Evaulating Web Site Performance

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it's too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

What Do You Do When You Have Traffic?

Traffic is fine. Traffic is good. Traffic to your website is fabulous! But do you find that although there are tons of traffic to your website but not much action? As in, not many people are posting messages in your forums and not many people are buying stuff from your website or employing your services? This is a problem common with website owners who have spent a large amount of money of working their search engine promotion without employing correct methods of eliciting action amongst visitors. Traffic is nothing is there’s no action!

What could be wrong with your strategy is that you need something…a graphic, some copywriting or a great promotion to propel these people into action. Maybe it’s because the traffic to your website finds the navigation complicated or confusing. Maybe they can’t find what they’re looking for. Try going to your website and think like the visitors or your website. Imagine you’re part of the traffic you’re attracting. When you come in, you’re looking for something and what do you see? How long will it take your traffic to find the stuff they are looking for on the first page of your website? How many times do they have to click onto a link before they find what they’re looking for? All this is essential to your traffic, don’t undermine it….work it!

Sometimes, it could be something as simple as great copywriting. Good copywriters know that in order to get action, you have to be unabashed about it. You don’t say ‘try it’, you say ‘you are losing out on an out-of-this-world opportunity if you don’t act now’. Well, not in so many words but I’ll give you a few examples of words to use as links in order to get people to click it. Like, ‘I want to save money now’, ‘I want this promotion’ or a simple I’m In.

Try revising some of your web copy to something more straightforward and direct. Don’t be shy about asking your traffic to act NOW because it’s true. Sometimes reworking your website copy to something shorter and more aggressive works wonders.

Marsha Maung is a freelance writer, SEO content writer and graphic designer
with more than 8 years experience in her field. She lives in Selangor, Malaysia
with her family and happily works from home working her clients' blogs and
websites. Visit http://www.marshamaung.com
for more info.Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marsha_Maung

Effective SEO Comes Cheap

Search engine optimization or SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Maximizing the benefits of a well optimized website will yield lots of earnings for the marketer. However, optimizing your site might cost you thousands of dollars if you are not skilled in this area.

But to tell you the truth, you can essentially get information on low cost SEO anywhere in the Internet. But only several really show you how to work out an affordable search engine optimization endeavor. And those few that really inform include this article.

1. Link exchanges

One cheap SEO method that can get you best results is through link exchanges or linking to and from other web sites. Depending on the websites that you would like to exchange links with, this tool could even cost you nothing at all. Contact the author or owner of the web site you want to have a link exchange with. You will be surprised with the eventual spiking up of your page ranking using this means of getting your website optimized.

2. Write or acquire key word rich articles

Writing truly informative and keyword-rich articles is one surefire way to make your Internet business more visible than ever. It's either you write your own articles or you get them from article directories that allow you to post these articles on your website as long as you keep the resource box or the author's byline in tact. Just don't stuff your articles with keywords that even idiots would get bore of reading them. The readability and freshness of your articles will still be the basis of whether your writers will keep on coming back to your website or not.

3. Catchy Domain Name

What better will make your target visitors remember your website but with a very easy-to-recall domain name. Something sweet and short will prove to be very invaluable. Registering your domain name is not for free. But creativity is.

4. Organize your site navigation

Providing easy steps in navigating your site is one way to make your visitors become at ease with your site. This, in turn, will improve the flow of traffic to your website.

Low cost SEO is always evolving like any other approach in information technology. There are many methods that can very well land you on the top ten rankings of Google or on any other search engines. Some may cost a lot but there are methods that can give you the same results at a low price or you can even do on your own such as those mentioned above.

How To Generate Traffic Using Only Free Methods

Putting up a company would of course require a lot of things, to get straight to the point, you need a capital. To make money requires money as well. But of course, with the versatility the internet offers, there are many ways you could find that could help optimize the potential of your site or business in generating traffic.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don’t have the resources that others have to generate more traffic for your site. Well, you don’t have to spend a cent; all you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.

