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Search Engines, Optimization & Keyword AnalysisSubmit It!, SearchEngineGuide.com, SearchEngineWatch.com There are a number of tricks to getting a higher placement in the search-engine rankings. Here are the keys at the present, and it changes as people get more clever about working around the aims of Google and the other players. 1. Popularity -- Trade links with other sites or put up sites under other domain names that link to your site. Popularity -- that is, how many pages link to your site -- has become a crucial factor in ranking over the past few years, and it's one of the hardest things over which you can gain much influence. So go be popular. 2. Go to the edge on "spider chow". It used to be that sites could embed a whole bunch of repetitions of the key words and phrases by which they wanted their site characterized in places that visitors to the site wouldn't read them (like white text on white background below the bottom of the home page) but the search-engine crawlers (spiders or robots) could. These practically invisible keywords are called "spider chow". The search engines caught onto this and began de-listing sites that did this practice. If your site employs a server-side technology such as Active Server Pages (by far my preferred Web technology), you can detect whether the visitor is a spider or a human. If it's a spider, you can serve them versions of your pages that are quite rich in the key words by which you want to be rated high but without exceeding the threshold of what would be considered force-feeding the spider ... and without exposing those spider-tailored pages to human eyes. 3. "Reverse" search engine -- There are ways to find out what search terms people have been entering into the search engines with a count showing how many people have entered that term as well as the phrases within which they've used that search term. This is probably the most useful intelligence about what people are looking for and how they think about things in the general areas to which your site is relevant. It's like reading the collective mind and seeing its priorities listed. I can't overestimate the importance of this technique. There's a way you can capture a lot of the relevant traffic by buying your way to the top of the sponsored links (always at the top of the search list and in a column at the right) for a penny or two per click -- i.e., each time someone clicks your link on the search-engine results list. 4. Doorway pages are pages that are designed specifically to attract people into the site. Each doorway page focuses on a specific set of keywords that go well together if a human lands on them. 5. Web server log analysis -- WebTrends and other similar analysis services can tell you what search engines referred visitors and what search terms they used to get there. This enables us to get feedback on what's working with just as much importance as seeing our position in searches. Here's a free submission service --> http://www.addpro.com/submit30.htm. This looks like the best approach to me in the aftermath of SubmitIt! going bust.
In case
there's something about that alternative that doesn't go, for $2.50, you can
submit your URL to a bunch of the best search engines -->
http://www.ineedhits.com/submission/easy-submit.aspx
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