Pagerank. It’s a little green bar that can mean the difference between your site earning thousands of pounds a month and nothing. Well, that has been the story up until now. An entire link buying industry has sprung up around the little green graphic.

Google was “supposed” to update the pagerank of all the sites in mid July. Now, 3 months later and there is still no sign of this happening. Pagerank is not being updated.

Further research has led me to conclude that Pagerank as we know it is dead. Google has constantly stated that it doesn’t rank websites according to pagerank (it’s a very common misconception that higher pagerank automatically means higher rankings), and Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, has said that pagerank is not a big deal in Google and exporting the data to the toolbar is seen as a none event.

There’s no official word from Google as of yet on the status of Pagerank and it’s future, so it might not be officially dead, but they’ve never taken this long to update the toolbar before.

Still, pagerank had it’s uses. You could gauge the level of popularity of a website if it had a high PR and determine whether it was worth getting those valuable backlinks. Now that PR is dead (but certainly not forgotten) it leaves webmasters and internet marketers to rely on other sources, namely Alexa and Compete.

Both of these sites try and estimate the level of traffic to a site and quite frankly, both of them do a rubbish job. They take their sample data from users that have installed their toolbar. This means that if a site gets 100,000 visitors a month but none of them have the toolbar, and another site gets 1,000 visitors a month and 10% of them have the toolbar installed, the latter website would be ranked higher.

So what are we left with now to determine the value of a link or advertising on a website? It’s very difficult. Say what you want about Pagerank, but it was an exceptionally useful tool for determining the cost of a link or advertising.

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The website is called One Way Link Exchange

The site that I am optimizing is HYIPJunction. The site is doing really well in Yahoo for various search terms, but not so well in Google and Live Here are the current rankings, as at 26th September.

So, one month from now, I’m hoping that my rankings in all the search engines will have improved from using this One Way Link Exchange service. If not…then we know that buying links from this company sucks

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What’s more, I don’t have any evidence to suggest that a search engine optimized layout will do any better in the search engines than a normal HTML layout. Using an SEO layout could be wishful thinking for all I know.

With that said, here are the ingredients that in theory make up the perfect SEO website layout.

1. The code has to be as clean as possible. This means using tableless CSS to define the layout rather than tables because it makes the website much ‘lighter’ and the content becomes the dominant factor rather than the table dividers, rows, font attributes etc.
    
2. The should be as little text and or code from where the body starts to where the content starts. Again, this is the case for using tableless CSS as you can virtually have the content be the first thing the spider reads as it crawls your site while still maintaining an attractive design
    
3. Your H1 and H2 tags should be as close to the beginning of the code as possible. This is to make sure the spider reads it first as the H1 tag is often given a lot of prominance in the search engine rankings. It’s like a big neon sign that says “this page is about ABC”
    
4. Make your content appear before the menu in your code. This makes sure the spider doesn’t get distracted by all the other keywords in your menu and indexes all your content before it moves on to another page
    
5. Use the title attribute in your h1, h2, a and img tags. The title attribute enables you to add a few more relevant keywords about the page and increase the keyword density of the page
    
6. What ever method you use to code the website (HTML/XHTML) make sure it is valid code. It is often said that Google will rank a valid code website above a non-valid one, however, I don’t have any evidence to support this. But hey, it can’t hurt, right?

Using the pointers above, i sat down and attempted to create my first XHTML/tableless CSS valid website that was extremely optimized for the search engines. Here’s what I came up with…

Creating The Graphics

The first thing I did was fire up photoshop and create a background and foreground. The background was a solid light grey and I created the foreground using the rectangular shape tool and setting the width to 770px (which is about the size of a standard website).

I added a few blending options to the rectangular shape to give it a glow and a solid border. I also did a slight inner glow to really define the shape. If you look at the image below, you will see it looks nothing like a website right now!

I then added a small blue bar which was going to act as the divider between the header and content. The blue bar was made just using the rectangular shape again with a gradient over the top with the opacity set very low. To make the bar stand out I added a light drop shadow to it. The result was this:

Still doesn’t look much like a website, right? For one thing it’s way to short

Slicing The Graphic

The method of creating a website nowadays is to create the graphics in photoshop, do a process called slicing and start working with the graphics in a HTML editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver.

