SEO Business Solutions

Search Engine Optimization

2008-08-05T15:02:00.003-06:00

Another very important part of search engine optimization is the social sites. Here is an opportunity to have inbound links from quality sites, and you don't have to pay for them. You can get people into your social network, and before you know it you have generated hundreds of visits to your website that you otherwise wouldn't expect. So I you have the time to go online and socialized then by all means go the websites and begin to make friends. If not, then you should allow SEO Business Solutions to do your search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

2008-07-09T16:39:00.003-06:00

Are you looking for an Search Engine Optimization company?

Look no more! SEO Business Solutions can get your website where you want it to be on search engine results. Go to our website and ask for a free analysis of your website, no strings attached. We will even help you optimize your website. Should you run into any problems, you will always have our SEO experts available. Ask for a free quote. We will be happy to tailor a package to fit your specific needs.

We Have Said This Before and Do Not Tire of Saying it: We are an ethical company.

2008-07-08T12:01:00.002-06:00

Webmasters want quick and easy solutions to their Search Engine Optimization problems.

If you are an experienced webmaster, you know that real Search Engine Optimization takes time and lots of patience. Most people want to get high rankings in Google and they want these rankings now. That's the reason why some companies offer quick and easy solutions that are supposed to bring your website in Google's top 10 results quickly and easily. Are these methods good for your business and can you afford to use
them?

5 quick and easy methods to get high rankings on search engines

The following five methods are the most popular quick fix solutions that some website promotion companies offer:

1. Hide text on your web pages
If you want to get high rankings for a special keyword, the keyword must appear on your web pages. If you don't want to change your web pages, hide keyword rich text on your web pages. For example, use white text on a white background, use CSS to hide text areas, fill HTML comments with keywords, etc.

2. Cloak your web pages
Cloaking is a method that allows you to deliver different pages to search engines and website visitors. For example, your website visitors could see your regular web pages while search engine spiders are redirected to keyword rich web pages that are stuffed with keywords that are relevant and not-so-relevant to your business.

Cloaking is an easy way to provide search engines with lots of content without changing your regular web pages.

3. Get content from other websites
Everybody knows that search engines need content to get high search engine rankings. The easiest way to get content rich web pages is to reproduce content from other websites on your website.

4. Buy links
Buying links is a quick way to get many links to your website. Why waste time to develop natural link partnerships with related websites?

5. Participate in linking schemes
Search engines prefer websites with many inbound links. Why not join a link network that promises hundreds of links within days with little work or no work at all?

Quick and easy solutions can become extremely expensive!

The problem with the methods mentioned above is that they all will get your website banned from Google's search result pages sooner or later. Google thinks that these methods are spam and we agree with that opinion. In fact, we consider such practices highly deceptive and unethical. We have discussed in previous blogs the ethics of
Search Engine Optimization.

You can get short term results with these methods but it is only a matter of time until your website will be penalized for using these methods. Just to be clear: Do not use the methods above or you will harm your website! You will end up being penalized, banned and/or blackballed.

Can you afford these methods?

Three questions and a risk-free plan.
Can your business afford to use one of the methods above? Consider these three questions:

* Do you have employees or investors?
* Is your website the primary source of your income?
* Would losing most of your visitors be a disaster for your income?

If your answer to one of these three questions is yes then you should avoid the tactics mentioned above at all cost. The risk is just too high. If you want to get high rankings on Google without risking your website, use ethical search engine
optimization methods. If you want to get lasting rankings, optimize your web pages for your keywords without spamming and get high quality links instead of using shady linking schemes.
Ethical search engine optimization methods take some time but they produce much better results than shady quick fix solutions.
Thank you Axandra for such highly informative and valuable articles!
We continue to advise our website visitors and customers to practice ethical search engine optimization. After all, we believe that you want to go to the top of the search engine results and stay there. Well, the way to stay
there is through ethical SEO.
This is a reprint from our website blog. We are making it more readily available because of the importance that we give ethical SEO.

Search Engine Optimization Term of the Day

2008-07-01T17:49:00.004-06:00

Bookmarks
Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.
There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content.
See also:
Del.icio.us - Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
Yahoo! MyWeb - similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
Google Notebook - allows you to note documents
Slashdot - tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
Digg - decentralized news site
Netscape - Digg clone
Google Video - Google's video hosting, tagging, and search site
YouTube - popular decentralized video site

Visit our Glossary for more relevant Search Engine Optimization terms.

Search Engine Optimization at SEO Business Solutions

2008-06-18T16:03:00.002-06:00

SEO Business Solutions is your only solution for your Search Engine Optimization needs. We have been at the vanguard of search engine optimization for many years now and will continue to work and improve in order to stay out in front. To this end, we have made many search engine optimization tools available to our customers and website users. We realize that many people don't have the financial resources to pay for search engine optimization or SEO. We also know that if you have a specialty website, your traffic might be such that it allows you the free time to do your own SEO. Also, we know that many people like to tinker and learn new things.
If you are one of the aforementioned people, then our free SEO tools are the thing for you. All you have to do is go to our Contact Us page and let us know that you are looking for free SEO tools. We will be more than happy to share some of the tools that we use with you. However, if you find yourself in a bind or pressed for time, don't hesitate to ask for a free website analysis and SEO quote. We will work with you to formulate an SEO plan that falls within your budget and expectations.

Search Engine Optimization Term of the Day at SEO Business Solutions

2008-06-09T15:38:00.002-06:00

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor Text is the text that a user would click on to follow a link. In case that the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text.

Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

For an example of anchor text, go to our search engine optimization glossary.

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

See also:
Backlink Analyzer - free tool to analyze your link anchor text

SEO Business Solutions Welcomes Your Contributions to its SEO Blog.

2008-06-03T21:26:00.005-06:00

We are looking for new and fresh ideas, software or products so our website users and customers can take advantage of them. If you wish to comment on any Blog posted by SEO Business Solutions, go to our contact us page and let us know what you think. If you have an idea or product related to SEO, let us know and we will post it. Make yourself and your ideas known.

SEO Business Solutions, constantly ahead of the pack

2008-06-02T04:43:00.003-06:00

You can see that we have definitely, but not definitively, defined the unknown through our Glossary of SEO Terms. We've done this to help our customers, website users and potential customers in understanding what SEO is really about. SEO has developed a jargon of its own, and you have to be familiar with the terms so that you can make an informed decision when you optimize your website.
We've identified thousands of SEO terms. We have also identified over 100 unique variables that directly affect natural search algorithms and our Search Engine Optimization specialists optimize your website or blog in accordance to these variables. However, we will not waver in our effort to let you know that search engines are constantly adjusting their algorithms to try to halt spammers. Therefore, SEO Business Solutions constantly re-evaluates and updates its software to ensure that the correct weight is given to each of these variables to ensure that your website will end up on the first page of search results for your chosen keywords and phrases.

By using ethical SEO practices, leading edge software and search engine algorithm trend analysis, SEO Business Solutions seemingly without effort will make the proper corrections to account for the changes and trends so that your website can maintain its good rankings and to secure new and higher rankings.

SEO Business Solutions Says Blogging Makes Sense

2008-06-01T14:26:00.003-06:00

A good blog with lots of keywords and content has become a great tool for search engine optimization.

