My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who approved my links for Clean Red Widgets and to all the people who I have learned from during this contest.

Congratulations to Jeff of albanyseo.com who just might be the winner although I am still keeping my fingers crossed!

Good luck Jeff!

Long back it was just a matter of some time to launch a site about clean red widgets — design it, fill it up with nice content and submit it into some directories — it was as simple as that! And search engines would also give good ranking to that website for the keywords featuring in the body-text of the webpage.

And since the number of websites about clean red widgets present then were not even half as much of what is there now and since the techniques of optimizing a site in search engines were not as improved, keywords could be repeated along with other otherwise refutable maneuvers like creating many domains with the same content. And this too ensured those sites a good position in the popular search engines.

But things have come a long way from that now. There has been a dramatic change in the search engine marketing scenario. Today, just ordinary designing, content and submission won’t help; the website owner needs to do his homework — study the various types of relevant keywords typed in search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN and then fashion his/her website accordingly so that the website ranks well enough to be viewed by the majority of people. And because today people tend to look for everything online and keep searching for the right goods and services till they find it, the search engine optimization is a big challenge, although with some amount of risk involved.

Now web presence is something very important here. If you are stepping into the online scene, your website needs to have a web presence. If not, you have a disfavor. The search engines, particularly Google, do not prefer giving high ranks to new domains. Position improves with time, as the website about clean red widgets becomes old.

So obviously, websites which are older in time and already have a secured web presence, stand a better chance of getting higher ranks in the search engine. Listed below are some of the key factors for achieving the top positions in search engines.

• Clean Codes: All search engines prefer a neatly coded website. When a webpage is designed in MS Word, it generates untidy html code. This is not a good thing. Also, website owners need to be careful about the WYSIWYG editors. Some use proprietary tags in the html and thus become uncongenial to the search engines.

• Content: No saying would suffice for the stupendous importance of proper content that helps a website to score high in the search engines. Content is the backbone for any site. Search engines often look for relevant keywords or phrases in the body text of a webpage to identify those with the searched words/phrases. If found, your website about clean red widgets is considered relevant for those keywords and you can expect a pretty good rank.

• Tags: Yet another very vital aspect in html coding is the tag—the title tags and meta-description tags. To give your website a decent search engine position, these tags must contain the relevant keywords which you think users will look for.

• Linking: Simply put, linking means other websites linking to your website. Now how would that help, you ask? This is good for your website precisely because the search engines consider each related link on your site as a given “vote”. The logic is easy — if site X links to site Y, it obviously follows that site Y is of some value or worthy of it. These links can either come from important directories like Yahoo! or Dmoz, or from other related websites. For instance, if your website promotes clothes, a link from a fashion house’s website would be relevant and count as a good vote in search engine parameters. However, exchanging links with questionable sites like link farms is not appreciated. Link farms are considered worthless in the sense that these are directories that just collect links without any valuable content in them. So whenever you add links to your website, ensure that those links have your targeted keywords in their anchor text. Post articles or mention elaborately about your product and services is and then include links to your site. There are many important sites which post articles and appreciate sites with good content. So you may also popularize your website by putting up online press releases there. However, it takes a lot of effort, patience, time, skill and money to achieve the desired position in search engines for particular keywords. But when the results start showing, and you start ranking highly for your site about Clean Red Widgets, you will know that it is worth the wait.

The hardest part of search engine marketing is to crack the Google algorithm. All the discussions, debates and research about clean red widgets, content optimization, keyword selection, title creation, link exchange and more are all too familiar among the website owners now. And it does seem at times that the search engines elude you and your site about clean red widgets because the moment you think you caught up with them, you find you are in the same abyss of yesterday, trying to grope the right way out.

The clever search engines keep moving forwards and with some very real reasons, beyond the otherwise ‘sadistic’ ones. In a way, these come down to two simple yet mutually conflicting factors —

• Competition: online businesses are growing everyday, by the minute.

• Expectation: Web-users, today, visit websites with lofty expectations. As it is the search engines that drive them to visit sites, they expect the sites referred thus, to be extremely relevant to their searches.

In a nutshell, it can be safely said that since the online competition is high with so many websites about clean red widgets are trying to outdo one another and make their mark in the online arena, the search engines are somehow compelled to change their algorithms from time to time to serve its users better with more comprehensively. They, however, do not intend to make things hard for website owners or optimizers; they only change algorithms to provide more accurate and more helpful search results to the users, so that they get the best information even in this highly competitive online business market.

