As a client of Rich’s Web Design you will be receiving a monthly report from Google Analytics in PDF format around the first day of EACH month.  Google Analytics is the industry’s leading web statistics application that will show you valuable statistics (good and bad) about visitors to your own web site.

It will show you the number of visitors your site received the previous month, what search phrases they used to find your site, how many visitors “bounced” (left after only viewing 1 page), how many people filled out your Contact Us form (if applicable), what mobile devices they used to view your site, what landing pages visitors entered your site from their searches, what cities / countries your searches originated from and other details.

For the entire article go to www.RichsWebDesign.com/google-webmaster-tools-report-terms.shtml

Wait!...not so fast. We've been testing over the past month, and Google still doesn't index Flash nearly as well as you might think. Converting your web site over to a Flash design could be a huge SEO disaster. Most Flash sites are created as one big file. That means every page within the Flash site has the same URL. People will be able to link to your homepage, but not to any of your internal pages. By using Flash, you've effectively chopped your link building efforts off at the knees.

Former Google Engineers Launch Rival Cuil Search Engine - A team of former Google engineers is taking on their old boss with a new search engine designed to rank pages based more on the quality and depth of the content on the page, and less on the links those pages have pointing to them. It's called Cuil (pronounced 'cool').

MSN - Live.com - Last year, Microsoft adCenter added a quality-based ranking component to their ads, similar to Google AdWords' Quality Score. Microsoft recently announced they've now rolled this feature out to advertisers in the UK and Canada.

ASK - Slow month at Ask...nothing new to report.

YAHOO! - Wanna Build Your Own Search Engine? Let Yahoo Show You How! - Yahoo knows that Google clearly dominates the search market, controlling more than 75% of the US market alone. One big reason Google has gotten such a foothold is because they face very little competition. With entrance costs into the search business running in the hundreds of millions, it's no surprise that only three companies (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) can really afford to compete. Yahoo has finally discontinued their famous Overture Keyword Tool. Long considered the definitive standard in free keyword tools by online marketers everywhere, the Overture Keyword Tool provided Yahoo with enormous amounts of free publicity and mindshare among those looking to promote their businesses online. Why they would want to get rid of it remains a mystery. Once it became clear that Yahoo was dropping the ball, WordTracker made the smart move to launch their own free keyword tool, which performed the same function as the Yahoo tool.

MSN - Live.com - Microsoft Unleashes New And Improved Indexing Bot - There's a new Microsoft search bot in town. It's called msnbot/1.1 and it's reputed to be a lot tougher and more efficient than its predecessor. This is good news if you're trying to get more exposure in Windows Live. Microsoft Rolling Back Recent Algorithm Change - It was supposed to be just a ranking and indexing algorithm update, but it had an unfortunate and unintended side-effect. Instead of helping to improve search results on Windows Live Search, Microsoft's recent algorithm update actually caused many websites to disappear into search oblivion.

ASK - Ask Adds Compete.com Traffic Data To Their Search Listings - Ask is a pretty cool search engine even if they aren't winning the search market popularity contest. One great feature they offer is called Search Binoculars. It permits you to preview a web page right in the search results before you actually click through to the page itself. Just mouse over the binoculars icon in the search results to see a page preview.


YAHOO! - Yahoo Lays Off Roughly 1000 Employees - In what some are calling a desperate bid to raise profits and lower operating costs (especially while fighting off an aggressive Microsoft takeover bid), Yahoo laid off nearly 1000 of their employees. Will Microsoft + Yahoo! = MicroHoo! ? Unless you've been living under a rock, you already know that Microsoft made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo, that Yahoo rejected the bid and that Microsoft has vowed to press on and turn hostile if need be to acquire Yahoo!

In crafting a good backup strategy, every business should survey the available types of backup technologies, in search of the best fit. Is it time for your business to move to a network backup and storage solution? Do you have mobile workers who need removable storage? Have you thought about the conveniences and rapidly growing capabilities of online backup and storage offerings?

Let PCMagCast, PC Magazine editors, and experts from Iomega explain the best backup strategies, including demystification of the many newer types of solutions, including online choices. With our 60-minute, interactive overview of inexpensive, easily deployed backup technologies, we'll help you lock down your data, work more efficiently, and automate your efforts.

In this webcast, you'll learn about:

More importantly, those same webmasters will also inform you, getting top 10 rankings in Google often means your site will prove profitable. Mainly because obtaining targeted traffic is usually your first obstacle in creating a viable online business. In other words, if you get top ten listings in Google for good searchable keywords, it is almost impossible not to earn money.