Good search engine optimization involves much more than the correct keyword strategy, inbound links, fresh content and all of the other things which SEO companies do to move your site up in the search engine results. What's particularly great about having a good blog is that it gives your site fresh content. If you use the right amount of keywords, your blog will place highly in search engine results. It is, of course, a great opportunity to have an inbound link from your blog to your website. There are really endless possibilities as far as blogging is concerned. It is up to the SEO Company and the imagination of its content writers and keyword analysts. SEO Business Solutions has developed its own software for optimization. We have worked countless hours on our software and continue to work on it so that it stays current. When there are changes in the algorithms of the search engines, we update our software to include the new changes. We apply our state of the art software to web logs, or blogs, in an effort to optimize your site in every way possible. We understand the possibilities that a good blog presents and take every advantage we can of the possibilities presented. We want you to see your site where you want it to be; on the first page of search results.

Have we used terms which you would like clarified? Visit our SEO Business Solutions Glossary of SEO Terms.

What's new at SEO Business Solutions?

2008-05-31T13:59:00.004-06:00

SEO Business Solutions has added the new term "favicon" to its glossary. If you don't know what the term means, then go to our glossary and find out. This and many other relevant terms can be found in our alphabetical glossary. We are going to continue updating our glossary and adding or removing terms as it becomes necessary. If you wish to make a contribution, go to our contact us page and let us know what the new term you have is or how we can improve the definitions we have. All suggestions will be given serious consideration.

Glossary of SEO Terms

2008-05-30T14:55:00.003-06:00

In an effort to assist its customers and website users, SEO Business Soltions recently introduced a glossary of SEO Terms. It is done in alphabetical order for your convenience. All you have to do is find the letter that correspondes to your term. However, if you don't find the term you're looking for, write to us at:
info@seobusinesssolutions.com
and let us know. We will find the term and place it in our glossary. In addition, if you think you have a better definition for one of our terms, write to us at the above stated email address and let us know what that better definition is. We will take it all under advisement and make the necessary changes.

Strong Growth for Google Inc.

2008-05-29T11:23:00.005-06:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc., showed strong growth in its ability to convert Web searches into ads viewed, according to a closely watched industry report quoted by analysts on Thursday, and its shares rose 2.5 percent.
Web tracking firm comScore Inc's monthly report on "paid clicks" showed Google's U.S. growth at 19.6 percent in April from a year ago, compared with growth of 2.7 percent in March and 3.1 percent in February, according to analysts.
Lehman Brothers analyst Douglas Anmuth said the growth suggests a reversal in trends seen for Google during the first quarter of the year and could spur shares higher on hopes the Web leader had reaccelerated growth in the market.
"We are cautious about reading too much into the data as they track only domestic (owned and operated) paid clicks and exclude Google's full network and international paid clicks," Anmuth wrote in a note to clients.
Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali said Google could exceed his revenue expectations for the second quarter if growth remained on its current trajectory.
He noted that paid click declines of 4.4 percent for Yahoo Inc., and 9 percent for Microsoft Corp's MSN could bolster the case for the two to combine, or for Yahoo to clinch a search partnership with Google that has been under discussion for weeks.
Microsoft withdrew a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo earlier this month in a disagreement over price. Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang said on Wednesday the two companies were still discussing a potential partnership or alternatives to a deal.
ComScore does not publicly release the paid click reports it sends to clients.
Google shares rose $15 to $583, Yahoo slipped 11 cents to $27.06 while Microsoft gained 32 cents to $28.50.

What does this article that appeared in today's New York Times mean to you? Well, it means that you should optimize your website for the Google search engine. We have been saying this over and over and will not get tired of advising our clients that optimizing for Google makes good business sense. We concentrate on the major search engines, Google and Yahoo! and two of the lesser players, MSN and Ask.com. In this way, we optimize for over 98% of the searches done in the USA. SEO Business Solutions is the clear choice for your websites's search engine optimization.
This and other relevant articles can be found in the New York Times Online.

SEO Business Solutions and Web Directories

2008-05-28T18:12:00.003-06:00

Why request inclusion in web directories if they are losing their relevance?

On May 14th, SEO Book commented on the fact that the directory JoeAnt is now a PageRank 3. We have submitted hundreds of sites to hundreds of directories. For sites at the lower end of the quality spectrum, we simply would not submit them to JoeAnt, because we knew they would not list them. Many of those same lower quality sites were accepted in other directories like Business.com, DMEGS and the Yahoo! Directory.
However it is not surprising to us that JoeAnt was dropped to a PageRank 3. Nick Stamoulis that same morning said that after all, it is a paid directory, which means your link is a paid link and we all know how Google feels about those for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, we do all we can to stay away from paid directories and link farms.
DMOZ, on the other hand, still gets a nod of respect from Google. Even though Google no longer needs data from DMOZ in order to index websites, it still crawls the human edited directory and uses the information. If it were up to us, we would lower DMOZ’s PageRank and give paid directories like JoeAnt a higher PageRank. But, of course, it’s not up to us, is it?
Yesterday, DMOZ announced that it has had visitors from over 200 countries. Are you surprised? We’re not. It’s a venerable website with lots of time and history on its side. They’ve been around a long time which Google and other search engines seem to love. We’d be surprised if they didn’t have that many countries in their referrer bin.
We’ve said for a long time now that directories are losing relevance because of other factors taking place on the Internet and supplanting the usefulness of directories. Well, it isn’t entirely so. In fact, to a certain degree, we believe that general directories are a lot less important than they used to be for Search Engine Optimization, but haven’t entirely lost their relevance. However, with the coming of other marketing tools like blogging, social bookmarking, social networking and RSS, directory listings just seem so ponderous and monolithic. DMOZ is a perfectly good example. You submit your site on DMOZ and have to wait 9 months to a year for your site to be listed. In the meantime, you could have built up thousands of inbound links using different means. Then why bother at all with DMOZ? The answer is simple but truly: Since DMOZ is still loved by Google, it makes sense to request inclusion in the directory, even if it takes a year to be included. An inclusion in a directory with a PR of 8 is the eventual payoff. We would also add that it pays to have as many inbound links as possible.
Even though directories, in general, are losing their relevance, SEO Business Solutions thinks that not requesting inclusion of your site in the DMOZ is not a good Search Engine Optimization practice.

Basic Differences When It Comes to Web Pages and Blogs With Regards to SEO

2008-05-27T18:54:00.003-06:00

What are the differences when it comes to web pages and blogs with regards to SEO?