How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent. Now it’s a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods. Because it is possible, you don’t need to speed a single cent, it may take time, to say honestly, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. You get better chances by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I’m about to tell you.

Take advantage of online forums and online communities. The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

You can also make use of newsletters. Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.

Another great idea is trading links with other sites. You don’t have to spend a cent. All you have to do is reach an agreement with another webmaster. With exchanging links, the efforts both sites do will benefit both sites. Every traffic that goes to the site could potentially click on the link of your site and visit your site as well. This works well especially when both sites feature the same niche.

Write articles that could pique the attention of people that have interest in your product. Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

Many sites offer free submission and posting of your articles. When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write good content for your site. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.
Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.

All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the methods depicted here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.

5 Easy Steps to Advance in SEO

Search Engine Optimization is probably one of the oldest traffic generating techniques in the internet. Due to its proven success in pulling up website's ranking on search engines, almost all webmasters are utilizing it. If you would like to advance in SEO, here are some simple, easy steps that you can take to attract more visitors to your site.

1. SEO almost equates to keywords. Use appropriate keywords that represent your products or services then match these with the ones that online users are using when they search for similar products. Your keywords should be easy to remember, short, and very descriptive.

2. Use keywords and keyphrases appropriately on your content. You must be able to follow required keyword density so search engines can easily find you site when online users key in your keywords. However, do it in moderation. Do not saturate your whole copy with keywords, it wouldn't make sense to your readers.

3. Submit your site to leading search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. This can tremendously pull up your rating as online users can easily find you when they use these search engines and use your keywords when they are searching the web.

4. Utilize other SEO techniques that include link building and buying text links. These will make your site appear on other similar websites so online users will know that your site exists.

5. Use Meta tags. Place keyword tags on your website to alert search engines that these keywords are particularly relevant to your site. Arrange your keywords by presenting the most important first to give valuable information to search engines when they present search results to online users.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets
of Article Promotion Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize

Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?

Building a website that looks great and is fun to use can be a great project, but what most of us really want is to be attracting visitors to our site. Making a search engine friendly website is vital to achieving this.

Firstly, before discussing how to go about making your website search engine friendly, we need to try and provide a bit of basic information on how search engines work.

Each of the major search engines have some basic similarities. They all have a number of automated processes called spiders, which are used to crawl the web. What these processes basically do is to follow hyperlinks all over the internet and then, when they arrive at a new page, to record some details of that page.

At the end of any such crawl, the search engines are able to build up some information about your website and the type of content that it contains.

When an internet user then carries out a search using the search engine, this information is used to decide how well your website matches the search criteria. The better the search engine considers the match, the better your rank in the results.

Ensuring that your website is search engine friendly involves two main steps - the first is to get your site included in the search engine results and the second is to get the best possible rankings.

In order to make sure that your site is crawled, it's vital that you build a site structure that is easily accessible, both by search engine spiders and by real visitors to your site.

You should try and make sure that every page on your website can be accessed within 2 or 3 clicks from your home page. To help the spiders find all of your pages, you should also include a site map, with links to every page on your site.

There are numerous steps involved when it comes to improving rankings but some basics include making proper use of the TITLE, H1 and H2 tags. If you're not sure how these should be used correctly then take some time to look at the HTML standards.

Add good quality, unique content to your website and make sure that your site is regularly refreshed - in other words, add new content regularly.

Finally, look to link to sites that are relevant to your own and try to gain links from related websites.

If you follow these simple steps, you'll soon have a search engine friendly website.

You can find out more about improving your web presence by visiting Search South, where Keith Barrett is employed as a search engine consultant. This article may be used by any website publisher, though this resource box must always be included in full.

Gurus Secrets Exposed - 9 Simple Steps for Organic Listings in SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is broadly divided into 2:

1. Organic SEO(Unpaid search results)
2. PPC (Paid or Sponsored search results)

Here, we are going to talk about the organic SEO. Let me first explain you what does one mean by an organic listing:

An Organic listing or Organic SEO is a natural search engine optimization (SEO) which focuses on optimizing websites by making them search engine friendly and appear in the unpaid or "organic" search engine results pages(SERPs). Organic SEO is considered to be inexpensive as compared to PPC results. Unlike Pay-per-click or PPC search results achieved in a short frame of time, an organic listing will increase your website traffic and income over a long time irrespective of the search engine algorithm changes.

