Provide a Dedicated Resource

This can be as simple as adding a new page to your intranet or as elaborate as a career development office. Offer as much as your budget will allow, keeping in mind that you can expand as time goes on. Include resources, referrals and tools to aid your employees in their development. With the amount of information available on the Internet, you can easily assemble a wealth of career-related articles, assessments, and planning tools. If you haven’t done so already, publish your company’s internal information. Organization charts, job descriptions, salary ranges, and training schedules are great resources for employees to use in planning.

Because career management may be new to your employees, include detailed instructions for using your system and a list of resources available to them in their planning. If you can’t provide a career development consultant, make certain that HR and managers are able to answer any questions that may arise.

Programs & External Resources

There are several initiatives you can incorporate in your career development program. Executive Career Coaches specialize in helping organizations manage their talent more effectively. They will help your employees determine the most appropriate career path and develop the skills necessary to grow within the organization. Partner with a career coach to provide services for key employees or arrange a reduced fee schedule for employees who wish to hire a coach at their own expense.

Another effective and low-cost tool is a mentoring program. You can structure a mentoring program in many ways. An informal program that simply matches a mentor and a mentee can be incorporated into your intranet site. A more formal program may have a coordinator dedicated to pairing the participants, training the mentors and overseeing the process. Regardless of the structure you choose, a mentoring program enables an organization to leverage their existing talent to impart their knowledge and expertise to one another.

Support & Communication

For any talent management initiative to be successful, it is imperative to garner the support of management from the top of the organization down to line managers. This goal can be achieved by communicating the organizational benefits and the anticipated return on investment from the outset.

It is essential to roll out a formal communication plan to employees. They can’t take advantage of your program if they don’t know about it. Promote your program consistently and encourage managers to do the same. Publicize this information in your recruitment literature and on your company website, and it will attract high-potential candidates.

Encouraging employees to manage their own careers won’t put a strain on internal resources and the benefits far outweigh the costs. In addition to building a pipeline of future leaders, you are addressing retention issues, meeting the demand for employee development, and making your organization more attractive to prospective employees. It’s a win-win for everyone.

SEO service.

One factor that Google, for example, takes into consideration when ranking websites is the number of high-quality links that a site contains. Finding appropriate links to add to your site in order to help improve your ranking is one way an SEO service can help.

Most popular search engines use web crawlers, specialized web robots, to search the web for the best matches to the keywords you have entered in the search line. The search engine then indexes the results, and ranks the results so that the best matches with your keywords end up near the top of the search engine result list.

Another aspect of your website that a quality search engine optimization firm will look at in addition to adding quality links will be to implement an effective site map of your site with links to important portions. It also pays to provide easy to read content. Effective, clear and concise writing brought to bear on your web site’s content by an SEO company will create a more useful and informative site that people will want to visit. This will also involve the analysis of appropriate keywords to include near the beginning of your content pieces, so that web crawlers will find the keywords easily.

The html code that your business web site utilizes is vitally important for ranking purposes. If a web crawler cannot find and analyze your site’s links, you are dead in the water. An SEO company can check your links to ensure that all are fully functional, which can also assist in improving your site’s ranking.

A reputable SEO company will offer clients a written contract with services and related fees clearly stated. You will also want to ensure open lines of communication with your selected company, because ultimately you are responsible for what is on your website. Beware of unscrupulous Internet marketing companies that use hidden text incorporating excessive keywords that can be read by web crawlers but not visitors to your site as a way of improving your site’s ranking, because it can get your site dropped from search engine indexes, so that it does not appear in search results lists at all. Ethical SEO companies can remove hidden text, or if it contains important material, can make it visible so that your visitors can access it easily.