There are distinct differences when it comes to web pages and blogs, not just in the look or navigation, but in the search engine optimization strategies as well. Sure, both need the usual villains of content, keywords and links. However SEO outcomes for each can be quite different.
Aside from the ease of creating multiple pages, each page of a blog will get indexed by they search engines. If there are ten pages to (or posts) on a blog, that is potentially ten pages indexed. A web page on the other hand gains only one indexing. Most web sites are made up of more than one page, however, extra pages are far more difficult to create and require some knowledge of web page coding. Because each page can be designed from scratch, search engine optimization strategies can be fine tuned for each page.Blogging requires little to no knowledge of programming codes, however your ability to fine tune your search engine optimization strategies is limited to the types of plugins available and how well you utilize them. It is much harder to customize each page on a blog.
Blogs and blogging can be great for delivering traffic. Web sites on the other hand are well suited to action such as buying, signing up to newsletters of or any other activity. Search engine optimization strategies for blogs require a focus not just on the search engines, but also with an eyes to the many social sites.
Search engine optimization on web pages can concentrate purely on gaining search engine result placement. Blogging and social sites fit like hand and glove as do web sites and search engines. Whilst more than half of many searches deliver blogs in the results pages, individuals who are looking to buy will almost always click through to a web page rather than a blog.
If you have a web site that is commercial in nature, you need to maximize your search engine optimization efforts to deliver targeted traffic. A blog in reality is a support service for your web page. Blogs need to not only target search engines, but also target the social community as well. Search engine optimization needs to take that social community into consideration as well.A good example of this is in keyword selection. A web page can target keywords centering around the products being sold. A blog needs to expand on those keywords to include phrases that relate to solving problems, offering tips and providing information. The search engine optimization strategies for each can be totally different.The best approach is to consider each as totally separate entities with totally different requirements. Your search engine optimization strategies should be separated and optimized for each entity to gain the maximum return for your efforts.
After all, you should expect a good return for your investment if you hire a company to optimize your site for search engine results. SEO Business Solutions can help you to maximize your investment. We consult with our clients to determine what the best strategy is and then we explain what we are going to do in terms that can be easily understood.
We always try to keep our clients as informed as possible so that they can make the best decision when it comes to search engine optimization. Visit our website and ask us for a free analysis and quote.

SEO Business Solutions

2008-05-26T17:16:00.002-06:00

The Region's best Search Engine Optimization company. Visit our site, compare us to other SEO companies and ask for a free analysis and quote.

SEO BUSINESS SOLUTIONS CONCENTRATES ITS EFFORTS ON THE MAIN SEARCH ENGINES

2008-05-26T15:24:00.002-06:00

YAHOO! AND GOOGLE ARE UP IN THEIR SHARE OF SEARCH ENGINE VOLUME

Don’t put all your search engine optimization eggs into one basket. Well not yet anyway. Despite Yahoo! gaining a small increase in search volume, Google is still the one that is way out in front and not slowing down, at least, not yet.
Google also increased their share of search volume leaving the other players to continue their downward slide. On present volumes, search engine optimization should focus on Google and Yahoo! and forget the rest. According to Compete, the big two have over 83% of search volume between with Google bringing home a huge 68.9%. The big loser over the last 12 months, apart from Yahoo! which has dropped almost 5%, has been MSN and Club Live (both Microsoft).
Yahoo!’s rise may have come at the expense of MSN and Club Live due to Microsoft’s attempted takeover of Yahoo! Club Live had the biggest percentage drop falling almost 33%.
It makes sense for SEO Business Solutions to concentrate its efforts on the main search engines. It also makes sense for you to hire a search engine company like SEO Business Solutions to handle your website's optimization because we will maximize your investment.
After all, hiring SEO Business Solutions is an investment which you hope will pay dividends in the form of increased traffic and sales. Let SEO Business Solutions do your website's Search Engine Optimization and watch your website move up in the search results to the place where you want it to be.

SEO terms you should be familiar with 0-9 and A-D

2008-05-25T19:13:00.003-06:00

You should become familiar with these SEO terms is you are planning to hire a company like SEO Business Solutions to do your Search Engine Optimization.

0 - 9
200
Status OK - The file request was successful. For example, a page or image was found and loaded properly in a browser.

Some poorly developed content management systems return 200 status codes even when a file does not exist. The proper response for file not found is a 404.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
301
Moved Permanently - The file has been moved permanently to a new location.
This is the preferred method of redirecting for most pages or websites. If you are going to move an entire site to a new location you may want to test moving a file or folder first, and then if that ranks well you may want to proceed with moving the entire site. Depending on your site authority and crawl frequency it may take anywhere from a few days to a month or so for the 301 redirect to be picked up.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
On Apache servers you can redirect URLs in a .htaccess file or via in the headers of some dynamic pages. Most web hosts run on Apache.
On IIS servers you can redirect using ASP or ASP.net, or from within the internet manager.
302
Found - The file has been found, but is temporarily located at another URI.
Generally, as it relates to SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects. Some search engines struggle with redirect handling. Due to poor processing of 302 redirects some search engines have allowed competing businesses to hijack the listings of competitors.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
404
Not Found - The server was unable to locate the URL.
Some content management systems send 404 status codes when documents do exist. Ensure files that exist do give a 200 status code and requests for files that do not exist give a 404 status code. You may also want to check with your host to see if you can set up a custom 404 error page which makes it easy for site visitors to

view your most popular and / or most relevant navigational options
report navigational problems within your site
Search engines request a robots.txt file to see what portions of your site they are allowed to crawl. Many browsers request a favicon.ico file when loading your site. While neither of these files are necessary, creating them will help keep your log files clean so you can focus on whatever other errors your site might have.

See also:

W3C HTTP 1.1 Status Code Definitions
A
Above the Fold
A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.
See also:

Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
Absolute Link
A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.
Example absolute link

Cool Stuff

Example relative link

Cool Stuff

AdCenter
Microsoft's cost per click ad network.
While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft's limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.

See also:

AdCenter - sign up for an account
Microsoft AdLabs - view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.
AdSense
Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.
AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales.

AdSense ad auction formats include

cost per click - advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on
CPM - advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information.
AdSense ad formats include

text
graphic
animated graphics
videos
In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on

how niche their site is
how commercially oriented their site is
the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical
It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable.

Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following

AdSense
affiliate marketing
direct ad sales
selling your own products and services
a mixture of the above
See also:

Google AdSense program - sign up as an ad publisher
Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
Google AdWords - buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant web pages.
AdWords
Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and traditional print ads.
AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.

See also:

Google AdWords - sign up for an advertiser account
Google Advertising Professional Program - program for qualifying as an AdWords expert
Google AdWords Learning Center - text and multimedia educational modules. Contains quizzes related to each section.
AdWords Keyword Tool - shows related keywords, advertiser competition, and relative search volume estimates.
Google Traffic Estimator - estimates bid prices and search volumes for keywords.
Free PPC tips [PDF] - my ebook offering free pay per click advice.
Andrew Goodman's Google AdWords Handbook - costs roughly $75, but is well worth it
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs allows merchants to expand their market reach and mindshare by paying independent agents on a cost per action (CPA) basis. Affiliates only get paid if visitors complete an action.
Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other's affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.

Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate).

Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the use of

algorithms which detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content;
manual review; and,
implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads.
See also:

Commission Junction - probably the largest affiliate network
Linkshare - another large affiliate network
Performics - another large affiliate network
Azoogle Ads - ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals
CPA Empire - similar to AzoogleAds
Amazon Associates - Amazon's affiliate program
Clickbank - an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information
Age
Some social networks or search systems may take site age, page age, user account age, and related historical data into account when determining how much to trust that person, website, or document. Some specialty search engines, like blog search engines, may also boost the relevancy of new documents.
Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.

Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change.

See also:

Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on historical data - mentions that document age, link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the relevancy of a document.
AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a technique which allows a web page to request additional data from a server without requiring a new page to load.
Alexa
Amazon.com owned search service which measures website traffic.
Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.