One of the main factors that give you high rankings at search engines for your search terms is the “Link popularity” factor. That is, how popular are your website links in the search engines. It could be due to on page factors, backlinks, or other off page factors. Organically optimized websites contain quality content rich with keywords that visitors find informative and relevant to their searches. This Content is further optimized for search engines by incorporating relevant key phrases or keywords page wise into the site's literature which are commonly searched for by any user. Organic optimization is holistic in approach. Successful organic optimization combines the technical process of SEO with compelling marketing. Every aspect of a website is analyzed for making it search engine and user friendly. On page Factors like the website's title, meta-tags, keywords, body of the webpage, website structure and design, usability and function are all taken into consideration. The time taken is considered as one of the weak factor in optimizing the website. It takes roughly about 3-4 months before you start getting search results for your website.

9 steps for organic listings in SEO are:

Choosing Keywords
We have to select primary set of 100 keywords through Overture Keywords Suggestion Tool, Digital point or WordTracker.

Bunching of Keywords
We then start bunching these keywords pagewise. We will make 10 bunches of 10 keywords each.

Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs)
We will select 10 pages to optimize for the site initially. If there is no suitable page found, then the existing web pages need to be optimized to the maximum for your website www.xyz.com. Every page should have atleast 10 keywords.

SEO Copy writing
According to the 10 keywords of every page, we need to see that every keyword should come in the content of the webpages at least 4 to 5 times. Word Of Caution: Note that the webpage should not look stuffed with keywords. The purpose of SEO Copywriting is to have good content that ranks highly in search engines for the targeted keywords or keyphrases.

Naming the SERPs
Name of the search engine result pages should be very simple. The best way to do is picking the best keywords of the page and to name the page in that way. Like;

www.xyz.com/offshore-proddev.html

Adding metatags to the SERPs
Metatags like, title, description, keywords, extracts, subject, etc, will be integrated to the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Structure of SERPs
These 10 search engine result pages (SERPs) should have text links among each other and a must text link to the site map. Apart from this we should have all the general links to take the visitor to the main website. Concept of these search engine result pages is visitor can go to the main website from it but it can’t be vice versa.

Robot.txt
Robot.txt is a simple file to restrict the search engine crawler to crawl any part of the site. Suppose we are not interested to reveal or index admin pages or folder. We can simply do this by putting the robot.txt in the root.

Submission and resubmission
Website Submission should be done only manually in various search engines and directories and never through any software. If the required result is not coming, we can resubmit after every 3-4 months.

Hari Qumar is a management graduate from a UK university and owns Begonia Infosys. He is actively involved in promoting SEO
in India and works for a Entertainment portal as well.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Hari_Qumar

How To Get High Quality One Way Links To Your Websites

There are basically two aspects to SEO, "on page" & "off page" optimization.

"On Page" SEO is easy because it's totally under your control. It's simply a case of making sure you have optimized your web pages correctly.

OK, so there is a bit more to it than that, like keyword research, keyword density & frequency, which html tags to use, making sure your site/pages are W3 Compliant, using relative/absolute internal linking structures to feed the pagerank where it's most effective, using titles and descriptions that encourage people to click through from the SERP's etc.

But essentially, once you know how to do all that, it's not difficult to get it right for all your pages/sites.

It's also less important in the long run than getting sufficient links to your site/pages from other sites.

Getting links to your site is fundamental to getting visitors, and without visitors all the time, effort and money invested in getting your site up and running, and looking "nice", is irrelevant.

No Visitors = No Point!

So links are essential to the health of your site, and indeed your business, but all links are not equal in value to your site.

Reciprocal links will help, but they are far less effective than one way backlinks, i.e. links from another site where you don't have to link back to them. These "One Way" backlinks will give your site a far greater boost in the search engine results and bring you more traffic, providing of course that you have chosen good (relevant) keywords for your links.