When you are slicing a graphic to become a website you need to start thinking of it as a jigsaw and working out how all the bits will fit together.

This is a very simple website so I just need to create four graphics from this image:

• Top bar
• Header with the blue bar
• Main background
• Bottom bar

The image below shows how I have sliced the website. There are four blue boxes and each one will create a separate image.

Since the background attribute can be repeated in what ever direction I want, I can get away with creating a background image that is just 1px high and then repeat it vertically. This is why I didn’t need to create a large website layout in photoshop because I knew that I only needed to take 1 pixel from it for the background. Clever, huh?!

Writing The Code

When I began this project, I had basic CSS skills, things like defining text attributes. But to create the design I wanted, I needed to learn how to do layouts with CSS. To do this I used these resources to learn CSS layouts:

• Pixel2Life.com
• W3Schools.com
• OpenWebDesign.org

What I found helpful was to imagine that you are substituting tables, dividers and rows for div tags. The content within a div tag can then be placed left or right by using the float attribute.

float: left

The code above would align the content to the left.

The construction of the website consists of 4 parts:

• The Main Wrapper – This defines the alignment and width of the website
• The Header – This defines the top image and the title of the website
• The Content Wrapper – This defines where the content goes
• The Footer – This defines the bottom image and any text to go in the footer

The whole website is enclosed in a wrapper (think of it as wrapping paper around a Christmas present, it encloses everything). The wrapper defines the alignment and the width of the website.

#wrap {
position: relative;
width: 800px;
background: #FFF url('images/bg.gif') repeat-y center top;
margin: 0 auto;
text-align: left
}

The next part of the code needs to define the top image, the header and the title of the website. This has to use an absolute postion because we want the top image to appear on top of the background image.

#top-bg {
position: absolute;
width: 800px;
height: 30px;
background: #F8F8F8 url('images/top.gif') repeat-y center top;
top: 0; left: 0;
z-index: 2
}

#header {
width: 800px;
position: relative;
height: 95px;
padding-top: 10px;
background: #CCC url('images/header.gif') no-repeat center top;
padding: 0;
color: #FFF
}

#header h1 {
position: absolute;
margin: 0; padding: 0;
font: bold 36px 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Sans-serif;
letter-spacing: -1px;
color: #AEAAAA;
text-transform: none;
text-decoration: none;

/* change the values of top and left to adjust the position of the logo*/
top: 25px; left: 30px;
}
#header h1#logo-text span {
color: #838181;
}

Although it looks like quite a lot of code above, all it’s doing is placing the top image, the header image (with the blue bar) and defining how the h1 title tag should display.

The next task is to define how the content will look. Since I want to make this a two column layout with the text on the left and the menu on the right I will need to use three sets of div tags. In the code example below I have taken out all the content and just left the div tags so you can see how the structure looks.

To my mind it is very similar to using tables. The top “content-wrap” div looks like the table tag to me and the “main” and “sidebar” divs act like the td and tr tags. (I replaced the < and > with [ and ] so that it displays correctly below)

[div id="content-wrap"]

[div id="main"]

[/div]

[div id="sidebar"]

[/div]

[/div]

Once the code is in there you can define the layout in CSS. I mentioned before about the “float: left/right” attribute. In this case we will just float the “main” div to the left and the “sidebar” div to the right. Very easy huh? This creates our two column layout without using tables.

The code below shows how the CSS defines each of the divs. Notice the float left/right for the main and sidebar div id’s.

#content-wrap {
position: relative;
clear: both;
float: left;
width: 770px;
padding-left: 15px;
display: inline;
}

#main {
float: left;
width: 68%;
padding: 0 0 0 0;
margin: 10px 0 0 20px;
display: inline;
}

#sidebar {
float: right;
width: 27%;
padding: 0 0 0 0;
margin: 10px 0 0 0;
}

The final piece of the jigsaw is to insert the footer image and make sure it’s perfectly aligned. To achieve this I needed two div tags, one to define the position and location of the image and the other to define the text. This ended up looking like this:

#footer-wrap {
clear: both;
width: 800px;
font-size: 95%;
background: url('images/footer.gif') no-repeat center bottom;
}

#footer-bottom {
clear: both;
color: #666;
height: 25px;
margin: 0 auto;
width: 800px;
padding: 10px 0;
text-align: center;
}

And Viola!