See also

Alexa.com
AllTheWeb
Search engine which was created by Fast, then bought by Overture, which was bought by Yahoo. Yahoo may use AllTheWeb as a test bed for new search technologies and features.
See also:

AllTheWeb
Alt Attribute
Blind people and most major search engines are not able to easily distinguish what is in an image. Using an image alt attribute allows you to help screen readers and search engines understand the function of an image by providing a text equivalent for the object.
Example usage

See also

W3C QA: Alt Attribute
AltaVista
Search engine bought out by Overture prior to Overture being bought by Yahoo. AltaVista was an early powerhouse in search, but on October 25, 1999 they did a major algorithmic update which caused them to dump many websites. Ultimately that update and brand mismanagement drove themselves toward irrelevancy and a loss of mindshare and marketshare.
See also:

AltaVista
Amazon.com
The largest internet retailing website. Amazon.com is rich in consumer generated media. Amazon also owns a number of other popular websites, including IMDB and Alexa.
See also:

Amazon.com - official site
Analytics
Software which allows you to track your page views, user paths, and conversion statistics based upon interpreting your log files or through including a JavaScript tracking code on your site.
Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.

See also:

Google Analytics - Google's free analytics program
Conversion Ruler - a simple and cheap web based analytic tool
ClickTracks - downloadable and web based analytics software
Anchor Text
The text that a user would click on to follow a link. In the case the link is an image the image alt attribute may act in the place of anchor text.
Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Example of anchor text:

Search Engine Optimization Blog

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

See also:

Backlink Analyzer - free tool to analyze your link anchor text
AOL
Popular web portal which merged with Time Warner.
API
Application Program Interface - a series of conventions or routines used to access software functions. Most major search products have an API program.
Arbitrage
Exploiting market inefficiencies by buying and reselling a commodity for a profit. As it relates to the search market, many thin content sites laced with an Overture feed or AdSense ads buy traffic from the major search engines and hope to send some percent of that traffic clicking out on a higher priced ad. Shopping search engines generally draw most of their traffic through arbitrage.
See also:

Wolf-Howl: AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets
[audio] Jeremy Shoemaker interviews Kris Jones and part 2
Wikipedia: arbitrage
ASP
Active Server Pages - a dynamic Microsoft programming language.
See also:

ASP.net
Ask
Ask is a search engine owned by InterActive Corp. They were originally named Ask Jeeves, but they dumped Jeeves in early 2006. Their search engine is powered by the Teoma search technology, which is largely reliant upon Kleinberg's concept of hubs and authorities.
See also:

Ask
Ask Sponsored Listings - Ask syndicates AdWords ads, but also sells internal pay per click ads as well
Ask Webmaster Help
Authority
The ability of a page or domain to rank well in search engines. Five large factors associated with site and page authority are link equity, site age, traffic trends, site history, and publishing unique original quality content.
Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Authorities
Topical authorities are sites which are well trusted and well cited by experts within their topical community. A topical authority is a page which is referenced from many topical experts and hub sites. A topical hub is page which references many authorities.
Example potential topical authorities:

the largest brands in your field
the top blogger talking about your subject
the Wikipedia or DMOZ page about your topic
See also:

Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
Jon Klienberg's Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
Jon Klienberg's home page
Hypersearching the Web
Automated Bid Management Software
Pay per click search engines are growing increasingly complex in their offerings. To help large advertisers cope with the increasing sophistication and complexity of these offerings some search engines and third party software developers have created software which makes it easier to control your ad spend. Some of the more advanced tools can integrate with your analytics programs and help you focus on conversion, ROI, and earnings elasticity instead of just looking at cost per click.
See also:

If you want to program internal bid management software you can get a developer token to use the Google AdWords API.

A few popular bid management tools are

Atlas OnePoint (formerly known as GoToast)
BidRank
KeywordMax
B
Backlink (see Inbound Link)

Bait and Switch
Marketing technique where you make something look overtly pure or as though it has another purpose to get people to believe in it or vote for it (by linking at it or sharing it with friends), then switch the intent or purpose of the website after you gain authority.
It is generally easier to get links to informational websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before trying to monetize their market position.

Banner Blindness
During the first web boom many businesses were based on eyeballs more than actually building real value. Many ads were typically quite irrelevant and web users learned to ignore the most common ad types.
In many ways text ads are successful because they are more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may eventually become text ad blind as well.

Nick Denton stated:

Imagine a web in which Google and Overture text ads are everywhere . Not only beside search results, but next to every article and weblog post. Ubiquity breeds contempt. Text ads, coupled with content targeting, are more effective than graphic ads for many advertisers; but they too, like banners, will suffer reader burnout.Battelle, John
Popular search and media blogger who co-founded The Industry Standard and Wired, and authored a popular book on search called The Search.
See also:

Searchblog - blog about the intersection of search, media, and technology.
The Search - John's book about the history and future of search.
The Database of Intentions - post about how search engines store many of our thoughts
Web 2.0 Conference - conference run by John Battelle.
Battelle's Google speech
Behavioral Targeting
Ad targeting based on past recent experience and/or implied intent. For example, if I recently searched for mortgages then am later reading a book review the page may still show me mortgage ads.
Bias
A prejudice based on experiences or a particular worldview.
Any media channel, publishing format, organization, or person is biased by

how and why they were created and their own experiences
the current set of social standards in which they exist
other markets they operate in
the need for self preservation
how they interface with the world around them
their capital, knowledge, status, or technological advantages and limitations
Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Large news organizations tend to aim for widely acceptable neutrality rather than objectivity. Some of the most popular individual web authors / publishers tend to be quite biased in nature. Rather than bias hurting one's exposure

The known / learned bias of a specific author may make their news more appealing than news from an organization that aimed to seem arbitrarily neutral.
I believe biased channels most likely typically have a larger readership than unbiased channels.
Most people prefer to subscribe to media which matches their own biases worldview.
If more people read what you write and passionately agree with it then they are more likely to link at it.
Things which are biased in nature are typically easier to be cited than things which are unbiased.
See also:

Alejandro M. Diaz's Through the Google Goggles [PDF] - thesis paper on Google's biases
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - looks at economic, biological, and linguistic history
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky DVD and book about mainstream media bias toward business interests
Comparison of the major search algorithms
Wikipedia: Bias
Bid Management Software (see Automated Bid Management Software)

Black Hat SEO
Search engines set up guidelines that help them extract billions of dollars of ad revenue from the work of publishers and the attention of searchers. Within that highly profitable framework search engines consider certain marketing techniques deceptive in nature, and label them as black hat SEO. Those which are considered within their guidelines are called white hat SEO techniques. The search guidelines are not a static set of rules, and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered deceptive the next.
Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

See also:

Black Hat SEO.com - parody site about black hat SEO
White Hat SEO.com - parody site about white hat SEO
Honest SEO - site offering tips on hiring an SEO
SEOConsultants.com - reviewed directory of SEO professionals
SEO Black Hat - blog about black hat SEO techniques
Block Level Analysis
A method used to break a page down into multiple points on the web graph by breaking its pages down into smaller blocks.
Block level link analysis can be used to help determine if content is page specific or part of a navigational system. It also can help determine if a link is a natural editorial link, what other links that link should be associated with, and/or if it is an advertisement. Search engines generally do not want to count advertisements as votes.