DMOZ Open Directory Project This is the most important and appreciated index on the web. It is edited by volunteers , and has more than half million categories and around five million websites. The main importance of DMOZ is its influence on major search engines like Google , Yahoo and etc. which derive information from DMOZ and ascribe large importance to links incoming from there to your website. To include your website in DMOZ go to http://www.dmoz.org , find the most appropriate category to your website, press Add URL and follow the orders. Take few minutes to read DMOZ terms of submission in order not to mess up your application. DMOZ will reject your website If it is placed under wrong category, mainly under construction, has no value to public or is poorly described. Description must be objective otherwise most chances it will be excluded. DMOZ will not notify you about reception or rejection. If you can’t find your website, don’t hurry to submit it again , try asking at DMOZ forums what is the status of your application. Entering DMOZ index is the only way to enter Google website directory. Yahoo Directory Yahoo is the most popular website in the world and US. Inclusion in its index might be worth the huge fee of 299$. Wright a short description (10-25 words ) , make it objective and fluent , include 2-3 keywords but do not exaggerate. Make sure your website is in a good condition (no 404 pages and under construction pages) Yahoo is not condemned to include your website even if you pay the fee , but they are supposed to review your listing in about 7 workdays. In yahoo index you dont need to pick a category , one of the editors does it. Must say, most of the websites are included. Business sites must pay the fee every year while non-profit sites must pay only once.

What Is Localized Search Engine Optimization?

Localized search engine optimization is the addition of local search terms to your tags and web pages. For example, if you work in Sonoma County, California and are targeting local or state visitors, be sure to include “Sonoma County” and “California” in your tags and in the text on your page. This way when searchers look for services in Sonoma County, California in the search engines, your website will have a better chance of showing up in the search engine results.

How Do I Include Local Search Terms?

There are many way to include local optimization terms. Oftentimes we as web page creator do not think like the user: we are too close to the subject matter we display on our websites. Sometimes when you know a subject very well you speak in shorthand when talking about it. Take a step back and read your web pages again. Spell it out for your visitor, using easy to understand, clear information. Realize that your visitors may not be as familiar with your message or product as you are. Get specific. If you sell blue widgets, say so in your text. If you sell primarily to a Sonoma County audience, include Sonoma County in your tags and text.

Include your local search terms, just like your typical keyword phrase terms, in your title and meta tags, headings, link text, and web page text as reasonable. Most importantly, include local information on your contact page, where your city and state location information is typically listed.

The simplest way:

* Title tag

What if you want to get even more specific? Try including:

* Title tag

* Heading tag

Blue Widgets For Sale - Sonoma County, California

* Page text:

Looking for blue widgets? We have the most affordable prices on blue widgets in the Sonoma County area. We deliver throughout Sonoma County and all of California.

In this way, users searching for “blue widgets sonoma county” will more likely pull up your web page of blue widgets for sale.

What About Sales From Other Places?

Don't worry, localized search engine optimization works much the same as regular optimization. With local search terms, you are simply providing additional information for your local customers, much like you might in the yellow pages. Your other search terms work the same way as always. This will not change your opportunities to pull in traffic from across the country if you have your regular optimization in place. What you may want to do is specify a few pages on your website for local search terms, instead of the entire website if you are reaching for both a local and country-wide audience. This gives you the opportunity to drive local traffic to specific sections of your website with regional information. Some users feel better about supporting their local economy when buying from local vendors. You can even dedicate specific content pages to your local search visitors, including advantages to buying your product locally. In this way, you get the best of both worlds, your local audience as well as visitors from across the country.

Use Localized Optimization

Be sure to use localized optimization to bring in your local visitors, providing them with a personalized touch and regional information. Widening your scope of traffic builds the number of your visitors, both near and far. Get specific for optimum local website traffic.

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

Copyright 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved.

Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without editing, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.

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Write a Description and Keyword META Tag

META tags are html tags describing a web page. The META description should be a sentence description of the web page. Historically, the description was shown in search results, however, it is less likely the case today. It is still good form to have a catchy description. Write an attention-grabbing description that will grab peoples’ attention. Thin of it as the “Call to Action” section of your html code. Be sure to include keywords that are present within the page content.

Some search engines may include the META description below your hyper linked title within the search results page. The META keyword section of your page should include a list of keyword phrases relevant to the page. Instead of writing complete sentences, you should list keywords in this section. The maximum number of characters in each should be no more than 255.

