How to Get Great Search Engine Rankings!

By Brandon Leibowitz

1. Choose Your Keywords Carefully

Once you've chosen your business and purchased a domain name the next step is to find useful and relevant keywords. Without this step your Web site will get lost among the many Web sites that compete for your business.

To begin keyword research you need to utilize some useful tools. The first Web site you should look at is Google Keywords which is a free tool that displays the amount of searches and competition for specific keywords. It also allows you to find more specific keywords that can better describe your site.

A better tool would be to purchase some type of software or service such as WordTracker which offers detailed information about keywords. Unfortunately it's not free, but there are other services that are.

2. Find a Niche Market

This cannot be stressed enough as it's much harder to receive top search engine rankings for a new site than an established site. A new site will have to compete with Web sites that have established high search engine rankings.

To compete with these Web sites is unwise. You first need to find a niche market, and then build up your Web site to a position as to where it can compete with these generic terms. For example let’s say you have a Web site geared towards weight loss. You would not use the keyword "weight loss" because there's too much competition. You can use one of the keyword tools to find suggestions of related keywords that you will be able to compete against. You may find the keyword “weight loss surgery” or “weight loss techniques.” These phrases are much better keywords than generic terms like “weight loss.”

Use the list of a few keywords, check out the competition that word/ phrase has on Google. Look at the number of competitors. If this exceeds a few million, then you need look for a more specific keyword. The next step is to observe the top listed pages and see how well they are optimized. You can download the Google Toolbar and add Page Rank to your browser for free.

A low Page Rank between 0 – 3 means that you can easily compete with these Web pages. A Web site with a Page Rank of 4 – 6 is a bit tougher to compete with, but is manageable using my guided steps and expertise. You don't want to compete with Web sites that have a Page Rank above 7. Check the domains homepage, not a sub-page to get an accurate Page Rank!

3. View Competitors Source Code

It's important to view potential competitor’s source code to see if they have efficiently performed on page search engine optimization. To do this on your Brower click “view” and then click on the “source” option as displayed.”

This will bring up a page with all the html code on it. You don't need to be an expert with html to understand what we're looking for. We need to see if our competitor’s Web site is properly optimized. We look to see if they are using their keywords in the header tags, the title tags, and the image alt tags. These should all be located near the top of the source code.

If you cannot find these then go to the toolbar and chose “edit” and select “find” and type in h1 or title, etc. to see if there are being used for the keywords. If these don't exist or aren't being used to hold keywords, you have found an easily beaten page. This means that with some proper optimization you will be able to outrank this page. The last thing you want to look at is the body content and to see if the keyword is used a few times in the body content. A site lacking in keywords in the body context is a poorly optimized page. You should always make sure your Web page is keyword rich with relevant content.

4. Keyword Placement

After you've selected a few keywords to use we want to combine the ones that have like terms. For example, if you've selected three keywords such as: weight loss story; weight loss picture; safe weight loss, you see that all three keywords contain the words “weight loss.” We can combine the words to better optimize your page.

For the title tag the fewer the keywords used, the better the search engines will rank your page.

When we create the page it should NEVER have “Welcome to our Web site!” in the Title Tags.

It should NEVER have “weight loss story, weight loss picture, safe weight loss” in the Title Tags either.

The way the title tags should look is: “Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture” (Note: You can add this character | by holding the shift key on your keyboard and pressing the backslash key above the enter key.)

You should always remove prepositions such as “and” as this will only hurt your search engine optimization. The fewer, more relevant the words, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

Header 1 tags should be placed above your body content. This should contain your most relevant keyword in this tag. i.e. “Weight Loss Story” This main keyword placed in the H1 tag will substantially increase your page ranking! The Header 2 tag should contain your second most important keyword. The header 3 tag will have your least important keyword placed in it. These header tags are often overlooked, but make a significant difference in your on page search engine optimization.

The body content of your Web page should be rich with keywords and relevant content. You should have each keyword appear at least once for every 1-2 paragraphs. Do not stuff your body with keywords. You want to give your body a clean natural look, meaning do not over or under use keywords!

Image tags alt tags should also be keyword rich. Search engines often look at the alt tags of images on your Web site. If the alt tags don't make use of your keywords then you will be ranked lower than if you had keywords in your alt tags.

5. Homepage Organization

We want the search engines to notice your keywords and index you accordingly. In order to do this you should start and end your body tags with your keywords. This gives the search engine spider information that your page is highly relevant to your keywords.

When the spider looks through your Web site it reads through your content from top left to bottom right. Below is an example of how the search engine reads your page starting with 1 then 2 then 3.

Rather than creating a table that looks like this:
navigational links
Your body text...