See also

Microsoft Research: Block-level Link Analysis
Blog
A periodically updated journal, typically formatted in reverse chronological order. Many blogs not only archive and categorize information, but also provide a feed and allow simple user interaction like leaving comments on the posts.
Most blogs tend to be personal in nature. Blogs are generally quite authoritative with heavy link equity because they give people a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link to whatever they think is interesting.

The most popular blogging platforms are Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, and Typepad.

Blog Comment Spam
Either manually or automatically (via a software program) adding low value or no value comments to other sites.
Automated blog spam:

Nice post!
by
Discreat Overnight Viagra Online Canadian Pharmacy Free Shipping
Manual blog spam:

I just wrote about this on my site. I don't know you, but I thought I would add no value to your site other than linking through to mine. Check it out!!!!!
by
cluebag manual spammer (usually with keywords as my name)
As time passes both manual and automated blog comment spam systems are evolving to look more like legitimate comments. I have seen some automated blog comment spam systems that have multiple fake personas that converse with one another.

Blogger
Blogger is a free blog platform owned by Google.
It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website's link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else's website.

Blogger is probably the easiest blogging software tool to use, but it lacks many some features present in other blog platforms.

See also:

Blogger.com
Blogroll
Link list on a blog, usually linking to other blogs owned by the same company or friends of that blogger.
Bold
A way to make words appear in a bolder font. Words that appear in a bolder font are more likely to be read by humans that are scanning a page. A search engine may also place slightly greater weighting on these words than regular text, but if you write natural page copy and a word or phrase appears on a page many times it probably does not make sense or look natural if you bold ever occurrence.
Example use:

words
words
Either would appear as words.

Bookmarks
Most browsers come with the ability to bookmark your favorite pages. Many web based services have also been created to allow you to bookmark and share your favorite resources. The popularity of a document (as measured in terms of link equity, number of bookmarks, or usage data) is a signal for the quality of the information. Some search engines may eventually use bookmarks to help aid their search relevancy.
Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.

There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.

Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content.

See also:

Del.icio.us - Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
Yahoo! MyWeb - similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
Google Notebook - allows you to note documents
Slashdot - tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
Digg - decentralized news site
Netscape - Digg clone
Google Video - Google's video hosting, tagging, and search site
YouTube - popular decentralized video site
Boolean Search
Many search engines allow you to perform searches that contain mathematical formulas such as AND, OR, or NOT. By default most search engines include AND with your query, requiring results to be relevant for all the words in your query.
Examples:

A Google search for SEO Book will return results for SEO AND Book.
A Google search for "SEO Book" will return results for the phrase SEO Book.
A Google search for SEO Book -Jorge will return results containing SEO AND Book but NOT Jorge.
A Google search for ~SEO -SEO will find results with words related to SEO that do not contain SEO.
Some search engines also allow you to search for other unique patterns or filtering ideas. Examples:

A numerical range: 12...18 would search for numbers between 12 and 18.
Recently updated: seo {frsh=100} would find recently updated documents. MSN search also lets you place more weight on local documents
Related documents: related:www.threadwatch.org would find documents related to Threadwatch.
Filetype: AdWords filetype:PDF would search for PDFs that mentioned AdWords.
Domain Extension: SEO inurl:.edu
IP Address: IP:64.111.97.133
See also:

Search Engine Showdown Features Chart - Greg R.Notess's comparison of features at major search engines.
Brand
The emotional response associated with your company and/or products.
A brand is built through controlling customer expectations and the social interactions between customers. Building a brand is what allows you to move away from commodity based pricing and move toward higher margin value based pricing.

See also:

Rob Frankel - branding expert who provides free branding question answers every Monday. He also offers Frankel's Laws of Big Time Branding™, blogs, and wrote the branding book titled The Revenge of Brand X.
Branded Keywords
Keywords or keyword phrases associated with a brand. Typically branded keywords occur late in the buying cycle, and are some of the highest value and highest converting keywords.
Some affiliate marketing programs prevent affiliates from bidding on the core brand related keywords, while others actively encourage it. Either way can work depending on your business model and marketing savvy, but it is important to ensure there is synergy between internal marketing and affiliate marketing programs.

Breadcrumb Navigation
Navigational technique used to help search engines and website users understand the relationship between pages.
Example breadcrumb navigation:

Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox

Whatever page the user is on is unlinked, but the pages above it within the site structure are linked to, and organized starting with the home page, right on down through the site structure.

Brin, Sergey
Co-founder of Google.
See also:

Wikipedia: Sergey Brin
Broken Link
A hyperlink which is not functioning. A link which does not lead to the desired location.
Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are

a website going offline
linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
moving a page's location
changing a domain's content management system
Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site's links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

Browser
Client used to view the world wide web.
The most popular browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Bush, Vannevar
WWII scientist who wrote a seminal research paper on the concepts of hypertext and a memory extension device titled As We May Think.
Business.com
A well trusted directory of business websites and information. Business.com is also a large pay per click arbitrage player.
See also:

Business.com
Buying Cycle
Before making large purchases consumers typically research what brands and products fit their needs and wants. Keyword based search marketing allows you to reach consumers at any point in the buying cycle. In many markets branded keywords tend to have high search volumes and high conversion rates.
The buying cycle may consist of the following stages

Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a need or want.
Search: after discovering a problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve or words associated with their identity.
Evaluate: may do comparison searches to compare different models, and also search for negative information like product sucks, etc.
Decide: look for information which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon
Purchase: may search for shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may also occur offline
Reevaluate: some people leave feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand they may cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of mouth marketing.
See also:

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? - book by Brian & Jeffrey Eisenberg about the buying cycle and Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing.

C
Cache
Copy of a web page stored by a search engine. When you search the web you are not actively searching the whole web, but are searching files in the search engine index.
Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Calacanis, Jason
Founder of Weblogs, Inc. Also pushed AOL to turn Netscape into a Digg clone.
See also:

Calacanis.com - Jason's blog
Canonical URL
Many content management systems are configured with errors which cause duplicate or exceptionally similar content to get indexed under multiple URLs. Many webmasters use inconsistent link structures throughout their site that cause the exact same content to get indexed under multiple URLs. The canonical version of any URL is the single most authoritative version indexed by major search engines. Search engines typically use PageRank or a similar measure to determine which version of a URL is the canonical URL.
Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.

Examples of URLs which may contain the same information in spite of being at different web addresses:

http://www.seobook.com/
http://www.seobook.com/index.shtml
http://seobook.com/
http://seobook.com/index.shtml
http://www.seobook.com/?tracking-code
Catalog (see Index)

Catch All Listing
A listing used by pay per click search engines to monetize long tail terms that are not yet targeted by marketers. This technique may be valuable if you have very competitive key words, but is not ideal since most major search engines have editorial guidelines that prevent bulk untargeted advertising, and most of the places that allow catch all listings have low traffic quality. Catch all listings may be an attractive idea on theme specific search engines and directories though, as they are already pre qualified clicks.
CGI
Common Gateway Interface - interface software between a web server and other machines or software running on that server. Many cgi programs are used to add interactivity to a web site.
Client
A program, computer, or process which makes information requests to another computer, process, or program.
Cloaking
Displaying different content to search engines and searchers. Depending on the intent of the display discrepancy and the strength of the brand of the person / company cloaking it may be considered reasonable or it may get a site banned from a search engine.
Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is common on many popular websites.