Many search engines give META tags little weight, but you should still include them in your site. Some search engine may use them to create a summary for the page. Instead of simply indexing sites based on META tag information, search engines prefer to index sites based on site content. In other words, search engines rather index your page based on the VISIBLE content rather than META tags.

The search engines consider invisible text such as content found within tags less trustworthy. Improper use of tags could fool search engines in the past. For example, an online business could list many keywords that have nothing to do with the site content in an effort to boost search engine.

Meta tags are not the “magic bullet” of search engine optimization. Utilizing proper tags will not skyrocket your site to the top of all search page listings, but they may improve your standings in search engines.

By following the simple methods listed below, you will be able to determine the right mix of keywords and phrases that will generate targeted prospects to your website. Remember that good search terms are ones that are related to your business and have sufficient monthly search traffic.

How to choose the best keywords and phrases?

1)Select keywords that represent your company’s “bread and butter.” What products and service lines are the most profitable, have the strongest sales, and continue to show good market demand. And yes, typically the 80/20 rule applies here. 80% of your sales and sales leads are produced by 20% of your keywords and phrases.

2)Look at complementary products and services that people tend to buy that you don’t offer. Often, these keywords generate good prospects and typically have less competition than your primary keywords and phrases.

3)Use online tools to help determine keyword variations and search frequency. The best free programs to use include Overture’s search term suggestion tool - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion and Google’s AdWords suggestion tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/main. 4)Use WordTracker -http://www.wordtracker.com. For a small fee, you can use this tool to find niche keywords, use the thesaurus to find related search terms and determine general monthly search frequency. This is a great tool and worth the investment.

5)Use pay-per-click programs like Overture or Google’s AdWords to choose keywords and phrases for your SEO program. Both programs help you generate search terms based on specific keyword relationships and show how often they are searched for. Set a small monthly budget and track the number of keyword impressions you receive for each search term. After one to two months of data, choose the search terms with adequate search frequency and incorporate them into your search engine optimization program.

6)Don’t forget Geographics. If your products and services are local or regional, be sure to include your state or city within your search phrases. For example, an investigations company that conducts most of its business in the Midwest would want to choose “Indiana and private investigator.”

7)Take a look at your competition. Based on your top three competitors, look at their website for specific search terms being used. Also, look at their META keywords to get a good idea of what search terms they think are important. Remember you want to look at competitors for your different markets served and products and service lines.

8)Analyze your website traffic. Make sure your web hosting company provides you with the ability to analyze your website log files. Some hosting companies have you log into your account to view monthly web traffic reports, while others email monthly reports. Information obtained can tell you the top search terms and search engines used to find your website and other valuable information. To get the most out of your log file data, it is recommended to use a log file analyzer such as Web Trends or Urchin.

By applying these methods, you will be well on your way to generating highly-targeted keywords and phrases that attract the right types of prospective clients - ones that have direct interest in your products, services, and solutions you offer. 

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About the Author

Corey Wenger is owner of Key Position Web Marketing and is a professional Search Engine Optimizer and Consultant who has over three years of experience in helping companies increase sales and profitability through strategic web marketing programs. On average, clients have seen 200% + increases in web marketing sales and prospects. For more information, please visithttp://www.key-position.com or email him at corey@key-position.com.

