Timely Tidbits from Media II Advertising, Public Relations, Sales Promotion

In This Issue:

Search Engine Optimization Part 2 - Google Specific
(This is a followup to the article in the last newsletter entitled, "Search Engine Optimization Part 1 - The Basics.")

This article is courtesy of Neal Wexler, Director of SiteLINK Sales at Dydacomp Development Corp. (http://www.dydacomp.com/). For over 15 years, Dydacomp has been serving the business automation needs of direct marketers with Mail Order Manager (M.O.M.) and their own completely integrated web commerce solution, SiteLINK.

When is comes to search engines, Google is the most unique when it comes to how they rank your site.

Unlike most search engines, building your site with SEO in mind and submitting your site isn't enough to see major results with Google.

A major part of the Google riddle concerns an internal system that Google uses to determine which sites they will consider more important. This Google specific system is called PageRank. Sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper by Googlebot. PageRank is determined by too many factors to list, but there are a few major things that can effect your site's PageRank.

The biggest factor is a site's PageRank is how many sites on the internet link to your site. Every link to your site is like a vote of confidence that your site is important and relevant. It's extremely important to increase the amount of websites that link to your site. This can be done many ways, but there are many things to be aware of that need to be taken into consideration. First off, stay away from:

• "Link Farms", FFA (Free For All) sites, or Link exchange services. These are frowned upon by many search engines, and could cause your site to be banned from search engines.

• Doorway Pages that serve no purpose other than driving spiders to your website.

• Spamming your URL on web Blogs, Forums, or Bulletin Boards.

If you make posts simply to get your URL listed in many sites, you will most likely get banned by the particular site and your posts will be removed. There is a good way of doing this however, and I'll expand upon this in a minute.

Some good ways to increase the amount of links on the internet are:

• Create a blog for yourself or your company. Blogs tend to get spidered well, and since you can control the copy and information, you can put information about your company, and add links to your site(s) or specific products on your site. Keep the content fresh, and you'll keep the spiders coming back often. You can get a free blog from http://www.blogger.com/ or http://www.livejournal.com/ among others.

• Post on other's Blogs, Forums, or Bulletin Boards. Now, I said earlier not to spam these sites with pointless posts, and that holds true, but if you actively post in these sites, don't try to sell to the other visitors, but legitimacy participate in the conversations, especially for sites in your industry, and put your website link in your signature, you'll add to the amount of links to your site without getting banned by the website or search engines.

• Have your friends put a link to your site in the "Links" section of their site.

• Work out deals with your suppliers, vendors, etc to put a link to your site on their site as a "Corporate Partner".

Note:Links from sites with a higher PageRank are better than from sites with a lower PageRank.

A useful tool is the Google Toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/?promo=mor-tb-en) which will show the PageRank of the site you are visiting.

You can also find your PageRank by finding your site on Google Directory (http://directory.google.com/). If you site Isn't listed, at the bottom of the page, select "Submit a Site". You'll be taken to the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/about.html) to submit your site.

Some tools you can use to check the link popularity of your site are:

http://www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck/

http://www.netconcepts.com/productcheck/

http://www.sitesolutions.com/webtools.asp?F=Form&T=WSLC
(Web Site Link Checker examines all the links in your web site to your
graphics, web site links, web page links and form calls.)

http://www.sitesolutions.com/webtools.asp?F=Form&T=SERC
(Search Engine Position Checker provides the actual position your web site appears for a particular keyword or key phrase.)

http://www.sitesolutions.com/webtools.asp?F=Form&T=SELC
(Search Engine checker, checks to see if your site is listed in the topsearch engines.)

The Public Bath?

In ancient times, public baths were places that men of learning and curiosity gathered to exchange ideas. Today those places no longer exist (unless you count hot tubs), so we've tried to adapt the bath's open freewheeling tone into a newsletter. We hope you'll read our Public Bath in just that spirit.

The Public Bath is not "first-thing-on-Monday" reading. Rather, it is more like "fifteen-minutes-till lunch on Friday" or, "on hold" reading. Some material is amusing, some sociological, some newsy and we hope -- all thought-provoking.

We also want to answer your questions and hear your reactions. Have a topic you would like us to explore? Let us know that too. After all, public baths are places for both listening and talking.

About Media II, Inc. – Media II is a full-service marketing communications firm that specializes in serving business-to-business marketers in a wide variety of industries. We offer marketing communications planning, print and email advertising, public relations, sales literature development, graphic design, direct mail, web site development, webcasting, database publishing, and search engine placement services. Like to know more? Visit our web site www.mediaii.com

Media II, Inc. / 34900 Chardon Road / Willoughby Hills, OH 44094 / 440-975-8201 / www.mediaii.com

If you have a topic you would like to see us address or if you would prefer not to receive this newsletter, please let us know. Email roy@mediaii.com