Evidently then, you can see that the search engines are overtly user-centric. And this does give webmasters and search engine marketers the most obvious clue as to what to do to get ahead in the game and stay there too. While it is of course important to keep track of the changing algorithms, you also need to focus on the users, your potential customers, analyze their needs and think of ways to fulfill those through your website. Compared to links and algorithms, you got to concentrate more on user-needs because that is one surefire way to take your search engine marketing at its helm.

Donning this coveted ‘marketing’ label, there are five things that you need to consider now:

• Working with other sites: Much in keeping with the coffee-shop-in-the-bookstore concept, you can fill up the void in another website about clean red widgets to benefit both ends. It is quite smart to work with other websites about clean red widgets and set up individual businesses in each other’s business space with one symbiotic approach.

• Deep links: It is always essential to take the visitors exactly to what they have been searching for. Using deep links comes in handy here. Therefore, keep deep links for both your organic and paid listings, so that viewers do not have to hunt for what they actually need.

• Publicity pieces: Well-written publicity pieces like articles and press releases allow you to accommodate the important and top search words for your website. But you must also make the piece a good, helpful, informative and interesting read, if you want it to be an effective marketing tool.

• Directories: While choosing business directories, you must go for those having the best custom. Instead of just another plain link, you should be in the look-out for good referrals.

• Anchor links: Anchor texts are links and information that you give out to other websites. Now, getting links is not the supreme objective, it is more important to draw the custom that gives more profit. So you may also spare a thought about using anchor texts that pertain to your users’ needs or to the topics in the page visited, in this case clean red widgets.

When you search for Clean Red Widgets on a search engine hundreds of pages are thrown open to you, but out of these you check not more than the first three. The websites about Clean Red Widgets are listed on the few hundred other pages which follow therefore go unnoticed and accordingly remain unvisited in spite of being listed by the engine. The left out websites can better there chances of earning a better ranking and getting visited by more users than they can honestly dream of by using SEO, read on to see how you can make it work for you.

Search Engine optimization is an advantageous method by means of which your URL can get the kind of spotlight which will earn it hundreds and thousands of visitors every single day! There are a number of ways of taking advantage of search engine optimization. Consider this; your website about Clean Red Widgets consists of a number of pages, what if I say that each of these pages may, individually, be maximized for search engine optimization? Putting to use your search engine technique on every one of your web pages will help you notch up your ranking on the search engines and increase your web traffic manifolds.

Follow the tips below to make SEO work for you.

• Internal Links

Now, search engines have this particular liking for sites with a lot of links on its pages, so make sure you include loads of them on all your pages. Keep the links internal, that is let them link one part of the website to another or one end of the page to the other end and so on. The basic reason for this is to keep your visitor occupied with the site, once they are at it. There is no plausible reason as to why you should encourage your visitors to leave your site about Clean Red Widgets by providing external links, keep it in the home front and yet optimize your site for the search engines.

• External Links

Like we just discussed external links in your site is a bad distraction which tends to steal away your visitors and sweep them off to other destinations. As a site owner, therefore, external links can seem a particularly unwelcome topic. But hold on, here is the catch, search engine’s offer higher rankings to sites which have both, external and internal links. Therefore there is no avoiding it, put up a few external links on your site, push them off into the margins of the page or right at the bottom of it, only make sure that you do put it, there’s no getting away from its obvious power.

• Keywords

Optimize all the pages on your site for keywords, in this case Clean Red Widgets. Technically your keywords should be present more than thrice on all the pages. For this reason an abundance of content is a good idea, sprinkle your keywords abundantly (but meaningfully and sensibly) within the written body of the site cause, search engine’s, though they cannot read, can and do scan text. If you have optimized each page right then every time a search engine scans your site’s text then your keywords, in this case Clean Red Widgets, will get detected and you will in turn achieve a higher ranking with it.

It is quite a regular client query as to how soon or how late can they expect the SEO projects to be in effect, or in other words, when can they get a good search engine listing. To this, the only answer is — patience! Any long term marketing effort, with SEO as its base, invariably takes time. You just need to be patient to realize the rewards.

Optimization Timeframe

The time span required for the SEO effort for a keyword like Clean Red Widgets, depends on some factors. One such is the keyword-accuracy factor — whether the choice of keywords/key phrases, in this case Clean Red Widgets, is right, whether it matches with what a potential visitor would type to find your website. So, evidently, if your keyword selection is accurate and if it is in keeping with the needs of your targeted viewers, you can be well assured of maximum success. Next, consider if you have used a Paid Inclusion and/or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) service. The recipe to successful optimization is the sum total of efficient SEO, Paid Inclusion and PPC services. Organic SEO alone takes longer to show results than when combined with the other two.