What precisely is an ad tracker? It is a marketing tracking software or program that allows you to trace and take note of every click-through made by visitors of your site and by other customers who got your referral link. There are ad tracking service providers as well, so you will just have to pay them to do the tracking for you. With the ad tracker, you can keep an eye on the progress of your marketing campaigns even offline. This tool or program is especially helpful if you are engaged in several affiliate and pay-per-click programs and have placed ads in emails, pop-ups and pop-unders, message boards, auto responders, Ezines, forums, several web sites, surveys and various ad service providers.
Of course, you don’t want all your efforts to be put to waste so you want to make sure you are getting paid for your hard work. Likewise, you want to make sure every dollar or cent you disburse in your advertising campaigns is wisely spent. With the help of the ad tracker, you will know accurately how many and which of your links where clicked on, how many clicked on your links, how many of your emails were opened and how many of those who opened your email clicked through the business site and purchased a product, how many products were purchased, which of your banner ads or links brought the most leads and sales and many other pertinent facts and figures you need.
Sales records and all data stated are necessary in any business as this could determine if your affiliate program is still worth continuing. This would also help you determine which of your marketing strategies is most effective and which is most beneficial for each product or service you are promoting.
Every decision and plan you make must be well grounded on facts. That decision or plan of action may not be the best, but it is something not to regret about when you had valid reasons for coming up with such decision or plan. You cannot just decide to terminate your affiliate program, just because you don’t earn big in an instant.
If you are serious with affiliate marketing, again and again, keep in mind that your success lies mainly on promotion and your hard work. If you don’t seem lucky enough to convince many of your site users to buy the products, don’t be disheartened and jump into a conclusion that your affiliate program is a failure. If it works for others, it could work for you, too. Know whether your advertising techniques are effective or not, which works best for your program and which doesn’t. Get an ad tracker to help you know all these and you’d surely be on the right track towards success!

Of course, you also need a few tips on the dos and don’ts of what makes a successful marketer. There are a few things that can help your business grow and also help you make the most of today’s Internet spending craze. The most important thing of all is to know who your customers are. It may seem like a silly idea - you certainly want everybody to be your customer, but this won’t happen too soon. You need to pick a viable niche in terms of both numbers and buying power.

Once you’ve found this niche you have to understand your customers. Are they emotional buyers, analytical buyers, “what’s-in-it-for me” buyers or fact freaks? There are many types of customers in your niche and although sometimes the products you market can help you shape your business, this is not always the case and you should not rely on other people to give you hints.

Examples of customers would include:

- Emotional Buyers: first-time mothers looking for safety items for their babies.

- Analytical Buyers: people who need to know every detail of the product they intend to buy, like where it was manufactured, by what company, what kind of materials and technology it incorporates, etc. If you fail to provide the details they need, they will go look for someone who can do that.

- What’s-in-it-for-me Buyers: the bargain hunters. They want to know what your product can do for them and you have to tell them all the facts as soon as they lay eyes on your web pages. They don’t need anything extra, all they want is to be sure they are getting the best value for their money and, if possible, a discount.

- Fact Freaks: Obsessed with being sure your products are as good as you claim they are. You will need hard evidence to support every claim you make. Reviews by well known independent web sites are great and so are testimonials and independent tests with the results published in important magazines and newspapers.

The good affiliate programs will provide you with almost everything you could wish for. You’ll have your free web site(s) personalized for you. You’ll have access to tons of articles to use on the web sites. If you need an SEO expert, you’ll get one in the blink of an eye. And although it’s hard to believe, affiliate programs do offer a totally “no risk - fast results” opportunity to make money online working from home.

But nobody will do the job for you. And your only job is to know and understand your customers. This is the only important thing when it comes to marketing, be it online or offline.

Once you have optimized your site, consider submitting it to every search engine. If you want to get spidered quicker in Google, have a web page with a PR of 4 or higher point to your site. Your site will be spidered within a couple of days!

One myth I would like to bust is that PR is a measure of a web site. Its not. I receive countless emails offering a reciprocal link with their PR5 or PR6 site. Unless my link is appearing on the main page, or a page that has PR6, I am not getting a share of PR6. Most likely, my link will appear on a page that has a PR2!

Page rank is Google's ranking of that specific page's relevance. Just because the main page has a PR of 4, does not make every page on the site a PR4. Beware of sites who claim that they will exchange links with you and its to your benefit since they have a PR5 or PR6. Where is your link appearing? If its on a page that has a PR of 4 or 5 or 6, great!

Reciprocal linking, if done properly, will ensure that your keywords are at the top of the search engine. If you have a popular keyword, youll need to have more back links. Pick your link partners properly, and ensure that they are linking to your keyword.