You should create a table that looks like this:
Your body text...
navigational links

Now, search engines will view your body content before it views your navigational menu. The search engine will see the top of your page then see a blank area and skip to your body content then move onto your navigational menu

6. Search Engine Submission

The best way to achieve high search engine rankings for new Web sites may not be what you expected. You should not submit your site directly to the search engines as this process can take weeks or even months to get your site listed. Instead you need to get listed on top ranking pages that are relevant to your Web site's content. These high ranking pages are often optimized on a weekly or even daily basis. Every time the site is indexed your link will appear and the search engines will automatically list your site in its index.

To do this you need to search for Web sites indexed by search engines and get them to link to you. The incentive you need to give them is to write some sort of article relevant to your line of business. At the bottom of the article you include your web page URL to get picked up by the search engines. You submit the article to popular article directories on the Web and you will be indexed by the search engines in a matter of days.

Here's a list of the most popular article directories:

GoArticles.com Ezinearticles.com ArticleCity.com Certificate.net/wwio Amazines.com Articledashboard.com Article-directory.com Submityourarticle.com/articles Magportal.com Isnare.com Pubs.acs.org/hotartcl Article-hangout.com Webarticles.com Articlecube.com Article-buzz.com

The other option is to perform a search of the most generic term that is related to your business. Click through these Web sites looking at the Page Ranks. Contact the Web site and ask them to link to your site and in return for linking back to their site. Always contact sites that are relevant to your line of work and always offer them something their visitors can benefit from once they add your link.

You can purchase a link in top Page Rank sites through link builders. A few of the good Web sites that can do this for you are: textbrokers.com or text-link-ads.com or linkadage.com.

Remember that you only need to purchase a link for one month, since it will take less than one month to get you indexed by the major search engines. Continuing to pay for the link after a month is a waste of your money.

7. Off Page Optimization

Here, you need to study the linking strategies of the top 10 Web sites for your keyword. We want to copy their model, but do things slightly better to achieve the top rankings. First open up a spreadsheet in Excel and list the following columns: Linking Web site, Anchor Text, Page Rank, Link Popularity Page Title, and Number of Outbound Links. Then we search your keyword on Google and fill in the information for the top 10 Web sites.

To discover the linking Web sites go to Google and type in the websites URL “link:www.thewebsite.com.” Then count the number of sites that are listed to get the link popularity.

Anchor text is whatever follows the .com or .org of a website URL.

Page Rank is the rank Google gives to Web sites. You can download it for free at Google’s Web site.

Page Title is the title of the page that appears on the top left of the screen. If the title does not contain the keywords then the site is not well optimized and easy to surpass in rankings.

Number of Outbound Links is the number of links located on the webpage linking to the site you’re checking.

Once all this information has been collected you can see what needs to be done to your site to beat the top ranking sites.

8. Search Engines and Capitalization

Capitalizing different letters in keywords brings up different results in search engines. Search engines are case-sensitive so it is important how you use capitalization. The problem with listing every variation of a word results in the search engines thinking that you are spam and deleting your URL. This gets worse with singular and plural words!

The solution is to stick with lowercase listings rather than trying different variations. Studies have shown that most people search in all lowercase and this has the most relevant listings. Not using every other variation means you lose out on 18% of traffic. This is not worth the risk of being banned from the search engines.

9. Search Engine Spamming

Search engine spamming is attempting to achieve top ranks for extremely popular keywords. Search engines have discovered ways to fight keyword stuffing and other search engine tricks. Search engines can detect your spam and will act accordingly by penalizing or banning you from their listings. The risks aren't worth the temporary rewards. Search engine spam should be considered the same as email spam.

10. Hire A Professional SEO

Hiring a professional search engine optimizer is a great idea if your business relies on Internet sales. Search engine optimization is something that is time consuming and requires lots of research. Most businesses don't have time to optimize their Web sites. At SEO Optimizers we make sure everything is inline at your site and fix any problems that may be holding you back from reaching the top ranks. If you really want to be at the top of any searches you need professionals to help you solve the problem.

About the Author

Brandon Leibowitz has been a professional search engine optimizer for years. He can successfully convert a site into one with top search engine rankings! He is the creator and owner of SEO Optimizers.

source: WebReference

14 Amazing Skyscraper Designs: Cool Architecture Of The Future

What will the architecture of the future look like?

Imagine a world where skyscrapers can walk, entire buildings can shift their form, and even prisons can 'float.'

The innovative winners of the 2010 Skyscraper Competition, held annually by eVolo magazine, have designed amazing buildings that aim to 'change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.'

In judging the entries and selecting the winning forms, 'globalization, sustainability, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution, were some of the multi-layered elements taken into consideration,' eVolo explains.