Paid Results

Services like Paid Inclusion or PPC bidding yield results much faster than the conventional search engine optimization. In Paid Inclusion submissions, you are given a time-frame for which your website about clean red widgets remains indexed in search engines after you sign up for it. And in PPC bidding, you start having results just as soon as people begin clicking on the PPC ads you posted. Well, search engine marketing of this kind includes a yearly budget for payments and renewals — Paid Inclusion submissions need to be renewed and PPC click-through costs demand a monthly payment. However, organic SEO coupled with PPC usually help in keeping the cost down for the paid service, and is particularly helpful if you are paying too much for the PPC campaign. At such a high price, you are well assured of extra targeted traffic to your site; so you can lower the bidding prices in your PPC service or even do away with some keyword bidding.

The time-frame allotted for your paid submissions implies that the search engines are making money in the meanwhile through the process. One good thing about ‘paying to get SEO results’ is that you can be sure of your site about clean red widgets rank-stability in the search engine database. Chances of a position-change in the listings are much lower.

Organic SEO

Now the organic route to search engine optimization is a little different. The finest reason to take recourse to organic SEO is to foster your web-presence at a minimum cost. But if you are only banking on organic optimization, you may have to wait up to three to six months to get complete results of your optimization efforts. But once you are done with optimizing your site, the bulk of the job is done. This is one great advantage to organic SEO. Although you may have to fine-tune your site with keywords and texts from time to time, but until and unless you thoroughly redesign your website, you are all set to get loads of targeted viewers. Just keep a tab on the status of your listing and read your log statistics often, especially to keep abreast of the new keywords people are typing in search engines to find your website about clean red widgets.

Patience Pays Off

The simplest and slowest of optimization efforts, organic SEO is web-promotion through common sense. It does not include lofty ideas and fancy promotion tools, and is, hence, time-consuming. The success is slow but stable. Organic SEO believes that good site-navigation, good amount of keyword-rich content and a good lot of inbound links from relevant websites lead to long-term success.

Patience is what you need to flaunt if you’re going about the organic route to search engine optimization. It is true that organic SEO takes time to show results, but rest assured, the output you get for your site about clean red widgets, will be worth your wait.

Among all reasons behind good link exchange strategies, the best would be that it helps get a good lot of internet traffic to your website about clean red widgets. You just need to find out other websites about clean red widgets similar to yours and in direct competition with you for exchanging links. That way you will be able to get just the kind of targeted viewers you want to come to your site.

Integral to great link exchange strategies is the hunt of fine and apt websites. This can even furnish your website about clean red widgets with some quality content. And, as is popularly known by all webmasters, well-written content in the site is the key approach to creating a solid web presence and the best way to get spotted by search engines. Finding out a huge list of sites to exchange links with can be the first step to your strategies, but it cannot stop at that. If you really want to get benefited, you must make sure about the quality of the sites too. Whenever you trade links, do it with sites that have quality content and an established web presence.

Another great and extremely helpful link exchange strategy is to exchange links with informative websites, those having good information on topics related to your site about clean red widgets. This not only keeps your site updated, but also attracts visitors and potential targeted traffic to your pages in search for more. It would be even wiser if you can write a few lines on your site about why you advocate visiting those links on your page. It would be as authentic as useful to your visitors.

Looking out for websites having keywords related to your site about clean red widgets, can again be one fine idea for structuring your link exchange strategies. The easiest way to go about this is to type your keywords in a search engine and analyze the list of websites shown in the search results. From these, you can then pick websites that you think would be worthy of a link exchange. However, try limiting your choice to the first and second result pages because websites in these first two pages draw the maximum traffic and would therefore be able to benefit you in a link exchange.

To check the performance of your link exchange strategies, you can simply enter the URL of your site in the search box of a search engine and get an entire list of websites whom you exchanged links with and who still have your link on their pages. That way you can judge your strategies better.

There are even more strategies for a beneficial link exchange than these. But these are some of the best and most popular of them. With more study and research, it would not be hard to find out more on link exchange strategies. The web is a vast store of information and with sincere research and efforts it is quite easy to achieve the much coveted success for your website about clean red widgets.

It is the world’s most popular search engine used by millions of people all over the world, the doorway between you and thousands and thousands of visitors who will flock to your website once they spot you, and isn’t the main purpose of putting up a website about Clean Red Widgets just that ? Although getting listed isn’t the only thing required for you to get visitors, you also want a good rating, a high ranking which will put you in the spotlight and will give you the opportunity to be noticed. But perhaps your site is new on the block, perhaps you entered the Clean Red Widgets contest very late? Maybe you think it’s too small to be picked up by Google. Relax that isn’t even an issue, just sit back and look at all the options you have.

