Below are tips and articles related to the search engines, rankings, and internet marketing to help you gain knowledge about search engine marketing facts, terminology, and certain attributes that the search engines consider important.

Articles Written by Submission-Pro Staff:

Don't spam. People come up with ways to "fool" search engines, and they may work for a little while... sometimes. But then the search engines catch on and write algorithms that penalize sites that use this practice. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: repeating keywords over and over; using invisible text (white text on white background); using very small text to jam the keywords in a small area.

Avoid repetitive submission of your site. Contrary to popular belief, continuously submitting your site to the major search engines doesn't increase your rankings or speed up the listing process. In fact over submitting to search engines could do more harm than good. It's very important to always read and adhere to each search engine's particular guidelines when it comes to submission. Once your site is listed in the search engines, other important criteria, including website content and link popularity becomes more important than frequency of submissions. There are times when re-submission may be necessary, but don't fall into the trap of continually submitting your site just for the sake of re-submission.

Analyze your website traffic. When your site is attracting visitors, knowing the behavior of these visitors is very important so that you can continually improve the effectiveness of your website. For example, if you know that visitors are entering your website via the home page and 90% then go to your "faq" page (or any other subpage), you know that you must make certain this "faq" page convincingly answers their questions. If you find that this "faq" page is the last page most people view before they exit your site, you may conclude that this page isn't doing an adequate job answering their questions; therefore revising the "faq" page would be prudent.

Optimize your title. Many search engines weigh the data in your title more heavily than other data in your page. Make sure that your title has keywords that represent your website effectively. For the most part, the title should be concise and always include your keyword(s). 

Create great website content. Your quest for high placement must start with a good website. It is important to have a good amount of text describing what you do. Use your keywords in the content, but don't repeat them over and over. Many search engines rate sites based on "keyword density". This is usually a formula that looks at META Keywords, words in your TITLE, words in paragraph text, words in links to other pages, and even words in the 'ALT' text on your images. They will even look at different forms of your keywords. For example, if an important keyword for you is "FISH", the word "FISHING" in the body of your document will raise the confidence in the word "FISH" on some engines.

Know the difference between organic and PPC listings. There are basically two types of results presented when keywords are searched on a major search engine. There are "pay-per-click" or "PPC" (also known as sponsored listings) and there are "organic" or "natural" (non pay-per-click) listings. The rankings for organic listings are determined by many factors including website content, body text, title and meta tags, link popularity, etc... The rankings for PPC listings are determined primarily by amount bid and relevance. Normally, having your site optimized for the organic (non-pay-per-click) services is the best way to start. Then moving into the sponsored (pay-per-click) programs to complement your organic listings. For larger budgets, you should consider initiating both types of campaigns at the same time. Our search engine submission services focus on optimizing and submitting your site for organic (non pay per click) listings. We also set-up, optimize and manage pay-per-click campaigns. Click here for more sponsored listing information.

Choose the right "partner" for your website marketing. Selecting the right search engine marketing company is one of the most important decisions you will make when pursuing internet marketing. During the process of choosing a company, you will notice a wide range of prices... ranging from free to thousands of dollars a month. Some charge monthly fees, some don't. Once you understand the basics of search marketing (reading this page will help) you are in a much better position to ask the right questions and choosing the right service. The best way to know if a company is a good fit with your organization and website needs is to call them. Speaking with representatives of potential search engine marketing "partners" will help you make the important decisions associated with gaining search engine visibility.

Major/minor search engines, and FFA's. You may have seen advertisements that say they will submit your site to "hundreds of thousands" of search engines. As you may know, there are only a handful (about 17) major search engines. There are also about one hundred or so "minor" search engines that are well worth submitting to. The "hundreds of thousands" that is regularly touted are actually Free for All (FFA) links. A FFA link is a link to your site. However, most search engines such as Google actually penalize websites for FFA or link farm association, since these FFA pages offer no real relevant information (other than a bunch of various links). Many years ago, submission to the FFA link pages was beneficial. Now it is not. The search engines (and us) recommend not utilizing FFA submissions. Targeted links on related topic websites are the best way to go about increasing website link popularity and exposure (see link section below).

Keep important content near the top of your pages. The actual text on your website is very important. Search engines (spiders) read this to determine where your site is ranked. Some engines will place a higher rating of importance based on where they find the text and keywords in your page. Closer to the top is usually better. But having keywords throughout your page develops a "theme" and that too is important.

Don't stuff the top of your pages with data the engines can't read. As with the last example, something higher up in your page can be more important that something further down. Therefore, HTML formatting, images, scripts, etc. toward the top of your page can result in lower rankings.

Control the use of images. We have all seen pages that are almost all images. Usually they are the most beautiful sites. After all, the artist can make beautiful screens that display your content in the most eye-pleasing way. However, the search engines don't have eyes. They don't see the beautifully formatted text in your image. All they see is "yourimage.jpg", and "yourimage.jpg". This doesn't go far in terms of keyword content and relevancy. Search engine friendly content is an important part of successful search engine positioning.

Links on your pages. When most search engine spiders see them, they consider your site more "real". It also gives the spiders a place to go. Make sure you link all of your website's important pages and also add links to other related sites. Using keywords in the link text itself is important.

Links from other websites. Some search engines place a very heavy rating of importance on how many other sites in their index have links to your website. Think of it for a second. If you knew that a company was only linked to by one website, versus a company that was linked to by many relevant websites, which one would you consider more important? If you were a search engine, you would try to rank the more important ones first. A few links from related sites are worth more than a bunch from unrelated sites.