For example: if your site is www.joesdinner.com, consider sending out requests to relevant higher ranking pages to start with, followed by lower ranking pages and ask web designers to link back in the following manner:

best dining in new york - joes dinner is the only place to eat when you're staying in New York.

Presuming their keyword is “best dining in new york”, having links pointing to your site with an anchor tag incorporating your keywords will improve your search engine rankings dramatically.

Once you have established a collection of sites pointing to your site using your keywords, you will start receiving reciprocal link exchanges from other sites. This is where you can start to be particular.

If you want to maintain an effective PR and attract better sites for linking, follow these tips:

a) Is it indexed?

While their site may be indexed, the page where they are placing your link, is it at least indexed by google? If you type in allinurl:www.sitename.com/links/right_here.html and there are no results, consider declining their offer. If the page your link appears on has not been indexed, there is no benefit whatsoever to you. If your pages have PR, they may consider placing your link on another page. If the page your link appears on is indexed, but does not have PR, consider accepting their offer. While the page today may not have PR, it will in time.

b) How many neighbours?

The value of the page rank is shared with each of the links on that page. If you are splitting that PR with several other sites, your share of PR will be small, which doesnt help you. Reconsider accepting any link exchanges if your site is 1 of more than 30 - 40 sites that will appear on that page, unless its a very high PR. Further, if there are too many links on that page, Google may consider the page to be part of a link farm, which may end up penalizing your site.

c) Is it relevant?

Google is big on relavancy. Ensure your links pages are relevant. If you operate a site about golf, having links from cooking sites will not help you establish your page rank. It may cost you more than you get in return.

How to Find Good PR sites:

a) Do a search for them by typing in your keyword and start asking for reciprocal link exchanges. Take a look at their PR and go from there. Remember, its the number of sites that backlink to you that matters, not strictly the PR of the page. I would rather have 50 pages that have a PR1 pointing to my site, than to have 5 sites that have a PR5. Of course, if you can get 50 pages that have a PR5 pointing to your site, you are laughing!

b) Take a look at your existing link partners and check out their links pages. Its clear the people appearing on those links pages are interested in reciprocating.

c) Purchase software that will help find quality link partners.

It is important to attract higher PR sites when you are on a reciprocal link campaign. However, its not the most important thing when it comes to search engine rankings. Its the backlinks that point back at you that are key. The more of those, the better off you will be for your keyword.

Remember: every page starts off as a PR0. Just because its new doesnt mean it wont get a higher PR once google gets around to assessing a score. If the page your site appears on is indexed, and its a relevant site of quality, consider exchanging links. You'll grow a large list of link partners in a short period of time, and increase your search engine rankings in the process.

It’s much wiser, to first try and discover what keyword phrases people are searching for on the major search engines and then optimize Web content for those specific phrases. However, there are still further regions to explore that go beyond keyword research. Let’s call it researching the “behavior” of your target audience.

The difference between keyword research and behavioral research is that keyword research keeps us in a rather technical mode and focused on finding out what words people are entering while searching. Behavioral research has the added advantage of enlightenment and understanding that not only reveals what keyword phrases are being used, but why those keywords are being used.

Give this some careful thought. What could possibly be more important than getting inside the head of your target audience and discovering what they really want? Actually nothing! Once we understand exactly what someone is looking for, we can give them exactly what they want. Think “behavior.” Every day, people around the world use the Internet as a tool for a vast array of purposes. A study of behaviors can carry you much deeper into understanding the desires of your target audience and ultimately, an understanding of what kind of useful content to provide for them.

While most people are thinking about what keywords to use, try to expand your scope to focus and discover the fullest possible picture of what your customer REALLY wants, what they really are doing, by simply studying their searching behavior on the major search engines.

Why make all this fuss about behavior trends anyway? What creates behavioral trends? Think about it this way. If you can discover how a certain target audience is using the Internet, then chances are the rest of your target audience may be doing exactly the same thing. This is not only helpful with respect to the ideal keyword phrase selection but also may be helpful to your writing style. How you communicate to a grandmother will have a completely different spin than how you communicate with a sports enthusiast looking for sports scores or a photographer searching for a place to review several different lenses.