First of all, let us clear out a fundamental point. There are, as you probably know, two ways of doing things, namely the right way and the wrong way. Now, although the wrong way is clearly wrong it is of some importance that we know it thoroughly so as to avoid it completely.

Following are, to put it politely, the avoidable ways of getting listed on Google.

Google provides it’s users with a way to put their URL’s in queue for crawling at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You don’t want to do this. The utter failure of this method probably has a little to do with the mechanics of the process. You see, once you have typed your website’s address into the space available here it is put in a queue (behind oodles and oodles of other pages) for the GoogleBot to, well, crawl. Anything can happen after this. For one, your site might not get crawled, or suppose it does get crawled (which in itself is about a million in one possibility) it might not be indexed by Google (!) So ultimately there’s no telling where that URL of yours will end up going. But I am guessing wherever it goes it won’t go anywhere near the first few pages of search results. So in other words this way is a complete waste of time. No one with a site about Clean Red Widgets has ever really benefited from it, and if you ask me no one ever will.

And now the more likely way to be listed by Google.

If you want to notch up on all those other sites about Clean Red Widgets to that coveted spot on Google then simply crawl another site. You know what they say about girls, go gaga over them and they don’t cut you an inch of slack, but ignore them and go to someone else and they’ll be eating right out of your hands, well believe it or not that principle works here too, only in a less jealous fashion that is. Once you put up your URL on some other site it might chance to be spotted by GoogleBot and followed upon. That chance following up will be your golden ticket to Google.

So, here’s what you can do, you can either put up your the URL to your site about Clean Red Widgets in like a million different sites or you can use a little sense and put it up on a few popular sites which will fetch you the sort of traffic even a couple of dozen others won’t. Pick a few sites like Amazon.com to plant your flag into, and soon you’ll sink your teeth right in to Google itself.

I know what you are thinking; you are probably wondering just how you will manage to get these larger sites to put you up and in the course grudging me for putting you on the same chase yet again. But don’t worry I promise it’s not as hard as it sounds. Just get yourself into a few discussion sites and forums and get involved in discussions about related topics; in this case, Clean Red Widgets, and only put your hyperlink along with your signature.

Statutory Warning: don’t try and get prompt results by pulling smart alecky tricks like typing in your hyperlink and adding a jerky GO HERE! caption. That won’t help you earn anything besides a good whack from the moderator’s of the site. Invest some time into this and really participate in the discussions, once you do that you will earn the liberty of sharing your URL about Clean Red Widgets with others.

If you have a certain amount of flair for writing and are proficient with words then you have an advantage over others like you. Believe it or not you can put this talent in line to work on your behalf.

Write a few well researched well planned out articles about clean red widdgets or other topics which might appeal to your targeted market. As in the previous method there are no shortcuts here and nothing, absolutely nothing, besides quality content will do you any good. Try and act smart, copy paste from elsewhere or simply try to get away with a badly done job and you will be at the receiving end of a royal brush-off from readers and editors.

Writing an article about clean red widgets is really not as hard as it sounds. Since it’s about your specific line a little research wouldn’t really cost you much time or labor. Record your results, go ahead experiment with a few situations, come up with hypothetical situations to explain particular problems and provide your analysis or solution for them. Once you have done a good job (and believe me when I say you will know when you have done a good job) proudly provide your own name and hyperlink of your site about clean red widgets at the end of the article.

If out of the two procedures we have discussed today you choose to use the second one, that is to write articles, then here are a few additional tips. A common phenomenon seen amongst most first time writers is their propensity to quit after writing the very first article, which usually convinces them of how completely incapable they are of the task. Do not get bogged down by similar thoughts. Keep writing about clean red widgets even if you think your efforts are not as good as you would like them to be. The more you write about clean red widgets, the finer your skills will get, the easier it will be for you to express yourself and in no time your articles will be scooped up by editors for their own sites. The more number of such sites you are included into the greater number of means of letting your link be known to people. As your popularity increases so will your chances of having your site about clean red widgets be put up by Google.

Tip #1 Don’t Spam

No major search engine indexes websites for too long, if they are found to be spammers. What’s more, from time to time, search engines revise the way they define “search engine spam”, so it would be worthwhile, both as a visitor and a website owner, to educate yourself and stay updated with the definition of spamming by the major search engines. Search engines often blacklist websites that practice spamming, which means you don’t get off by simply not getting indexed but you might also get your website blacklisted for life. Of course this is probably not an issue with sites about Clean Red Widgets.