Check out the designers' incredible skyscraper creations below:

The first place winner of eVolo's 2010 skyscraper competition was the team of Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze from Malaysia.

Their "Vertical Prison" concept envisions a prison high above a city where inmates will live and work in factories and fields during their sentence. This will produce usable goods for the city below and the inmates will gain productive skills as a form of rehabilitation.

Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, and Leonardus Chrisnantyo of Indonesia got second place in the eVolo contest with their "Water Purification Skyscraper."

As a response to Indonesia's increasingly polluted rivers and growing slums, the Water Purification Skyscraper will use a three-phase system to clean up the rivers. Furthermore, it will relocate the people living in the slums into the skyscraper and employ them at the purification plant.

Ryohei Koike and Jarod Poenisch's concept for a "Nested Skyscraper" placed third in the competition

Their design uses multiple layers of advanced materials and robotic construction to adapt and respond to solar and wind exposure. A series of robots will create the primary structure and a secondary set of robots will be programmable and change the structure as desired by thickening or shifting.

The "Double Stuffed Skyscraper" by Viktor Ramos and Richie Gelles of the United States takes inspiration from current trends in architecture that create multi-purpose structures--in this case orienting residential units above a shopping center housed below.

The Double Stuffed Skyscraper aims to maximize space to better service both the public and residents by breaking up, redistributing and sharing amenities.

"Vertical Street City" by Sergiy Prokof`yev, Arsenii Kuznetsov, and Oleksandr Garashchenko of the Ukraine is a response to the solid and static state of current skyscrapers.

The Vertical Street City will instead develop over time and take its form from the people living in it, molding to fit their needs. The design is not identified as apartment living, but each level was intended to function as an independent, individual house.

The team of Axel Cailteux, Céline Hautfenne, Julie Neuwels, and Delphine Termote from Belgium designed the Skyscraper Ecosystem in Manhattan to be self-sufficient.

The design creates another city above the current level of skyscrapers that will house the necessary infrastructures for self-sufficiency, including a "photovoltaic skin and wind turbines for the electricity production, lagooning for the waste water purification and recycling area."

The "Immaterial Skyscraper" was designed by Mikhail Belyakov, Vyacheslav Borisenko and Pavel Pechurkin of Russia.

This skyscraper concept is a "skyscraper made of light." A large net would be suspended from a zepplin floating above the building, and lasers would be used to project images onto the net enshrouding the structure, to allowing for a myriad of images and forms to be projected onto the surface.

Anton Markus Pasing of Germany envisions this "Walking Skyscraper" as a walking plant museum that, in the future, could return greenery to cities by walking through it in.

The "Wind Tower" by Elena Batueva of Russia focuses on filling the need for medical service buildings. The design is for a modern, self-sufficient building that would harness wind power for its energy needs. There are also numerous locations where medical helicopters could land.

The "Freshwater Factory Skyscraper" is an eco-friendly structure designed by Nicolas Chausson, Gaël Desveaux, Jiao Yang Huang, and Thomas Jullien of France.

This series of 'bubbles' that make up the skyscraper use tidal-powered pumps, mangrove trees, condensation and gravity to do much of the purification and redistribution of water.

"Hermit Mountains" was designed by Hongjun Zhou and Lu Xiong and is designed to be a sustainable tower retreat for people seeking solitude and meditation.

Ayrat Khusnutdinov of Russia created the "Sky Table," a concept for a new kind of skyscraper and public space.

The building is made up of a number of interconnected cells and pillars that are meant to facilitate community and relations.

The "Strait of Messina Skyscraper" would bridge the gap between Messina and Reggio Calabria and will essentially become a vertical city.

Designed by Hong Wong and SheungHok Lim from the United Kingdom, Structural Cell Skyscraper explores the idea of a skyscraper made of a cell-structural system that would allow individual cells of the building to be moved and the building reshaped. This will allow flexibility to house the ever-expanding urban populations of the world's cities.

source: TheHuffingtonPost

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Why don't Americans receive an itemized tax receipt?

Is that all you get for your money?

Oct 1st 2010, 20:13 by M.S.

EVERYONE'S talking about Third Way's idea for a taxpayer receipt. (Ezra Klein, Annie Lowrey, Joshua Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, for starters.) So I'll talk about it too. Like everybody else, I like it. What's not to like?

Two complicating factors are raised. Megan McArdle writes that this is a great idea, but most of the liberal folks who are championing it may be unpleasantly surprised to find out which of the big-ticket items end up raising voters' ire: "[I]sn't it possible that the widespread support for programs like Social Security and Medicare rests on the fact that most people don't realize just how big a portion of your paycheck those programs consume?" Maybe. But the three items that voters already do see broken out separately on their taxes are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, since they're paid separately as FICA. Setting up the list this way might change things a bit, but then again it might not.

