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I know I’m not a SEO expert but these are some basic things anyone should know and use. And the best thing about this things is that they are FREE. (And they work better than any kind of paid crap.)

• Title tags. These are very important because the words in your title tag appear in the search results. This way you can tell the search engine and the search engine user what that page is all about.
• Content. We all know that content is king. But to get better ranks in search engines you need to spread your keywords all over the contend (be careful not to use too many keywords, search engines don’t like that, and be sure add some keyword variation). You should always try to keep your content updated because this gives search engine spiders and visitors lots of reasons to come back.
• Links. Backlinks to be more precise, links from other sites to your site. They are saying that your site is ok, it should be up there. The more authority the site that is linking to you has, the better you will get rated. Low quality links can do you more harm than good.
• URL. This is not yet rocket science. People don’t know much about how URL’s act in search engines, but we know 2 things: 1) keywords in the URL are good for you and 2) search engines don’t like long URL’s with too many keywords.
• Site architecture. Using a proper site structure will allow spiders to index your site faster and better. Try to use deep links and link your pages/posts between them. The use of flash, javascript and images will get you nowhere. Spiders like only html and text (I’m not saying you shouldn’t use flash or java but don’t put any important info in there.)
• People. Far more important than any of the things above. Of they like your site then you will surely rank better.

Popularity: 23% [?]

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Are you a SEO maniac? When you are writing something do you optimize it for search engines? If the answer is YES then the next list is for you.

Document Title

• Use the desired Keyword in the document title at least once (optional).
• Use between 4 - 6 words in the document title.
• Use at most 50 characters in the document title.

Meta Keywords

• Use the desired Keyword in the meta keywords.

Bold Body Text

• Use the desired Keyword in the bold body text.
• Use 30 - 50 words in the bold body text.
• Use at most 300 characters in the bold body text.

First Sentence Of Body Text

• Use the desired Keyword in the first sentence of body text.
• Use 20 - 30 words in the first sentence.
• Use at most 150 characters in the first sentence.

URL

• Use the desired Keyword in the URL.
• Use at least 2 words in the URL.
• Use more than 10 characters in the URL.

General Advice

• Search engines cannot read what is written in your graphical images, in flash or in javascript.
• Fresh, continuous updates are the best way to ensure that search engines will return to your site.
• Search engines penalize websites if search terms of the Meta Keywords don’t appear in the body text of the page.
• Some search engines and directories don’t accept submissions with capitalized letters in the document title or in the meta tags.
• Don’t use frames.
• Some search engines consider tiny text (font size 1) as an attempt to fool the search engines.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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Surfing the web, looking for some interesting moneymakers i found TNX.net. This is an advertising platform that targets both publishers and advertisers equally well. What they offer is a blend of contextual advertising and text-link brokering. Furthermore, most of us know Google does not endorse paid links so TNX have come up with a fantastic tool - the link generator - that makes paid links look natural to Google.

How does TNX work?

First of all, i must tell you TNX functions on a point basis. This means you buy points and with those poinst you buy links (or as a publisher you get paid in points for the links you display and you can sell those points for money). Easy enough and in my opinion very effective.

For Advertisers

At first i was shocked when i saw the price. Shocked not because the price was high, but because it was really low - for $10 you can buy… 10.000 links (ten thousand). That is simply astonishing. But the great thing is TNX.net does not function like any contextual advertising, it gives you a triple advantage: it attracts interested visitors from websites that display your ads, it attracts an even greater number of visitors from search engines and it can increase your pagerank. Even more, TNX.net offers some fantastic targeting: by website’s niche (or category), there is also a targeting by the site’s region, Google PR of each page and Link popularity (Yahoo backlinks) of each website. Other thing you need to know are you can test-drive it for free - you will get some free point when you sign-up (no deposit required) and if you are an advertising agency or SEO consultant you can get discounts up to %50. So to sum up everything TNX.net offers you advertising that is simple, very effective and very very cheap.

For Publishers

To sign-up as a TNX publisher your site will need to have 2 things: it must be indexed by Google and it must be hosted on a service that supports PHP or Perl (this is because you have to add some code to your website). Aside of that the publisher program is open to all site whether big or small. All you have to do is add the TNX code to your site and their spyder will index your site quickly (1-3 days) and after that you will be able to sell your links. And now making money is so easy - for every link you display you will get paid (this depends on your site’s PR and link popularity). Again, simple and effective.

But wait, there’s more - The referral program of course

Yep, TNX offers a very lucrative referral program. When you refer webmasters to TNX.net, you get 13.3% (as long as your account is active) of all TNX-points that are generated by their websites. In addition, you will receive 5% of all payments, made by referred advertiser. Great income. But the really cool thing about TNX’s referral program is it works and will work really well because you see, TNX is a quite new advertising platform and not so many people know about them - this means you have the chance to sign-up those people to TNX.

Growing fast in popularity and in user numbers (42,000+) TNX.net is the next big thing to look for - that i can guarantee you.

Popularity: 47% [?]

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If you have a site you may have noticed already that not all of your pages are indexed by google. And you shouldn’t expect to get all of your pages indexed by google. But you can make google crawl more and more pages on your site using the following methods:

1) Use Google Webmaster Tools - this will get you on a better position with big G.

2) Use a Sitemap - a map of your site will help crawlers discover all the pages of your site.

3) PageRank - the higher it is the more pages will be indexed because big G thinks your pages are important (and remember, each page has it’s own pagerank).

4) Links - links throughout your site send the crawler to more and more pages. This is why deep linking is so important.

5) Original content - if your content is a xerox copy of another page chances are google will skip is, thinking that it was already indexed.

6) Frequent updates - G likes pages with new content and if you update often big G will begin to like you and index your pages faster.

7) Speed - the faster google can crawl the faster it will index - so this is why speed is so important.

Crawl caching proxy - matt cutts explains this one.

9) Do not post relevant information using javascript or flash - google can’t read them.

10) Volume - do not post more than 5000 pages (yea like…) per week.

Popularity: 23% [?]

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These days everybody uses Google as a point of reference when it comes to ranking. The thing with Google is that they don’t like cloaking because it can be used to fool their spider. And they don’t like paid links because their algorithm places such a high emphasis on links as a quality indicator, and paid linking subverts their system’s integrity. So what they did to manage all this is they disallowed paid links and cloaking and punished the sites that disregard their rules by penalizing or even booting them from the index. Now that’s not good at all.

Now for MSN things are a bit different. Just a bit. They don’t recommend cloaking and paid links but still but they don’t discount either practice as forbidden. For the cloaking the don’t have an official position yet and for the paid links MSN thinks it’s ok to pay for links as long they are somewhat relevant (meaning that if you have a site on a motoring topic and you pay for a link on a site with a weight loss topic, your link might not be taken into consideration).

And if you think that MSN is just another revamped search engine with some less than great results, then think again. The folks at MSN didn’t waste any time and worked their asses off to get better and better with their results. Next improvement is set to appear in about 2 months. So this is something to keep an eye on.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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