Tip #2 Don’t Use Frames

Search engine spiders crawling the web do not respond well to websites using frames and frequently miss many of the pages that are listed within the website.

Tip #3 Don’t Have Pages Under Construction

Make sure when you submit your site to the search engines to get indexed, that you do not have pages still under construction. Search engines as a rule hate to list pages that are under construction. So, always complete them before you submit your websites for indexing. Also, never use the phrase “Under Construction” on your pages that are unfinished! It does not create a good impression.

Tip #4 Never use Sneaky Tricks like Invisible Text

Do not use invisible text stuffed with keywords like Clean Red Widgets, to try and boost your SE rankings. It may not be apparent to your viewers that you are using invisible text, but the search engine spiders will detect it and may even blacklist your website. Play fair and safe and always go by the rules.

Concentrate on the ON page and OFF page optimizing. On page deals with getting your description tags and meta tags similar to your webpages. One key fact not to forget is to use tags with the keywords in the content. In this case, our keywords are Clean Red Widgets.

Off Page optimizing is probably the most important. Without this, you cannot even expect getting visitors on your site. This is nothing but an exercise to get other sites to point to your site, sites that have similar subjects. While you may not find many sites about Clean Red Widgets willing to allow you to post a link back to your site, you should try nevertheless.

Over the period of time, the topic of link exchange has also undergone a number of irreversible changes. Today, people are asking for money to exchange links to get higher PR sites. Unfortunately, you won’t get much money trying to sell links about Clean Red Widgets so what can you do now? Well, first of all, for the purposes of this contest, you cannot buy links, but outside this contest, you could buy maybe a couple of links at the most, if it is absolutely necessary. Apart than that, find forums where you can post or discuss about your website. How? There are a lot of tools available that will assist you in your search. One of the best is Fast Blog Finder, or you could simply Google it. After that, when you get your membership, you can put your website URL within the signature box. Another way of off-page optimization is to submit articles to article directories. Articles also help to make your website popular.

But you have to write excellent CONTENT for your specific site. This is called a one way link, meaning there will be no reciprocal links. Work this out and submit your articles to around fifty free article directories or websites; this should lead to a good PR in say a couple of months. Articles work big time and in ways that are always not apparent immediately. In the effort to rank for the term Clean Red Widgets however, an article may not work out.

Search engine results is one of the most best ways of getting many visitors to your site. But creating the website is not enough. You have to make sure that you have the right keywords selected and the right SEO work done so that your site will get a high ranking. This is an absolute must. Search engine optimization can be the difference a good site and a great business. It will earn you customers. It will keep your website busily trafficked and will help to bring you a health return on your investment.

Nobody denies the benefits you of ranking high in a search engine, even for such an obscure search term like Clean Red Widgets, but we don’t want to stoop to shady or illegal practices to get these rankings. A whole bunch of unethical practices have recently become popular among those so-called SEO experts trying to boost their rankings. At first glance, some of these might not seem so bad, but it is important that you recognize them for what they really are. The first step is spotting what YOU might be doing wrong. Take a look at the list of shady items below.

Inappropriate use of keywords

Yes, you can fool search engines with long strings of text where bury gallons of keywords that have no relevance to your site, but in the end you won’t be fooling the customers. Let’s face it, if someone is searching for “fish” or “fishing” he is most likely to not click on a site with a text like “boating clean fishing red exotic widgets animals site seeing great locations cruising Kuala Lumpur”. The irony is that if someone is really searching for a subject related to your site’s material, in this case Clean Red Widgets, even then he/she is probably going to skip clicking on your link because the description betrays no clue as to what really the site is about.

Inappropriate use of Meta tags

First things first, if you are wondering what META tags are then they are the html code that your website designer has used to create your webpage about Clean Red Widgets. They are also used to inform search engines as to what the keywords on the site are. So as is obvious by now certain ways of tampering with your META tags, certain ‘tricks’, let’s call them, might help you fool the search engine in ways very similar to that described above. However, you won’t get you too far, because even a search engine knows not to go by appearance alone when it comes to websites. Even if the website is about Clean Red Widgets. So instead of depending on the META tags alone it usually also checks up the content!

False content

As a user you have probably come across a dozen sites about Clean Red Widgets, which seem to have long strings of text that have nothing to do with the site and probably make no sense individually either. These are what are called ‘False content’; they are put up on a site only to use a few keywords which might get detected by a search engine. Needless to say such content is a complete obstacle in a good read and even if the overall look and feel of your site is A1 every visitor will get put off by these.