I added in a few extra bits such as a cool rollover menu on the left and the list in the main content column. But the code I have used above should help you create your very own 2 column tableless css design with a header and footer image.

View the final design here: SEO Optimized Template

You can download the files here:

Right Hand Menu

Left Hand Menu

You are free to download and use the templates, but please don’t sell them or claim them as your own. I don’t require any link backs (although I should!) but if you mention this page on your blog or website or reference it in a forum post that would be cool.

Your feedback and suggestions are always appreciated. Do you want to see any more templates of this nature?

Let me know, use the comments form below!

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With so many directories to choose from, how can you know which directories are the best ones to part with your hard earned dollars?

Well, here’s run down of what I consider to be the top 5 paid directories…

#5 Alive Directory
Cost: $49.95 (per year) or $74.95 (per year)
PageRank: 6
Page Strength: 7.5
Alexa Traffic Rank: 16799
Alive Directory has just had a facelift (about time) and is run by dedicated owners who ensure timely approval of submitted links. However, as with most paid directories their standards are high so don’t go submitting knock off adsense sites! Expect to be approved within 24-48 hours.

#4 Starting Point
Cost: $99 (per year)
PageRank: 7
Page Strength: 8.5
Alexa Traffic Rank: 22,875
Chances are you have never heard of Starting Point directory – I certainly hadn’t until I got serious about directory submissions. However, for an unknown directory it has a high page rank and a low Alexa traffic ranking. I rate this one marginally higher than Alive Directory because is has a higher page rank and page strength.

#3 Best Of The Web
Cost: $69.95 (per year) or $199.95 one time fee
PageRank: 7
Page Strength: 8
Alexa Traffic Rank: 8764
The Best of The Web directory has been around since…well, the internet started. They are slightly less expensive than Starting Point and have a much lower Alexa traffic ranking. For this reason, even though the page rank is the same you will get better a better return for your money by submitting to BOTW.org.

#2 Aviva Directory
Cost: $49.95 (per year) or $74.95 (per year)
PageRank: 7
Page Strength: 7.5
Alexa Traffic Rank: 8729
Aviva Directory is run by a dedicated individual who is committed to providing only the highest of quality links for surfers. Approval time is just 24 to 48 hours and to get a yearly listing for just $49.95 it makes it one of the best value directories on the internet. Don’t be tempted to submit junk sites though you will be wasting your time.

#1 Yahoo Directory
Cost: $299 (and $299 annually recurring)
PageRank: 8
Page Strength: 10
Alexa Traffic Rank: 1!

At number one it has to be the Yahoo Directory without a doubt. One of the original web directories it has become one of the two authority directories on the web. Not only that, but Google directly references it as a good place to submit your link in their guidelines for webmasters:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Given that Google recommends you list your site in the Yahoo Directory and the directory itself has such a high PR and Alexa traffic ranking you absolutely must consider Yahoo if you want to pay for submissions.

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Like many things when it comes to SEO, what once worked no longer does.

Take meta-tags for example. Way back when the internet was still a baby, meta tags were introduced to help search engines (at the time the big search engine was AltaVista…Google hadn’t even been invented) work out what the site was about. It wasn’t long before people started abusing the Meta Tags and when the next generation of search engines came about the importance of the meta tags diminished forever.

There are some self styled gurus that will tell you that you need the optimum keyword density to rank well in the search engines. The truth is, if there were an optimium density then it would be very easy to rank in the search engines. The best thing to do is to keep your writing natural and focus on the reader first, search engine second.

Now onpage optimization doesn’t count for much nowadays. The way a search engine ranks your site is to see how many inbound links your site has and assign a weight to each of these links. What a search engine is concerned about is that your site is relevant to what the user searched for and if there are plenty of inbound links chances are your site is relevant.

The classic example to prove to people that on site optimization has a lower relevancy to search engine optimization is the “click here” results. If you search on Google for the phrase click here then the number one result is for Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.

If you check out their site you will find that the phrase “click here” doesn’t appear anywhere in the title or the text. What does this mean? The site is getting it’s ranking not because of it’s on page optimization, but because of it’s off page optimization; which I’ll cover in more detail in another article.

Unlike Adobe, most of us don’t have millions of inbound links to our site, so we have to use every resource available to us to make our site as search engine friendly as possible – and this includes onpage optimization.