See also:

The Definitive Guide to Cloaking - Dan Kramer's guide to cloaking. I also interviewed Dan here.
KloakIt - cheaply priced cloaking software
Fantomaster - more expensive cloaking software
Cluetrain Manifesto, The
Book about how the web is a marketplace, and how it is different from traditional offline business.
See also:

The Cluetrain Manifesto website - offers the book for free online.
Clustering
In search results the listings from any individual site are typically limited to a certain number and grouped together to make the search results appear neat and organized and to ensure diversity amongst the top ranked results. Clustering can also refer to a technique which allows search engines to group hubs and authorities on a specific topic together to further enhance their value by showing their relationships.
See also

Google Touchgraph - interesting web application that shows the relationship between sites Google returns as being related to a site you enter.
CMS
Content Management System. Tool used to help make it easy to update and add information to a website.
Blog software programs are some of the most popular content management systems currently used on the web. Many content management systems have errors associated with them which make it hard for search engines to index content due to issues such as duplicate content.

Co-citation
In topical authority based search algorithms links which appear near one another on a page may be deemed to be related to one another. In algorithms like latent semantic indexing words which appear near one another often are frequently deemed to be related.
Comments
Many blogs and other content management systems allow readers to leave user feedback.
Leaving enlightening and thoughtful comments on someone else's related website is one way to help get them to notice you.

See also:

blog comment spam - the addition of low value or no value comments to other's websites
Comments Tag
Some web developers also place comments in the source code of their work to help make it easy for people to understand the code.
HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as . They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document.

In the past some SEOs would stuff keywords in comment tags to help increase the page keyword density, but search has evolved beyond that stage, and at this point using comments to stuff keywords into a page adds to your risk profile and presents little ranking upside potential.

Compacted Information
Information which is generally and widely associated with a product. For example, most published books have an ISBN.
As the number of product databases online increases and duplicate content filters are forced to get more aggressive the keys to getting your information indexed are to have a site with enough authority to be considered the most important document on that topic, or to have enough non compacted information (for example, user reviews) on your product level pages to make them be seen as unique documents.

Conceptual Links
Links which search engines attempt to understand beyond just the words in them. Some rather advanced search engines are attempting to find out the concept links versus just matching the words of the text to that specific word set. Some search algorithms may even look at co-citation and words near the link instead of just focusing on anchor text.
Concept Search
A search which attempts to conceptually match results with the query, not necessarily with those words, rather their concept.
For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various types of vertical search results at the top of the search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns by you or other searchers.

Contextual Advertising
Advertising programs which generate relevant advertisements based on the content of a webpage.
See also:

Google AdSense is the most popular contextual advertising program.
Conversion
Many forms of online advertising are easy to track. A conversion is reached when a desired goal is completed.
Most offline ads have generally been much harder to track than online ads. Some marketers use custom phone numbers or coupon codes to tie offline activity to online marketing.

Here are a few common example desired goals

a product sale
completing a lead form
a phone call
capturing an email
filling out a survey
getting a person to pay attention to you
getting feedback
having a site visitor share your website with a friend
having a site visitor link at your site
Bid management, affiliate tracking, and analytics programs make it easy to track conversion sources.

See also:

Google Conversion University - free conversion tracking information
Google Website Optimizer - free multi variable testing product offered by Google.
Copyright
The legal rights to publish and reproduce a particular piece of work.
See also:

Copyright.gov
Cookie
Small data file written to a user's local machine to track them. Cookies are used to help websites customize your user experience and help affiliate program managers track conversions.
CPA
Cost per action. The effectiveness of many other forms of online advertising have their effectiveness measured on a cost per action basis. Many affiliate marketing programs and contextual ads are structured on a cost per action basis. An action may be anything from an ad click, to filling out a lead form, to buying a product.
CPC
Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.
See also:

Google AdWords - Google's pay per click ad program which allows you to buy search and contextual ads.
Google AdSense - Google's contextual ad program.
Microsoft AdCenter - Microsoft's pay per click ad platform.
Yahoo! Search Marketing - Yahoo!'s pay per click ad platform
CPM
Cost per thousand ad impressions.
Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.

Crawl Depth
How deeply a website is crawled and indexed.
Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity to get deeply indexed. Another thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content issues.

Crawl Frequency
How frequently a website is crawled.
Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.

See also:

Google's Matt Cutts video on Google Crawling Patterns
Matt Cutts post Indexing Timeline - mentions sites with unnatural link profiles may not be crawled as frequently or deeply
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is a method for adding styles to web documents.
Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change the design of many pages by editing a single file. See also

W3C: CSS - official guidelines for CSS
CSS Zen Garden - examples of various CSS layouts
Glish.com - examples of various CSS layouts, links to other CSS resources
CTR
Clickthrough rate - the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand.
Cutts, Matt
Google's head of search quality.
See also:

Matt Cutts blog
Interview of Matt Cutts
SEO Videos by Matt Cutts
Cybersquatting
Registering domains related to other trademarks or brands in an attempt to cash in on the value created by said trademark or brand.
D
Dayparting
Turning ad campaigns on or off, changing ad bid price, or budget constraints based on bidding more when your target audience is available and less when they are less likely to be available.
Dead Link
A link which is no longer functional.
Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as a sign of information quality.

Deep Link
A link which points to an internal page within a website.
When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create content based on easy linking opportunities they think up.

Dedicated Server
Server which is limited to serving one website or a small collection of websites owned by a single person.
Dedicated servers tend to be more reliable than shared (or virtual) servers. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

Deep Link Ratio
The ratio of links pointing to internal pages to overall links pointing at a website.
A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

De-Listing
Temporarily or permanently becoming de-indexed from a directory or search engine.
De-indexing may be due to any of the following:

Pages on new websites (or sites with limited link authority relative to their size) may be temporarily de-indexed until the search engine does a deep spidering and re-cache of the web.
During some updates search engines readjust crawl priorities.
You need a significant number of high quality links to get a large website well indexed and keep it well indexed.
Duplicate content filters, inbound and outbound link quality, or other information quality related issues may also relate to re-adjusted crawl priorities.
Pages which have changed location and are not properly redirected, or pages which are down when a search engine tries to crawl them may be temporarily de-indexed.
Search Spam:
If a website tripped an automatic spam filter it may return to the search index anywhere from a few days to a few months after the problem has been fixed.
If a website is editorially removed by a human you may need to contact the search engine directly to request reinclusion.
Del.icio.us
Popular social bookmarking website.
See also:

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us Recently Popular
Demographics
Statistical data or characteristics which define segments of a population.
Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter and AdWords, allow you to target ads at websites or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc.