Kevin Drum meanwhile wonders whether either of the parties would support this shift.

Would liberals be afraid that people might look at the welfare-related spending and be outraged? Would conservatives be afraid that people might look at the startlingly low numbers for everything after the Big Five (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, interest on the debt) and lose some of their outrage over federal spending? Technical details aside, this is the kind of idea that everyone should support. Taxpayers should know where their tax dollars are going, after all. And yet, I'll bet that neither party would actually be in favor of this. Why do you suppose that is?

I'm sure Mr Drum meant this as a rhetorical question, but I'm too dumb to immediately get the rhetorical answer, so I had to think about why this might be the case. If it is the case, I can think of two explanations. One is that there's uncertainty about which side the change would benefit: Democrats think it would benefit Republicans, while Republicans think it would benefit Democrats. One of the two propositions is in fact correct, but either one party is simply guessing the odds wrong, or both parties are too risk-averse to find a zone there where they're comfortable placing a bet.

The second possibility is that the parties aren't risk-averse here; they actually place a positive value on denying the voters independent accurate information about how the government spends its money. Why might that be? It might be because political parties compete for power by shaping voters' political opinions to their own electoral benefit, and they have more power to shape opinions when the voters aren't getting this sort of information from neutral sources. They might oppose this kind of tax receipt because it diminishes their ability to act as informational gatekeepers between voters and government. It's a theory, anyway. But given that politicians routinely submit their bills to the nonpartisan and fairly rigorous CBO for analysis, I'm not really sure how accurate this theory is; I'm probably overblowing it.

source: theEconomist

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Boy's NBA-Size Dream Comes True

Four-Year-Old Ezra's Prosthetic Leg Doesn't Stop Him From Reaching High, Really High
BRIAN O'KEEFE
April 16, 2010

Four-year-old Ezra Frech was born with a rare condition that caused his left arm and leg to form improperly, which hasn't stopped the boy from doggedly doing what he loves most, playing basketball.

But the boy who has inspired so many recently got the surprise of his life when he met his favorite player, L.A. Lakers' Pau Gasol.

Ezra Deals With Differences

With a prosthetic leg, Ezra learned early on how being different is no big deal.

"It was a limb issue," Ezra's mom, Bahar Soomekh, said of his condition. "When the chromosomes divided, one side, his left side, got misinformation so it didn't form like the right side."

There was also something else special about Ezra. He was happy as a baby, engaged in everything, a possible sign of what was to come.

He had surgery at age 3 to remove the leg that wasn't growing properly and had it replaced with a prosthetic leg.

"That day that he walked into our doors, he changed our lives," Hanger Prosthetics therapist Ryan Russell said. "There's just something about him. ... He comes in here, he lights the place up." The new leg changed things for Ezra.

"I can't skip very well, but I can skip a different way," he said.

But being different isn't always easy.

"Sometimes, he has those days where he's like, 'I don't want to be different,'" Soomekh said. "He would sob to me and say, 'Tell God to give me another leg. Can you ask him if he has another leg like other kids?' ... He has had those moments."

Other times, whenever a basketball in his hands, it's impossible to slow him down.

"Every spare minute he has its dedicated to basketball," Ezra's dad, Clayton Frech, said. "Its fascinating."

Ezra said, "I just play over and over and over until its dinner time."

He plays inside, outside, alone, at school and with strangers. His favorite team? The L.A. Lakers.

Gasol Is His Favorite Player

"He doesn't watch cartoons," his mother said. "He watches Lakers games over and over again."

His favorite player is Gasol, whom he watches with near obsession.

"He just recently got a haircut because Pau Gasol got a haircut," Soomekh said. "He would wake up in the morning and come into my bathroom and grab my eyeliner and ask me to give him a beard like Pau Gasol." For all his adoration, Ezra had never met Gasol, until a few days ago.

Before a recent game, backstage at the Staples Center where the Lakers play, Ezra got a big surprise when Gasol, at 7-feet tall, walked through the door. After a few hugs, autographs and pictures, Ezra was floating.

"It was so exciting. It was surprising," Ezra said. "I was so happy I met him and I was like, 'Oh, my God.'"

Gasol said it was a gift to him as well.

"To be able to share a couple of minutes with a kid full of joy, full of happiness in his situation ... it just makes you feel incredibly blessed," Gasol said.

Leaving such an impression is nothing new for Ezra.

"Virtually every person he comes across," his mother said, "he teaches them about acceptance and appreciation of a diverse world."

source: ABCNews

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