But what are the most important factors to consider when optimizing your website? Let’s take a look…

5. Keep the content focused
Too often webmasters try and optimize their home page for every keyword they can think of. In the end this over-optimization works against you as you dilute the relevance of your keywords. Keep the content of the page focused on one or two keywords at the most. If you are targeting multiple keywords then create separate pages for those keywords with the content focused around those keywords.

4. More than 500 words on your site
Back in the 90′s doorway pages were ultra fashionable. People would create doorway pages for each keyword. All they did was provide a short amount of text focused on a particular keyword and invited the user to enter the site. The search engines got wise to this and discounted them because they didn’t have enough content on the pages. When you are creating your laser focused page use more than 500 words to show the search engine that this page contains valuable and useful content to the user.

Don’t worry so much about keyword density, as long as you follow the rest of the instructions your page will rank well.

3. Create good linking structure
The power of inbound links cannot be underestimated in SEO, nor can the power of keyword rich anchor text. Well guess what? Your internal link structure counts towards your SEO rankings. So instead of using the text “Home” in a link to take people back to the home page, use your main keyword instead. That way google knows that it is going to a page that is all about your keyword.

Follow this structure throughout your site – but remember to keep your links readable and understandable to humans too! Using the correct internal link structure is a little known and underused SEO method that really pays off.

2. H1 tags
I have a feeling that as the word gets out about the power of H1 tags then the weight that they hold with search engines will diminish. The reason a lot of people don’t use H1 tags is because it creates very large text. However, using simple CSS we can change the style of a H1 tag to anything we want.

For example:


<h1 style="font-size: 8px;">This is a tiny h1 tag!</h1>

Try and get your main keywords within the h1 tag but remember to keep it readable!

1. Your Page Title
This is possibly the most important factor of onpage SEO. Whenever you do a search on Google or any of the big search engines the results always highlights the keyword in the title. All too often webmasters and online businesses misuse their title tag by writing something like:

Welcome To XYZ Company Ltd!

Now if this company sold widgets, there would be no highlighting in the search engine results page. The truth is no one really cares about the company name. When a user clicks on a link in the search engine results page they do so because they think the site might solve their problem (in this case a severe widget problem).

Therefore, don’t use the company name in the title, but include your primary keywords. Don’t over do it either, the more keywords you use the less effective they become. If you are targeting a dozen keywords then consider creating 12 individual pages targeted around each keyword.

Conclusion
There are dozens of other factors involved in onpage optimization such as file naming, alt tags, title tags and your domain name, but the factors above are amongst the most important that you need to consider when optimizing your website

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So often the different between getting a good ranking and a bad ranking is down to how you approach the optimization of your site. As with most things in life there’s a right way and a wrong way. Do it the wrong way and you’re looking at a life in Supplementalville, do it right and you get to live on the converted home page bringing in so many visitors you won’t know what to do.

Sidenote: Google’s Supplemental Index are results that it gives when it can’t find anything definite that you are searching for. Web pages in the supplemental index are pages that don’t have enough inbound links for Google to ‘trust’ the page enough to serve it up as a main result.

If you want to get good rankings, then make sure you avoid these top 5 SEO mistakes:

5. Purchasing 5,000 ‘Instant’ Backlinks
More and more webmasters are realising that back links are crucial to search engine domination. The problem with this is that it takes time and effort to generate backlinks, you have to submit to directories, write articles, provide good content, approach link partners…it’s a full time job. Since it’s human nature to find the easy route, the path of least resistance, when we see an advert promising thousands of instant backlinks it’s very tempting to jack in the hard stuff and pay the $100 fee to get all these links.

The problem with purchasing ‘instant’ backlinks is that often you are getting links from unrelated sites that might have dozens – maybe hundreds of other links on the same page. To a search engine, for a new site to get thousands of backlinks overnight is very unnatural and raises a big red flag. They may even suppress the rankings because of this anomaly.

4. Purchasing Submission to 5,000,000 Search Engines & Directories
Following on from purchasing thousands of back links, there are many sites online that promise to automatically submit your site to millions of search engines and directories and even the big three; Google, Yahoo & MSN. The problem here is that 99% of the sites they will submit to are link farms and FFA sites which may have worked 6 years ago, but no longer work with the big search engines.