If you happened to learn that a grandmother is shopping online to buy a gift for her daughter’s newborn baby, then what are the chances of there being many other grandmothers doing the same thing. If enough grandmothers are doing this in real life every day, it creates a trend.

So lets get down to talking about behaviors then.

Some people have already realized that online consumers are searching for price comparisons online. Wouldn’t it be useful to know exactly what prices or what products people are comparing? How easily you could you take advantage of this information by creating ideal content within a retail site, that compares exactly these things that people are searching for and want to know! Not only that, but suppose you could research those exact products and determine fairly quickly where the biggest “window of opportunity” would be for you?

One of the most powerful and useful tools for researching human behavior is Wordtracker.com. As an official member of Wordtracker’s question and answer support team, I help answer peoples questions about keyword research every day. The questions I answer are mostly things that customers are curious about, but often the answer to their question does not allow me the time to explain about some of the special advantages of Wordtracker. This is why I wrote an e-book called Wordtracker Magic, to help people understand some simple, easy alternatives to performing keyword research and behavioral research. Many people miss the behavioral trends simply because they are thinking too narrowly about “keywords” which may already be pre-programmed into their minds. Remember, if there is enough common interest in any topic, so that a similar search behavior is occurring then it will often leave an identifiable trend behind in Wordtrackers database. Every time you can discover those trends, it’s like pure gold! 

Articles Source - Free Articles

About the Author

John Alexander is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together, they teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive “hands on” search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. John also teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com, and he’s a member of Wordtracker’s official question support team.

But who wants to listen to anyone go on about how great something is when you know they’re also selling it?

In our society, what you’re allowed to say about something you like (and get an open and unsuspecting mind at the other end) depends on whether you’re selling it or not.

Pretend you just got the new Power Mac. Of course you’re supposed to show and tell your friends. And if you just got that new motorized stroller, you show it off to your friend, and she’s usually all eyes and ears. They call that word of mouth – among friends.

Some say that’s the coveted form of advertising because people are telling each other about things that work in their lives and they have no known ulterior motive. It has social value – you to pass on good information that might help someone else. Plus it’s fun to be the one to tell someone else about something good, fun or useful that they didn’t know about before.

BUT…when you happen to be selling the thing you’re going on about, suddenly no one wants to hear your good words anymore. Ask yourself: How much time do YOU want to spend listening to someone else extolling the virtues of something, when you know they’re also selling it?

And the thing is, EVEN if the wonderful things they say about it are true, when someone is selling it, the truth is suddenly suspect to all who are listening.

Of course we know why: sales and marketing types have lost our trust. We’ve been fooled so often that one new best-selling business book is entitled, “All Marketers are Liars.”

Seems we’ve concluded that sales and marketing people who will say whatever they have to, to try and sell you something – overstatements and misrepresentions are common. Here’s what happened to me last week. “You’ve Been Pre-Approved”

Seems like the only way people believe each other about new and fun things is if they’re not also selling it.

So what do you do if you sell stuff you DO really love madly?

1. Tell the other person right up front that you ARE selling the product.

2. Tell WHY you decided to sell it. What did it do for you that made you decide to sell it?

3. Make NO promises about what might happen for them. Only tell what happened for you.

Remember the very famous and successful TV ad with Victor Kiam, the guy who bought Remington? He came on black and white TV in the 70’s, in his bathrobe, held out a razor, and announced to everyone watching: “I liked this razor so much I bought the company.”

We can do that, can’t we?

THEN you have taken ANY possible hidden agenda out of it. And then you get some credibility. Because you have just bared all: You are marketing it, because of what it did for you. And you make NO gushy promises about what it will do for them.

That’s one thing we show you in the book, “If My Product’s So Great, How Come I Can’t Sell It?”

If you have other language and techniques that have given you credibility when you describe the wonders of your product to a prospect, please share. Use the ‘Comments’ section below. I for one am waiting with bated breath.