There are many ways of getting these powerful one way backlinks, but most you will have no control over the anchor text used (i.e. keywords) in the link, which means their "power" in unfocused and therefore of less use to you in achieving the targeted keyword results you are looking for.

For example, submitting your site to website directories can be a very effective way of picking up some high quality one way links from high PR sites, but you will seldom be able to choose the keywords/anchor text used for the link, often ending up with the site name as the link.

This is not a waste of time, as the Pagerank passed to your site will, with the correct internal linking structure, be passed on to your sites internal pages, helping them to rank better for their targeted keywords.

So how can you get highly targeted one way links?

It's fairly common for webmasters to now buy or "rent" links to their sites through service like Text-Link-Ads.com, and these services will allow you to choose the anchor text, but they are far from cheap. A link from a PR 8 site can easily cost $150+ per month. In fact there is now a business model emerging based on building sites simply to sell these kind of links (see LazyGitMarketing.com).

Google has also publicly stated that they disapprove of this practice and are actively seeking to downgrade the value of such "paid links", although personally it seems like a valid form of advertising to me, but maybe I just don't have Google's wisdom in these matters. ;)

As always in business, there are entrepreneurs who have identified this need in the market and a whole new branch of linking services are popping up offering new solutions for one way backlinks.

I've been testing some of them out over the last few months and have found a couple that have had a significant positive effect on the sites I used them for.

The Backlink Solution BacklinkSolution.com

This first solution is a monthly subscription that provides a network of high quality blog sites for you to post comments on, including a link to your site(s) using your chosen anchor text.

Note: As you make the link yourself, you can also link to internal pages on your site to improve their rankings as well, which you can't do with directory submissions.

It is a manual process, but is easy enough that it can be outsourced fairly cheaply.

The Pagerank of these blogs varies, but the links provided are very "natural" in appearance to the search engines, and as you can post unique relevant content on market related blogs, the links are highly relevant. You are also limited as to how many blogs you can post to each month, to ensure that the links grow naturally over time, rather than all in one go.

Three Backlinks Way Links 3WayBackLinks.com

The internet marketing market is highly competitive, so it's hardly surprising that another service with a different twist has popped up from this market.

This is an automated "three way links" system, where you link to site A, which then links to site B, which then links back to you. Whilst this is arguably not as powerful as true "one way backlinks", it's still a significant step above one way "reciprocal" linking that is the more traditional method used by the majority of webmasters.

The process is also automated for you, making it very hands off. You can submit up to 20 sites with just one account and you can specify three different anchor texts to be used as the links for each site’s, making sure you don't incur any penalties for over use of just one text link keyword or phrase.

It is also set up to gradually build up the links over time to make it all appear very natural to the search engines.

Your Own Authority Blog BetterThanLinks.com

There is one final service that I've found to be very useful, although it is more ideal for people with multiple sites to promote.

The service gives you your own blog on an existing high PR authority site. The site has 833,039 backlinks listed in Yahoo and gets spidered several times a day by all of the major search engines. For example in June 2007 Googlebot visited it 14,470 times and Yahoo Slurp 52,436 times, so you can see why it's an regarded as an "authority" site.

I have used this to link to brand new sites and had them indexed by Google within 24 hours, so it's a great way of getting a new site in to the SE's quickly, and the link weight will obviously also help any site linked to.

As a side note, I've also found that my blog on this site can get fairly significant traffic itself when I take the time to keyword optimize the posts, which is always a nice added benefit.

I haven't traded reciprocal links for any of my sites in almost two years, you can probably see why I don't need to. Using powerful new linking tools and services like these means I am able to take total control over the "off page" SEO linking strategies for my sites in the same way as I do for the "on page" SEO factors.

Wouldn't you like to do have the same level of control over your sites search engine rankings?