Not only that, but actually submitting your site to the big three search engines is considered by many SEO experts to be an unwise decision. The general consensus is that it is much better for a search engine to ‘discover’ your site from other sites linking to you rather than submitting your site which has no back links.

3. Linking to Bad Neighbourhoods
The search engines understand that you can’t control who links to you so will not penalize you if a banned site or unrelated site is linking to your site. If they did penalize you then your competitors would set up dozens of bad sites all linking to you to destroy your SEO dreams. However, what the search engines do penalize you for is for links on your site that link into bad neighbourhoods.

For example, you may get a link exchange request from an adult website that has a page rank of 6. Although this would be very tempting if your site is about Golf then the adult site has zero connection with your site. Topics to absolutely avoid linking to are: gambling, adult, pharmacy, warez or anything else illegal or shady.

Sometimes you might get a link exchange request from a site that is on the same topic as your site but their site has been banned from the search engines. If you link to that site, the search engines see it as a ‘vote’ for that site and will penalize your site for it.

2. Keyword Stuffing Your Homepage Using The Tags & Hidden Text
Keyword stuffing used to be a favourite trick of the webmasters back in the late 90′s along with hidden text. Some bright spark realized that you could use the white background and white font colour and stuff your site full of keywords that only the search engine will see. Needless to say this practice was soon made redundant by the search engines. Today some people feel you can do a similar thing but use external CSS to control the font colour. Needless to say the search engines are wise to this too

Webmasters have also cottoned on to the fact that there are many ‘legitimate’ ways they can stuff keywords such as in the alt tag of an image or the title tag of links and header tags. Repetitive use of keywords in these tags will set off alarm bells to a search engine robot and your site will get penalized for it.

1. Writing For Search Engines Instead of Humans
Far too often webmasters are obsessing over keyword densities, the optimum number of words per page, ensuring all their keywords are entered into the text. All too often this can result in text that is disjointed and unreadable for humans – it just doesn’ flow naturally. By writing for the search engine robots you are missing the entire point of your site. If a visitor comes to your site and gets frustrated that your content isn’t making much sense, are they likely to come back? No.

There is a new and growing school of thought that centers around VO, or visitor optimization. The theory goes that if you give the visitor what they want, the search engine rankings will soon follow as your visitors start linking to your ‘excellent’ content naturally from their sites and blogs.

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1. Making a start…

The website in question is www.ocarda.com and I chose to make it on something that I knew a lot about and have a rather nerdy passion for. I discovered a while ago that unless you make a website on a topic that you are passionate about, then you quickly lose interest. For example, car insurance might pay well in terms of affiliate programs and adsense, but if you don’t know your 3rd party cover from your fire and theft cover (hey, I know nothing about it…I don’t even own a car!), then you will quickly lose interest.

Anyway, I chose free templates and free themes for various CMS’s, shopping carts and forums for my niche. I’m always on the lookout for great designs so in the end I thought why not make a website out of it. I started back in September 2006 and have kept it very basic, everything on the site is done manually.

However, since that time I have been consistant with adding new content and promotion and the traffic has grown steadily over the past 11 months or so. Infact, check out a screenshot of my traffic below…

Every month except December has seen an increase in traffic (December wanted to be different, didn’t want to follow the crowd, I think it will grow out of it later on). Last month saw an average of 193 visitors per day turn up to my site which is just under 5,800 visitors a month. Remember, these are unique visitors, not hits (which is something completely different). Currently in July we are running at an average of 200 visitors a day and this is all with zero paid advertising.

I’m using specific methods to get visitors mainly from organic search engine results. I’m also seeing some fantastic results with http://www.eurekster.com. Some of the methods I’m using are:

1. Good onsite optimization
2. Submiting to link directories
3. Doing reciprocal link exchanges (they do still work!)
4. Using the awesome power of SEO elite
5. Secret magic fairy dust

OK, you got me, so I lied about the 5th one. But the magic fairy dust is what so many people are looking for. Infact it’s not magic at all. The secret ingredient is so mundane I don’t think I can be bothered to write it here.

Hmm, maybe that’s a clue.

The secret ingredient is consistancy. If you don’t do this consistantly you will never see results. Consistancy means having a daily plan and sticking to it. It can mean doing promotion work for 5 minutes or maybe 2 hours. It doesn’t matter, just being consistant is the key!

