

Relevance- Search engines prioritize incoming links from pages that are relevant to the page in question. If you sell gardening tools, a link from a gardening tool manufacturer boosts your rankings more than one from a antiques discussion forum.

Number of links- The more, the better. Though lots of irrelevant links are less effective than a few relevant ones, they’re better than nothing as they may still generate a little traffic to your site.

Link text- The text used to describe a link can also affect your rankings. These three links all point to the same URL but use different text:

http://www.InternetMarketingBook.com is somewhat relevant
Internet Marketing Book is most relevant
Click here is not at all relevant

Page importance- The more important the page linking to your site is, the more it can do to positively boost your ranking. For example, a link from CNN is much more important than a link from Aunt Edie’s rock collection site.

Most search engines spiders figure that any words other sites use to describe your site are particularly relevant. So, if a lot of sites linking to you use keywords in their link text, search engines will boost your ranking for those keywords.

Click Popularity

Click popularity is the measure of the number of clicks received by each site in a search engine’s results page. For example, let’s say that 100 users search for ‘tropical fish’. If after scanning the first 10 results, 97 users click on Tropical Fish Feeding and Care a click tracking technology assumes that the site Tropical Fish Feeding and Care is more relevant than the others. Next time someone searches for tropical fish, Tropical Fish Feeding and Care will appear higher in the results.

The real only way to boost your click popularity is to see what text the various search engines use in your listing and then make it better. Most search engines use one of, or a combination of following: your page title, the first few lines of text on your webpage, part of your meta description, description or keywords you entered when submitting your site to the search engine.

Stickiness

Stickiness is a measure of the amount of time a user spends at a website. It’s calculated according to the time that elapses between each of the user’s clicks on the search engine’s results page, or how long it is until the user clicks the back button in their browser.

An example could be when you perform a search for ‘chicken recipe’. You get the standard results page with 10 results listed in order of relevancy, click on one of the links and surf the website for 2 minutes. It turns that it doesn’t quite have what you’re looking for, so you try another site that turns out to be junk and spend less than 5 seconds on it before you try another.

Click tracking technologies record the time between your clicks and use that time to determine each site’s relevance. The longer your visit the website, the stickier the site is (in theory) and the better it will do in the results ranking next time. It is important to note that stickiness is not used by many search engines, as it is hard to track and the results can be easily skewed.

Both click popularity and stickiness allow the search engine users to rank sites rather than web crawling software or site reviewers.

Search Engines and Themes

A theme is defined by search engines as a common topic throughout an entire site. Another way to think about it is that some of your most important keywords are used consistently throughout your site. In an effort to provide their users with more relevant information, search engines developed sophisticated technology that extracts website’s themes. This technology allows results to be more focused on relevant sites for the topic searched for, instead of individual webpages.

Theme technology is used by some of the major search engine’s formulas or algorithms to index and rank sites. They are used by AltaVista, Lycos and Google. Also, when a Yahoo! reviewer is reviewing sites, sites that have a common theme will receive a higher ranking than one that is all over the place.

Site Design

Your site’s design plays a major in role in your visitor’s decision to either stick around and look at your content or continue surfing to another site. Graphics, layout, load time, fonts and ease of navigation can all influence the user. To craft a site that retains visitors, make it fast, clean and pleasant. The basic principal is do everything you can to keep them on your site for as long as possible. Not only can that help improve your search engine ranking, but it will help your sales as well.

Aside from attracting and retaining visitors, your site’s design is critical for search engine positioning. Directories, such as Yahoo!, manually review your site before accepting it. Directory editors look for sites with good design to add to their indexes. Any editor from a directory will tell you that a site using ‘This page is under construction’ message won’t be listed. Visitors don’t enjoy construction areas either. Don’t submit to directories, or even search engines for that matter, until you have your whole site up.

Capitalizing on Alphabetical Priority

Some smaller search engines use alphabetical hierarchy in their ranking formulas. But more importantly, directories such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project list sites in alphabetical order in their directory or categorical listings. Alphabetical priority is a way of ordering files based on the alphabetical hierarchy of the characters in their names. It is generally accepted that numbers come before letters, and symbols (@, #, & etc.) come before numbers. But don’t try to mislead them by adding ‘AAA’ or some kind of symbol in front of your name. Directories are reviewed by human editors who can confirm your actual business name.