User-agent: ia_archiver

Disallow: /

ia_archiver is the crawler name for the wayback machine that you may have

heard of, and the / after disallow tells ai_archiver not to index any of your

site. The # allows you to write comments to yourself so you

can keep track of what you typed.

Type the above three lines into notepad from your computer and save it to the

root directory of your web site as robots.txt. Web crawlers look for this

document first at a web site before doing anything else. This helps the

crawler to do its job, and helps the web site owner tell the spider what to do.

Say for instance you have some data that you don't want the crawlers to see.

(Like duplicate content for other browser referrer pages) You can deter

crawlers from indexing the 'duplicate' directory by typing this into your

robots.txt file.

Or if you would like to have the robots.txt file created for you, visit

www.rietta.com/robogen. To validate

your robots.txt file to make sure it works properly you can visit

www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi

User-agent: *

Disallow: /duplicate/

The * after user-agent says that this action applies to all crawlers and

/duplicate/ after disallow tells all crawlers to ignore this directory and not

search it. For each user-agent and disallow line there must be a blank

space between them in order for it to function correctly. So this is how

you would create the above two commands into a robots.txt file:

# this identifies the wayback machine

User-agent: ia_archiver

Disallow: /

User-agent: *

Disallow: /duplicate/

One thing to note that is very important: Anyone can access the

robots.txt file of a site. So if you have information that you don't want

anyone to see don't include it into the robots.txt file. If the directory

that you don't want anyone to see is not linked to from your web site the

crawlers won't index it anyway.

An alternative to blocking indexing of your site is to put a meta tag into

the page. It looks like this:

You put this into the tag of your web page. This line tells the

robot crawlers not to index (search) the page and not to follow any of the

hyperlinks on the page. So as an example

tells the robots crawlers to not index the page, but follow the hyperlinks on

this page.

Did you know that Google has its own tag?

It looks like this:

This tells the Google robot crawler not to index the page, not to follow any of

the links, and not to keep from storing cached versions of your web site.

You will want this done if you update the content on your site frequently.

This prevents the web user from seeing outdated content that isn't refreshed

because of storage in the cache.

You can use the tag to specifically talk to Google's robots to avoid

complications or if you are optimizing your site for Google's search engine.

This concludes this month's article.

Until the next article have a great day!

Copyright Michael Rock

(You have permission to copy this article as long as it remains intact with the

author's byline)

Web development contractor (Web Design and Hosting)

Internet Presence

www.TheInternetPresence.com

The owner of this registered company

has over twenty years experience with DOS, windows business applications, numerous

programming languages, artistic development, and web design. Other areas of

interest include web marketing, web promoting, and business marketing and

development. After the persuasion of those praising his work, he decided to go

into business himself and highly suggests everyone else to do the same.