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Now there are some decent freebie tools out there that can help you with optimizing your website. The tools on SEO Chat and iWebTool spring to mind.

There’s also a plethora of paid seo tools available on the internet, choosing the right one is essential for your search engine rankings. Some seo software is quite cheap and others are rediculously expensive. If you are on a budget you need to get one that packs maximum punch for what it costs.

I personally use a tool called SEO Elite. I came across this tool after being thoroughly fed up with some other software (that shall remain entirely nameless, but if you replaced the ‘S’ in SEO with a ‘C’ you might be close). Doing what all good seo people do when researching a keyword, I went to Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines and typed in seo software and looked which sites were ranked in the top 10 of each. I found that SEO Elite was ranked in the top 5 of all the search engines so it seemed to me that not only did they talk the talk, but they walked the walk too.

Handy Hint: When searching for seo software, check out the rankings on various search engines. If the tool is as good as the company says it is then it should at least control top 10 positions for it’s main keywords on all search engines. If it’s no where to be found on any search engine then you may want to consider a different tool because if it’s not working for them, will it work for you?!

SEO Elite costs $167 which puts it in the mid-price range for these sorts of tools. The number of features and benefits that it packs though means it could sell equally as well with if it was comparably priced to the tools that are in the higher price range.

As we all know (or you will know now if you didn’t already), the best way to get top rankings is to have quality inbound links from sites that are relevant to your own. For example if you were running a website about Cars, a relevant link could come from a site that talks about Bio Fuel. An unrelevant link would be from a site that is about general stocks (although if the site was specifically about stocks in car manufacturers you might have a relevant link).

While you can learn from an ebook how to optimize your website with titles, headers, keyword density and so on it only plays a minor part in increasing your search engine rankings.

Sidenote: If you are looking for a quality ebook on how to optimize your website, download this free seo ebook

What you can’t get from an ebook though and what SEO Elite is built for is finding out where all your sites are ranked for various keywords in all the search engines, finding out which sites are linking to your competitors (so you can email them and get them to link to you too!), checking that link partners are still linking back to you (oh you wouldn’t believe how important this is), and an essential tool, finding possible authority sites – sites that the search engines consider to be the main authority on a particular subject. Getting links from authority sites in your chosen niche is a direct route to search engine domination

But this isn’t only what SEO Elite can do for you. There are tools out there that can do similiar things (albeit not with quite the same finesse as SEO Elite). For example, over on SEOChat they have a free tool that lets you find out where your site is ranked for a certain keyword. However, SEO Elite takes this one step further by letting you track multiple keywords and multiple domains and multiple search engines. It even draws a cool little graph for you so that you can see with a certain amount of satisfaction your hard work paying off as the websites rise in the rankings.

Now it would be very unscrupulous of me to recommend SEO Elite if I had not had any success with it personally. So I have exported a list of all my sites that I have in the top 50 across multiple keywords in multiple search engines. You can view the report here: My Rankings.

As I pointed out earlier, the key to getting to the top of the search engines is quality inbound links. So far the features we’ve looked at on SEO Elite concentrated more on the analysis and reporting side of things, but incredibly, SEO Elite manages to include some pretty nifty tools to help you in getting more of those elusive back links.

There is a feature that will search for sites in your niche that allow you to add your link to their site automatically – all at the click of the button. There’s no HTML, no emailing, no hassle, just point and click to add your site to sometimes hundreds of relevant websites.

Sidenote: Don’t overdo the link submission. If you do too many links in too short a time this will be seen as spamming by the search engines and they may remove your website from their pages!

One of the hottest topics right now in the SEO field is article marketing. Simply put, you write (or have written by a ghostwriter) an article on the subject of your website and you syndicate this article to various directories so that it is picked up by other webmasters to be used on their site on the condition that they retain a link back to you so everyone’s a winner. The theory says that you are getting those essential backlinks to your site and the webmasters are getting quality content for their site. There are various pitfalls to article marketing but that is a different subject. Understand that article marketing is hot and it is working.

SEO Elite includes a feature that will submit your article to dozens of the most important article directories on the internet for maximum exposure – and in keeping with the trademark way this software has of doing things, most of it is at the click of a button. Some standalone article submitters cost $97 on their own: Article Submitter. The only function is to submit articles. With SEO Elite you are not only getting the powerful analysis, reporting, charting and linking tools, you get the inbuilt article submitter as part of the software.