How To Proceed?
First, you must know the rudimentary basics of how keywords work. Keywords and keyword phrases are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they're looking for online. If you have a site on "dog training" then your goal is to get a top 10 ranking for the keywords "dog training".

Now if no one searches for "dog training" it would be a useless keyword, you would get no traffic no matter how perfectly your site is optimized for that keyword.

How Do You Know If A Keyword Is Good?
To find out, you have to do some keyword research on your particular keywords. Many professional online marketers use keyword research software like Brad Callen's Keyword Elite. However, you can also use the keyword suggestion tools supplied by Google Adwords or Overture. Try here: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Now if you check "dog training", you will find it receives around 4,469 searches each day. That's a lot of trafic but you must realize that it may be too good, or rather too competitive for your purposes, especially if you have a new site.

Biggest Mistake When Choosing Keywords
The most common mistake most novice webmasters make is targeting keywords which are too competitive. You simply will not be able to compete or place for extremely competitive keywords. Well established sites and businesses with very deep pockets have the resources to completely dominate those keywords.

While it is not entirely futile nor a waste of time to concentrate your efforts on highly competitive keywords, you will have better success if you target low to medium competitive keywords.

Long Tail Keyword Marketing
Besides online marketers have discovered that longer keyword phrases are usually the most lucrative. These phrases deliver traffic which is better targeted and more likely to convert into a sale. "Dog hunting training" which gets around 100 searches a day will be more targeted than the general term "dog training" and if you have a site devoted to training hunting dogs then this keyword phrase may convert better for you.

Always keep this "Long Tail" keyword strategy in the back of your mind as you implement the following steps to achieve your own Top 10 Rankings in Google.

1. Make A Master Keyword List
Your first step is to make a master list of the keywords you wish to target. Obviously these should be closely related to the theme of your site. Check the keyword competition by seeing how many sites are listed in Google for that keyword. Webmasters should also check the Google PageRank of the sites that hold the top 10 positions. If all those sites are PR6 and above it may be hard to get ranked high for your keywords.

2. Choose Related Keywords
Once you have your master lνst of keywords, find long tail related keywords to target. Again, check out the competition and daily searches made for each chosen keyword.

3. Use Quality Content For Your Keywords
Creating quality content should always be your main goal. Write for actual visitors who will see and read your content. First and foremost you must have good useful content that your visitors will use themselves and recommend to their friends or colleagues. Tie this quality content in with your chosen keywords. Use one keyword phrase per page.

4. Keyword In Domain Name, Title and URLs
Having your keyword in your domain name will score big points from search engines. Plus, each page of content should contain your keywords in the title & meta tags for that page. Most experts also suggest you have your keyword in the URL and use hyphens to separate your keywords. Although the author has gotten good results by using an underscore and htm in URLs. Example: www.yoursite.com/your_keyword.htm

5. Do On Page Optimization
Keyword ratio is a much discussed topic by SEO experts and many suggest you should have your keyword in the H1 or headline title of your page. Sprinkle your keyword and variations of it throughout your page. Don't over do it but make sure the robot/spiders will clearly discover what your page is about. Many webmasters make sure they include their main keyword in the first and last 25 words on their pages.

6. Use Traffic Modules
One technique that works extremely well in Google is clustering a closely related topic or subject into a distinct separate section on your site. For example, if you have a marketing site, you could create a whole section on article marketing where you would have 50 to 100 keyworded pages all relating to your subject. Writing articles, formatting articles, submitting articles, article software... place a keyword linked menu on each page to connect all your pages together.

Keep in mind, your main objective is to supply quality information to your visitors. One reason Google may favor this type of structure is because they want quality content returned in their SERPs.

7. Try Article Marketing
Article marketing is writing short informative articles on keyword topics related to your sites. You then submit these helpful keyworded articles to ezine directories on the web. When your articles are picked up by related sites, you receive quality One-Way links. The higher the quality of your article, the more links you will receive.

Another ranking tactic to use: If you're just starting out your site will probably have a low PR rank and you will find it hard to rank for even modest keywords. That's why it's useful to take advantage of the higher PageRank of the major ezine directories. Your keyworded articles on these high PR sites will get picked up by Google and displayed in the top 10 rankings. Now the displayed URL will be the article directory site but the links in the resource box will be pointing back to your site. Over time this article marketing technique will raise your own site's rankings for those keywords. Simple but effective.