Now that you understand the power of the Google Sitemap you’re probably asking yourself how to create and implement a Google Sitemap. The first step is to simply create your sitemaps. Here are the templates which are also available at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
For a sitemap file use the following format:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84“>
   <url>
      <loc><A href=”http://www.example.com/http://www.example.com/<;/loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc><A href=”http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaiihttp://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii<;/loc>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc><A href=”http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealandhttp://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand<;/loc>
      <lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc><A href=”http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundlandhttp://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland<;/loc>
      <lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>
      <priority>0.3</priority>
You can see that there’s practical value in learning more about SEO. Can you think of ways to apply what’s been covered so far?
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc><A href=”http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usahttp://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa<;/loc>
      <lastmod>2004-11-23</lastmod>
   </url>
</urlset>
Everything here is pretty self-explanatory with the exception of the changefreq and the priority aspects. The changefreq asks how often you think the page will change on average. The possible values for the changefreq option are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. The priority aspect basically just asks how important the particular page is in your website. The value can be anywhere between 0.0 and 1.0. If you decide not to specify a priority it will default to 0.5.
To create a sitemap index file follow the following format:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
   <sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84“>
   <sitemap>
      <loc><A href=”http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gzhttp://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz<;/loc>
      <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc><A href=”http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gzhttp://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz<;/loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   </sitemapindex>
This is all pretty straight forward but it leads me to my next point. You notice that the file names all end in .gz. Google allows you to compress your sitemaps so that they take up less of your disk space when you place them on your site and less of your band width when Google downloads them (which it seems to do approximately once every 9 hours or so). You may only use .gz compression. If you try .zip, it won’t work.
Now all that you really have to do is submit your sitemap to google. In order to do this you must go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and log into your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you can create one. Once you log in you will be allowed to submit your sitemap into the google index. At some point within about 24 hours of your submission, Google will give you the option to place a small HTML file onto your website so that it can confirm that you do, indeed, have access to editing the site. Once you have done this it will begin to provide you with statistics regarding your google sitemap. (Note that even without this feature you can see when google downloaded the sitemap last and what the status of the sitemap was at that time.)
How Google Sitemaps Fits Into Search Engine Optimization.
According to Google, the Sitemaps utility is free and will continue to be - yet it’s almost as good as the paid inclusion service offered by rival search engines. So how can you take advantage of this great service?
First of all, you should create a Google Account. Although you can still use Google Sitemaps without an account, you need one before you can use Google’s tools to check your site submissions. Once you do that and go to sitemaps.google.com, you’ll be guided through the process.
Google Sitemaps has a very helpful question and answer page that will give you the help you need - the answers to most questions people have can be found right there. Good luck!
The day will come when you can use something you read about here to have a beneficial impact. Then you’ll be glad you took the time to learn more about SEO.
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Higher click-thru ratios According to recent research, websites that are listed at the top of the organic search results and the paid listings will triple their click-thru ratio. Three times more people will visit your website if it is listed in both places because there is a second opinion effect. Searchers see both listings and are encouraged by the fact that a website is listed in both the organic listings and the paid listings.

Greater penetration of search results By optimizing your websites content to rank well in the organic search results, your website can be found for many keyword phrases and combinations of keywords. Good organic search engine rankings typically take months to achieve, and are fairly easy to maintain on an ongoing basis. Pay per click (PPC) can be implemented quicklyit can also be turned on and off as needed, depending on your companys budget and current promotions.

More keyword research Keyword research tells you how many people per day search for what keyword terms. There are many tools available that allow you to perform keyword research even before you achieve organic search engine rankings or start a PPC campaign. Once organic search engine rankings are achieved, keyword research using existing website statistic data allows you to enhance your listing of keywordsyou can combine your organic keyword list with your PPC keyword list to focus on the keyword phrases that bring you the best ROI.

Build credibility Organic search engine rankings provide very high levels of credibility and broad coverage on potentially every search engine worldwide. When a website is listed well in the organic search results, the website usually is found for not only their chosen keywords but many combinations of keyword phrases related to those chosen keywords. Its those other combinations of related keywords that bring a website a lot of more visibility in the search results, frequently causing a website appear to be found for everything related to a certain industry. The results can be staggeringa properly optimized website can appear in the search results more often and for more related keywords than a company who has not done any organic search optimization.

Appearing the paid results also helps to build credibilityjust because a searcher doesnt click on a paid ad and visits the website doesnt mean they havent seen the companys sponsored listing. Paid listings also can provide some visibility and credibility for certain keywords that arent usually obtainable through organic search engine optimization.

Bill Hartzer manages the Search Engine Marketing division of MarketNet, Inc., a leading full-service interactive design and development firm in Dallas, Texas. Hartzer recently joined MarketNet, where his vast experience significantly bolsters MarketNets already robust search engine marketing offerings.

Hartzer is a successful writer and search engine marketing expert. During the past fifteen years, some of his many accomplishments include:

Search Engine Optimization Strategist, Intec Telecom Systems PLC

Webmaster, Intec Telecom Systems PLC

Founder, Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association

Owner/Author, Corporate Web Site Marketing

Administrator, Search Engine Forums

Frequent Speaker, Search Engine Strategies Conferences

Frequent Speaker, WebmasterWorlds PubCon Search Engine and Internet Marketing Conference