In closing, I’m really satisfied with what SEO Elite has done for me and my business and I’m proud to be able to recommend this software based on my own personal success in using it as you can see from My Rankings.

And it’s not just me that is entirely satisfied, check out this long list of SEO Elite Reviews from dozens of other SEO nerds, marketers, business owners and webmasters that have nothing but praise for this essential tool.

SEO Elite costs $167 and you can purchase it with PayPal or any major credit card through the clickbank payment processing company. It even comes with a solid 90 day money back gurarantee so that if you are not entirely satisfied you can get your money back with no questions asked (the software will be disabled though!).

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The first thing that I did was to optimize my home page with my main keywords: HYIP Scripts

So what does optimizing the homepage include?

Well, you have to get your hands a little bit dirty and start playing with the HTML code.

First off, the TITLE TAG which is very very important. Too many people do not enter a title for their page name. Just do a quick search on Google to find that there are over 116 million web pages out there with no title.

Choosing your title is very important too. The more words you use, the less effective your title becomes. Therefore it is imperative that you do not use unnecessary words like “and” or “Welcome To My Site” (using “Welcome To…” is such a waste, do you really think someone is going to search for “Welcome To…”).

It is becoming common practice amongst SEO geeks to use the pipe symbol “|” to seperate keywords in the title – you don’t even need to mention your website name! Use your three main keywords in the title, seperated by the “|” symbol.

You can add your meta description and meta keyword tags in the HTML header part, but the major search engines largely ignore these as they have been abused in the past.

The next step is to use the <h1> header tag. This tag tells the spider what the website is about and is the 2nd most important tag in the HTML (the title is first).

By default the <h1> tag makes the text really big and can distort or ruin the appearance of your website. It is always good practice to use CSS to help you control the look of your <h1> tag.

As an example of how CSS can be used to change the <h1> tag, have a look at my HYIP Monitor site. The text at the very top which says HYIP Investments | HYIP Forum | HYIP Rating is a <h1> tag but using CSS to control the look of the text.

If you view the source code for this site, you will see:

<h1 class="sitename">HYIP Investments | HYIP Forum | HYIP Rating</h1>

The CSS code simply tells the browser how to format the <h1> text.

The third most important thing to consider when optimizing your website is the navigation/menu system.

This is an area all too many people don’t do correctly because they don’t understand how spiders and search engines work.

For a start, where ever possible, use text for the links rather than images. This is because you can use keywords in your anchor text which actually helps your search engine ranking, because each link to a page counts as a “vote” which in turn increases your pagerank. If you had a big enough website (10,000 pages) and no inbound links other than on your own site, it’s very possible to have a PR of 5 or maybe even 6 (as long as all those pages are indexed).

Instead of using the word “home” as the anchor text in the link, consider using your main keyword. This all counts towards your SEO and backlinks. The same method applies for all your other links. Where ever possible, use your keywords for the anchor text.

Another important factor to consider is to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute in your links on non-essential pages such as the disclaimer, privacy policy, TOS etc. This stops you from passing on page rank to non-essential pages and increases the page rank you pass on to the important pages.

My final top tip for optimizing your website is don’t put your copyright information as the very last think on your page. Many search engines (especially MSN and sometimes Yahoo) tend to use a combination of your title and the text at the bottom of the page for the site description in your search results.

Although you should include a copyright notice, make sure the last block of text at the end of your page contains one or two sentences with your main keywords in it.

Of course, there are lots of other website optimization methods, such as naming your images with keywords, using the title and alt attributes, considering your keyword density etc. But these are all secondary to what I’ve discussed above.

I’ll give some more SEO tips later on this week.

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Check out the following screen shots from Google, Yahoo and MSN for my website, abcHYIP.com and check out where it is ranked for it’s primary keyword: hyip scripts…

Here you can see that abcHYIP.com is ranked at number two in Google.com for the phrase: hyip scripts.

Here you can see that abcHYIP.com is ranked at number one in Yahoo.com for the phrase: hyip scripts.

Here you can see that abcHYIP.com is ranked at number one in msn.com for the phrase: hyip scripts.

As you can see, I’ve clearly dominated the search engines for the keyword I have chosen. So how did I achieve this?

I’ll reveal a few secrets tomorrow :~)

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