Author: Matt Garrett - © 2007 http://www.dominoseo.com

Get more simple effective Optimization Tips and Advice @ DominoSEO.Com

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Google Ranking Secrets

Google is by far the most important search engine on the net. To rise to the top of their search engine, you need to improve your link popularity and you need to understand how they measure your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffíc comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top, you will likely rise to the top of all the other search engines as well). Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millíons of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.
The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Frëe For All (FFA) pages.If you try to acquire inbound links by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Link farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources. Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. They use a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will be ranked in the search listings.
One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that has more links.
The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link would help your score much more if it were from a website whose subject matter is the same as yours.
Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For example, if your site is about jewelry, and another jewelry website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewelry is being written or discussed.
Also, they give an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn about it.
Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.
It is difficult to íncrease your link popularity, but now that you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a link to your site.
About The Author
Jim Pretin is the owner of Forms4Free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.

SEO Or Page Rank –Which Is The More Important?

By Peter Nisbet (c) 2007

Whether you believe in SEO or Page Rank and wonder which is more important, your thinking is irrelevant. You are wasting your time in wondering what is the correct answer to that question, since even if you knew it, there is little you could do to use that information.

Why do I say that? Because SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way of designing your website, and placing content in it, to satisfy search engine algorithms. Search engines are so sophisticated today that if you achieve that, then you will also satisfy visitors to your website. If you satisfy visitors to your website, then they will stay on the page they landed on and read it. They will then clíck to read other pages on your website and might even make a purchase.

Sure, some will leave right away, but if the search engines feel that your content is good enough for a high placement in their indices for the search term, or keyword, that your visitor used to get to your web page, then it is more likely that you will achieve a relatively high stick rate of people to your site than a lower one.

Now, consider if you thought Google PageRank more important (and PageRank is correct, not Page Rank). You would then spend more of your time trying to get links back to your website than you would properly optimizing your site and filling it with good content. If you were successful in that difficult job, then Google, and possibly other search engines, would líst you a bit higher in their indices, not because their spiders thought your site was relevant to the search term used by the potential visitors, but because other websites thought so.

You will then get visitors to your website, and the page they land on would have to be relevant to the search term they used or they will immediately leave. If it is relevant, they will stay, perhaps visit other web pages and perhaps make a purchase.

So what is the difference? You get basically the same end result. How can you tell which is the more important. There is one simple way to do this, and one that I have used more than once. Design two websites round the same keyword. Make the keyword the name of the website and then apply classical theoretical SEO to one site, including some of the extra special tips that can make the difference between success and failure – in fact that DO make that difference.

Now apply only minimal SEO to the other and make sure you have exactly the same content on each, but rewritten to avoid duplicate content or that would negate the test. However, with the second site, you must generate as many links back to your website as possible, using non-reciprocal links where possible, but reciprocal links where necessary. There are a few ways in which you can generate lots of one-way links to selected pages on your site, and you should make that your home page for the purposes of this test.

Wait 4 weeks then chëck Google, Yahoo and MSN for the position of each of your home pages. You will find that your first website will generally be listed higher for the keyword that both sites are built round. Chëck again about 3 months later, and you will likely find that website 2 will feature higher as the links start to take effect, but then the first site will overtake it as it generates its own links naturally. Basically, what this proves to me is that it is essential to optimize your website for search engines in the classical way, but that for best results you must also have a good level of links back to your website. There are simple, ways to achieve both, but that would be the topic of another article. However, in the end, if you apply both, then you will achieve best results. I know that there are exceptions to this, and I have highlighted them in some of my ebooks, but generally that is the case.

So, the answer to the question: SEO or Page Rank, is that neither is the more important. They are both equally important, but it is possible to do one better than the other and then you would be tempted to say that your way was best. But you would be wrong!

If you did find what was the best, you couldn't use that information since search engines rules are transitory but good honest content and classical SEO have always prevailed, as has a good number of links that others follow to reach your website.
Peter
is an expert on audio-visual file formats and codecs and more information on p2p file sharing software can be obtained from his websites LegalAndFree.com and Online-Free-Movies.com where options are presented and the ethics discussed.