By: Craig Fifield | Source: microsoft.com

It’s the online equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising. And just like its offline cousin, it’s the most effective way to get new business.

This advertising mode is known as "link building," and it involves getting other Web sites to link to your site. It’s like one of your neighbors recommending a good plumber or handyman; it carries more weight than if a person just stumbled across your Web site.

In today’s world, there is much more to good search engine listings than simply optimizing your site for keywords.

In order to keep searchers happy, search engines are always developing ways to make their results more relevant. In the last couple of years, links have become increasingly more important to the engines because they see links as an endorsement of your site by other Web sites. Think about it for a minute: Would you link to a site you didn’t like?

This concept is referred to as "link popularity." Based on the links pointing to your site, the search engines either increase or decrease how relevant your site is for particular keyword searches.

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By: Christine Parfitt | Source: webpronews.com

Keyword research is one of the most important parts of a pay per click campaign so how do you go about identifying as many relevant words and phrases as possible? Here are some techniques:

1. Use your existing resources

You know your own business and you will have access to a list of your most relevant keywords. Your brain is a good place to start! Here are some resources that will be useful

• Your website
• Your product brochures, ad creative, email campaigns and any other marketing and sales collateral
• Your knowledge of the business – brainstorm!
• Your network of friends, family and customers – ask them for words and phrases they would use to find your business
• Your website’s log files. See what people search for when they come to your site.

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By: Loren Baker | Source: searchenginejournal.com

Google will continue to try to see if the 404ed page has ever been reinstated as a live page.

"Google even provides these errors in Google Webmaster Central, where you can see web crawl errors including 404 not found errors."

Instead of serving a 404 error message which makes it look like your site is full of broken pages and links, it’s much better to customize your 404 error page with:

• A site map, or link to the site map and link to the homepage which will direct the crawler to the main content rich sections of your site.
• If you run a blog try aggregating your RSS or archive feed to serve links to the 5-10 most recent posts.
• A search box which will help your users find what they are looking for on the site.

Get more information here…

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