8. Anchor Text And One Way Links
Off page optimization is important in obtaining high rankings in Google. Getting quality One-Way links is very important. Anchor Text simply refers to "the underlined clicked on words" in your links. Most webmasters include their keywords in their anchor text as this tells the search engines exactly what the links are about.

9. Tags, Blogging And Web 2.0
Take advantage of Web 2.0 by using blogs, RSS feeds and the social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg. Try AddThis.com for a simple social bookmarking system. At the very least your site should have a blog and RSS feed attached to it as this is an effective way of boosting your keyword rankings.

Tags have become very important for getting higher rankings. Keep in mind, in free blogging software such as WordPress, categories will automatically be seen as tags. Blogger, which is owned by Google, now has a form where you put your keywords (tags) for each post you make.

10. PPC vs Organic Search
Of course, one of the fastest ways to get your links displayed on Google is to pay for them by using Google Adwords. Your ad and links will sit side by side with the organic link results. In Pay Per Click advertising you bid or pay so much per click for your keywords and you only pay when someone clicks your links. But smart marketers also know since you're getting millions of impressions advertising your products, acquiring name recognition and branding through PPC advertising can be a major side-benefit.

However, most webmasters would say that organic links (SERPS) will return better traffic than paid links or advertising. In most cases, this may be true because Google's organic rankings are becoming more respected and more trusted by users. They simply carry more weight with surfers.

This makes it even more beneficial to obtain top 10 rankings for your keywords in Google. Depending on the competitiveness of your chosen keywords reaching the first page listing or even the favored number one spot is well within any webmaster's reach. Just go for it. The rewards are well worth your efforts.

2. Make sure your site validates as a search engine friendly site. The best site to use for this purpose is The World Wide Web Consortium. Their markup validation service will tell you if your site conforms to W3C standards and whether or not the search engines can read your site. If your site has errors, these may stop the bots from properly indexing your site.

3. Make sure you have a contact page with an address and telephone number and a form of some sort so people can contact you. Don't list your email on the site unless you want spammers to send you tons of junk mail. Make sure the form you use on the site uses captcha (challenge-response system). Have a Privacy Policy Page and Terms of Services page and ensure that they have at least 300 words of text each. Most sites have these pages, but I strongly recommend you not copy. Find examples, but use your own words and include keywords related to your site. Make the pages personal to the reader.

4. Every page on your site should have at least 300 words or more. Don't write a 2 paragraph page that has little to no real information. Provide details and give examples.

5. Create a FAQ or Tutorial page on your site. Make each subject link to its own page and focus each page on 1 or 2 keywords. As a start, try to add 10 of these types of pages to your site. You can come up with ideas for FAQ's or Tutorials by reviewing your industry and trying to determine what people might not understand about it and the kinds of questions they might ask. Then post the questions and the answers. This is an easy way to add great content to your site and to help potential clients feel secure about your service.

6. Add a blog to your site. Have your blog designed to match your site so that as it draws traffic your readers know this is your main site of business. This will add value to your site, plus improve your search engine rankings. Create categories and write frequently about your industry to keep your readers interested and your content fresh.

7. Create Link Bait using your blog. There are very few services that offer this on a professional level and it can be very complex. I suggest leaving this service to the professionals because it requires time and knowledge and can be difficult and frustrating to do. The idea is to add unique and detailed content about your industry which creates enough buzz through various channels to motivate others to refer and link back to your blog. This can be a huge asset to your business because many writers love to provide plugs to quality content.

8. Post to Directory sites that have good inner page rank, especially on the page where your site will be listed. Use unique anchor text for each posting. Again, this may be one of those tasks best left to professionals because, if done correctly, your site's search engine ranking can be dramatically improved and, if done incorrectly, can be a waste of time, effort and money.

9. Text Link Brokering is another creative and effective way to build more anchor text back links. Find related and quality ranked sites that will list your site in text format. Generally, this requires a one time, monthly or yearly fee.

10. If you have a product or service to sell, offer affiliate incentives. Post these incentives on affiliate forums and elsewhere to generate interest in getting others to promote your service for you. Be sure you have a solid affiliate back end in place to provide your affiliates with dependable stats and access. Then, have people write reviews on your program's tracking and payout reliability to generate additional buzz.

The 10 points noted above are by no means a complete list of what you could do to improve your site's search engine ranking, but if you focus your efforts on these 10 areas, rest assured you will see both an increase in traffic and higher rankings.

MSN - Live.com - Microsoft Seeks To Make It Easier For Mobile Users To Surf The Web - Microsoft recently redesigned Mobile MSN in a bid to win over mobile users. The new Mobile MSN offers a variety of information and services relating to news, sports, entertainment, email, search, instant messaging, and maps.

ASK - Ask Relaunches Their Search Engine as Ask 3D - Ask.com's new Ask 3D release of their search engine is a radical redesign of their search interface, featuring a 3-column layout that allows Ask to display far more information for a query than most other engines.

YAHOO! - Gives Their CEO the Boot, Puts Founder Jerry Yang in Charge - Yahoo announced their CEO Terry S. Semel is stepping down and being replaced by Jerry Yang, one of the company's cofounders. The gap between Google and Yahoo is rapidly getting larger and Yahoo's shareholders are painfully aware.

This list of twelve SEO-related definitions in alphabetical order (with notes) serves as a great companion for your initial SEO reading. Read alone it will get you up to speed on some key terminology that you'll need to know to intelligently engage the ever-changing world of SEO.

The number of opinions and "experts" on ways to increase search engine traffic is overwhelming. And regardless of what anyone might tell you, they're all guessing. The search engines themselves don't divulge how their methods work for one simple reason. As soon as anyone figures out the method, there's a mad rush to implement changes based on the method.

In a perfect world, where there were no scoundrels, this might not be a factor. Everyone would organize their web site information so that a visitor could easily find what they are looking for, and life would be good. But we certainly don't live in a perfect world and scoundrels are everywhere.

So we are at the mercy of the search engines to help us sort through the clutter to find what we want. And that's the value that the search engines provide, accurate and meaningful search engine results that are related to the search terms or phrases. So it goes back to the quality of content, that's the only common factor in all 3 major search engines' ranking methods.

Each of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) search engines use a little different method and technology to arrive at any given web site's ranking under specific search terms. As mentioned above, no one knows exactly how each method works. But you can test different strategies and methods to see how they impact your rank.

And therein lies the only true method of determining what the search engines might look for when ranking your web page on specific search terms. I'm sure most of us are aware that most processes can be expressed in mathematical equations. I'm not sure if that's the best method for search engine ranking, but it is the most popular for the search engine ranking process.

And consider the fact that when someone has determined (or thinks they have determined) one of the factors used in search engine rankings they beat it to death. Every discovered aspect in the past few years has been exploited immediately to the point of the search engines abandoning the tactic. As soon as the search engines see that someone can beat the system, they change it.

That's one of the big reasons you see constant change in ranking methods. Since there is a tremendous amount of revenue at stake for all concerned, i.e. sales of products and services for the web site owners, plus the advertising revenue for the search engines, any advantage is huge.

If you would have tested and tracked all the changes and methods in search engine rankings for the past few years, one constant factor would stand out. This is also one of the most misunderstood and often overlooked elements in search engine ranking for a specific term.

So what's the one thing that the search engines can't change about their mathematical algorithms? You got it, CONTENT! The search engines can play with the process, methods, or means to judge web site content. But, if web site owners stick to the basic philosophy of providing meaningful content, in relation to the search term, the impact of changes are far less, if even felt.

And that is where many web site owners run afoul of getting good search engine rankings. Many jump on the bandwagon with every new revelation in search engine strategies based on the latest changes. It's the old forest and trees scenario, Internet style. Even if you get a slight advantage from all these "new" tactics, it will be short lived. As soon as the search engines catch on that you are working the system, they will change the system.

So the best way to increase your rankings for a particular search term is to provide meaningful information or content based on that search term. Here a few guidelines I've found that help:

You'll find many "experts" who will give you a hard list of items and how to present this information. And I don't disagree with suggestions to include the search term in your web page in key areas like title, description, and font designations like H1. That helps the search engine software bots to determine the content.

But I've seen web pages with no meta-tags, title, or description but that had rock solid content and still had high search engine rankings on a particular search term. So make it easy for the search engines, but always remember that the content is the single consistent factor in search engine rankings.

There are a lot of different aspects to consider when trying to improve your search engine ranking, and increase search engine traffic. The keyword and phrase research, interpreting the search term or phrase to provide the best result, reviewing other popular web sites with the same intentions, linking to other like content web sites, and more. How you present the information and content is also an important issue.

But all those factors come after good content. So if you start with providing the best content, you can't go wrong. After all, this is both an art and a science, not to mention a moving target. If you would like to learn more, please visit our other article links below.