Denton, Nick
Publisher of Gawker, a popular ring of topical weblogs, which are typically focused on controversy.
See also:

Nick Denton.org - official blog, where Nick often talks about business and his various blogs.
Description
Directories and search engines provide a short description near each listing which aims to add context to the title.
High quality directories typically prefer the description describes what the site is about rather than something that is overtly promotional in nature. Search engines typically

use a description from a trusted directory (such as DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory) for homepages of sites listed in those directories
use the page meta description (especially if it is relevant to the search query and has the words from the search query in it)
attempt to extract a description from the page content which is relevant for the particular search query and ranking page (this is called a snippet)
or some combination of the above
Digg
Social news site where users vote on which stories get the most exposure and become the most popular.
See also:

Digg.com
Directory
A categorized catalog of websites, typically manually organized by topical editorial experts.
Some directories cater to specific niche topics, while others are more comprehensive in nature. Major search engines likely place significant weight on links from DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Smaller and less established general directories likely pull less weight. If a directory does not exercise editorial control over listings search engines will not be likely to trust their links at all.

DMOZ
The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of websites. DMOZ is owned by AOL, and is primarily ran by volunteer editors.
See also:

DMOZ.org
Submitting a Site to the Open Directory Project
DNS
Domain Name Server or Domain Name System. A naming scheme mechanism used to help resolve a domain name / host name to a specific TCP/IP Address.
Domain
Scheme used for logical or location organization of the web. Many people also use the word domain to refer to a specific website.
Doorway Pages
Pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements.
Some webmasters cloak thousands of doorway pages on trusted domains, and rake in a boatload of cash until they are caught and de-listed. If the page would have a unique purpose outside of search then search engines are generally fine with it, but if the page only exists because search engines exist then search engines are more likely to frown on the behavior.

Dreamweaver
Popular web development and editing software offering a what you see is what you get interface.
See also:

Dreamweaver official site
Duplicate Content
Content which is duplicate or near duplicate in nature.
Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content. For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature.

See also:

Duplicate Content Detection - video where Matt Cutts talks about the process of duplicate content detection
Identifying and filtering near-duplicate documents
Search Engine Patents On Duplicated Content and Re-Ranking Methods
Stuntdubl: How to Remedy Duplicate Content
Dynamic Content
Content which changes over time or uses a dynamic language such as PHP to help render the page.
In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use URL rewriting to help make dynamic content look static in nature.

Dynamic Languages
Programming languages such as PHP or ASP which build web pages on the fly upon request.

Unethical SEO Practices are not a part of SEO Business Solutions

2008-05-24T13:23:00.003-06:00

Unfortunately for the website owner, there are many SEO companies in the market that engage in unethical SEO practices. However, SEO Business Solutions is not one of these companies. In the last few days, we have been posting articles on our blog which will actually guide you in selecting your SEO company and have listed some of the unethical practices that some SEO companies engage in. We will continue our discussion with some of the most common unethical practices and abuses.

What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

*owns shadow domains
*puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
*offers to sell keywords in the address bar
*doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
*guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
*operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
*gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
*has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

Or, instead of wasting your time with these unethical SEO companies, you can go the the SEO Business Solutions website, look at what we offer and allow us to get your website where you want it to be on the search results of the major search engines. Only SEO Business Solutions will be open with you and tell you exactly what we will do for you at a very competitive price. Go to our contact us page and ask for a free quote.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization

2008-05-23T18:04:00.003-06:00

SEO Business Solutions is an ethical Search Engine Optimization company. What exactly does this mean? First and foremost, we refuse to engage in any practices that might harm your website, and this most certainly includes any and all SEO practices that will get your site black listed or blackballed. It makes no sense for you to see your website on the first page of the major search engines for a month, and then watch it disappear.
Secondly, we have been in the SEO business long enough to know exactly what it takes to get your website where you want it to be. It takes time, effort and patience. We cannot guarantee you a number one overall in the search engines. We would caution you to check very carefully if any SEO website offers you placement on the first page of a major search engine as #1 overall.
Some SEO companies will guarantee you placement on the first page of search results in Lycos, AlltheWeb and many other search engines which are nearly irrelevant.
The most important search engines are the ones that have captured most of the search market. These search engines are: Google.com, search.Yahoo.com and search.MSN.com. Together they account for over 94% of all searches. Look at the statistics according to Hitwise:
Domain Mar.-08 Feb.-08 Mar.-07
www.google.com 67.25% 66.44% 64.13%
search.yahoo.com 20.29% 20.59% 21.26%
search.msn.com 6.65% 6.95% 9.01%
Add ask.com, and you have accounted for 98.28% of all searches in the USA. What goes does appearing #1 in AllTheWeb do you? In addition, most unethical SEO companies will not even tell you that most of the other search engines are powered by one of the major search engines and almost mirror the results of the major search engines. Therefore, be careful if an SEO company gurantees you a first page position in a search engine such as AOL because AOL is powered by Google and nearly mirrors the results in Google with some variations.
In Conclusion, let SEO Business Solutions optimize your site and place it where you want it to be. We will not try to deceive you or deal unethically with you, and we will work with you every step of the way.

SEO Business Solutions does not use unethical SEO practices

2008-05-22T14:26:00.006-06:00

So, just what are some of those unethical practices?

Network Solutions displays a real talent for tripping itself up with unethical behavior. Sometimes it gets caught and called on the conduct quickly, as happened when it engaged in domain name tasting. Other times, though, it can continue for months before enough people catch on to make a real stink.
Ordinarily, we'd publish a story about Network Solutions on our Web Hosters web site. As a domain name seller and registry, the company goes back to the early days of the web, before the US government bowed to the pressure to allow competition in domain name registration. This move drove down the price of domain names from $35 per year per name to as little as $6 or less.
You can read about one of the ways that Network Solutions unethically tried to gain greater control of the market here. Basically, every time you visited NetSol's web site and performed a domain name search using its Whois tool, the company bought the domain name itself if it wasn't already owned. If you didn't buy the domain name immediately, you would come back later to discover that Network Solutions was the owner of record. You could only buy the domain from NetSol - and the company's prices for domain names were and are significantly higher than many other registrars' prices. NetSol gave the dubious justification that it was trying to protect its customers from domain tasters - but the fact that it was doing so by domain tasting itself escaped no one.
You can read the rest of the story at the link I provided; this article is not about that lovely debacle. It's about a matter that is even closer to the hearts of the SEOs and web site owners: ethical SEO practices. Or more precisely, it's about the unethical SEO practices in which Network Solutions is engaging.
If you haven't received a letter from them yet, this may come as a surprise to you; I only heard about it myself in early March, and Network Solutions has been offering SEO services at least since the middle of last year (and probably longer). In this article, I'm going to look at Network Solution's apparent guarantee, the fine print on the promise, and the ways in which it violates the principles of ethical SEO. By the time I'm finished, you'll be well-armed whether the company makes the offer directly to you, or a client tells you that they've heard "Network Solutions will do the same thing for me that you're promising to do - and for less money."
I can guess what you're thinking: first Sam's Club gets into the SEO business, and now this. Network Solutions' packages look a little different from those Sam's Club offers, however; at the very least, they're more expensive. Here's a bulleted list of their packages and pricing:
• For 10 keywords and no guarantee, you pay $1800.
• For 20 keywords and a guarantee for five listings, you pay $2800.
• For 30 keywords and a guarantee for 10 listings, you pay $3800.
• For 50 keywords and a guarantee for 20 listings, you pay $5800.
So what is this "guarantee" to which I'm alluding? Here is an image taken from Network Solutions' own web site:

If you look just under the orange bar, even with my having to reduce this image, you can clearly see the headline "Top 10 Search Results" and just below it "Get your site on the first page of search engines guaranteed." That's a pretty remarkable guarantee for a relatively low price!
It's also the kind of guarantee to make anyone knowledgeable about SEO rather suspicious. Chris Silver Smith recently blogged about a letter he received from Network Solutions that promised "Guaranteed Top 10 Rankings on Major Search Engines." Here's part of the problem: despite its standing as a registrar, Network Solutions does not have an "in" with any of the major search engines; no SEO does. In fact, NetSol's behavior raises at least two flags on the list of guidelines that Google gives for choosing an SEO: "Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue" and "Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings."
Network Solutions makes certain specific exceptions to its guarantee. It doesn't cover web sites that are all Flash, contain frames/layers or adult content. Web sites with downtime of more than a day void the guarantee; so do web sites that have been altered after NetSol has optimized them or that do not use 301 redirects.
Here's the specific text of the guarantee, taken from Network Solutions' web site: "For optimization packages ("To 10 Search Results service"), Network Solutions guarantees a minimum number of top 10 listings in one or more of 12 search engines within 10 months from completion date...Network Solutions will only submit keywords to search engines in the United States. The search engines included are: AOL, Alltheweb, AltaVista, Ask.com (formerly known as AskJeeves.com), Google, Hotbot, Looksmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo!."
Does anyone want to make any guesses as to what percentage of search traffic Hotbot receives these days? Or AlltheWeb? It can't be very much. In early March, Hitwise reported the percentage of US searches among the leading search engine providers (remember, Network Solutions only submits keywords to search engines in the US). At that time, Google saw a little over 66 percent of this traffic. Yahoo saw close to 21 percent. MSN saw nearly seven percent. Ask was down to four percent. When you add up these figures, you get 98 percent.
What does this mean? By simple math, it means that the rest of the search engine market is wrestling over the remaining two percent of search traffic. So Network Solutions could get you top listings on AlltheWeb, Hotbot, and Lycos, where the link to your web site would see less than two percent of search traffic, and still have fulfilled its "guarantee." Maybe it isn't so unethical after all; that's not exactly much of a guarantee.
There is something else to note about NetSol's guarantee: "This service(s) does not guarantee any sales or traffic to your web site." Additionally, there is no mention in Network Solutions' guarantee of how long your site will stay in the top 10 results. So in theory, the company could take 10 months to get your site listed in the top 10 search results on Lycos (for example) and if the listing stayed there for one month, it would have fulfilled its end of the contract - regardless of whether you received more traffic or conversions from the listing.
Network Solutions explains the process it goes through to optimize a web site. It seems to understand that 10 months is a long time for some people, and notes that "many of our customers see their sites listed within the top 10 results within 3 months." However, it adds that "To accelerate the process, you may want to consider a Link Building Service Package in conjunction with a Top 10 Search Results package." Right up front, it admits that link building is not part of its SEO package.
I don't need to tell anyone who makes their living doing SEO just how vital link building is. You can technically separate SEO into on-page and off-page optimization, and classify link building as part of off-page SEO optimization. Nevertheless, it's surprising that it isn't already a part of a package that guarantees top 10 results. Links play a very important role in many search engines' algorithms (especially Google's!).
Let's take a look at what you DO get. The first step is keyword analysis. Netsol reviews your site and conducts research to develop a list that is relevant to your site, your business, and your industry. The keywords will be terms that are frequently used and specific enough to your web site "that clicks from the search engines will be highly targeted leads." You get to approve the list, and the company will revise its list up to three times to ensure it has focused on the right ones.
In the second step, site analysis, NetSol looks at your site's code, text, and links to make sure they are up to snuff. These are important checks that any site owner and/or SEO should perform regularly in any case. NetSol checks for broken links, problems with your site's server status, and may make minor adjustments to your home page's code to make it easier for the search engines to crawl your site's content.
In the third step, content development, NetSol's professional writers/editors create additional content for your site based on the final list of keywords from step one. The content is then integrated into your optimized pages. Again, there's nothing here that's particularly controversial, though one wonders how much content can be bought - and of what quality - for the prices listed on the packages. Some really good writers will charge as much as $300 or more for an article of a decent length. Additionally, search engines love new content; will Network Solutions spread out the new content over the entire period so the spiders will keep coming back?
For the fourth step, search engine submission and reporting, Network Solutions will submit your domain name to major search engines and directories. I have to wonder why NetSol is doing this, since it hasn't been a meaningful practice for quite some time (with the possible exception of the DMOZ directory). I could see building a site map, which is one of the things NetSol says it does in this step, but submission? It's interesting to note here that the company says in its guarantee that its services for this package "do not include the paid submission fees that some engines charge for inclusion...Additional fees may apply for changes, modifications, updates, and optimization alterations that exceed the scope of these optimization services."
The final step, reporting, provides the customer with "submission reports, ranking reports, and additional tips for keeping your site optimized for search engines." You receive a final report when your site reaches the guaranteed number of listings (which could be as early as three months). As previously noted, though, the packages don't include any kind of maintenance; in fact, Network Solutions engages in a bit of up-selling at this point in its explanation of what it does by suggesting a maintenance package to "help extend the life of your site's high rankings."
So is this a scam, or is it worth the money? The package arrangements come with enough loopholes to make one wonder. It seems to be slightly less of a scam than the typical SEO spam email, simply because Network Solutions is relatively up front about what it is and isn't offering. But how many of their prospective customers are going to read the fine print? I mean that metaphorically, by the way; when I clicked through to the links the company provided to its guarantee and explanations of what it did for the packages, the font was all in a normal size.
Even so, the SEO deals offered by Network Solutions seem like the kind of thing you'd see from someone trying to take advantage of not-too-knowledgeable customers. As with any service, if you're thinking of signing up for what they offer, I'd suggest you check with other customers who bought the same package and find out what their experience was like. Good luck!

DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by SEO Business Solutions. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. Thanks to SEOChat for a wonderful and informative article.

Take a look at SEO Business Solutions. Our prices are competitive and we do not engage in decietful or unethical practices. We deliver. Our guarantee is that if you follow all of our tips on the Search Engine Optimization of your site, you will soon see your site moving up in the search results until it ends up on the first page of the major search engines. We can not guarantee you a number one ranking and would tell you again to be wary of any SEO service guaranteeing you a number one ranking on any search engine, much less Google, Yahoo and MSN, who account for over 90% of all the searches in the Unites States.

Tricking a search engine is not an ethical practice

2008-05-20T14:49:00.005-06:00

Tricking a search engine generally involves showing the searchbot a different web page from the one shown to the visitor. Unfortunately, searchbots are not that sophisticated when it comes to what they will or will not read on a web page. However, as search engines have grown over the years, they've gotten a lot better at recognizing when tricks are being used. Getting caught can result in a much lower ranking or an all-out ban from the search engine. Either way, it's important to know what techniques are considered deception so that, if anything, you'll know what to avoid.
Some of the most ubiquitous techniques involve manipulating keywords in some way. Keyword stacking (or stuffing), in which the same words or phrases are repeated over and over, or using keywords that are unrelated to your site are fairly obvious methods. Granted, these are very old and barbaric techniques, but they have proven to be effective in the past. For example, hiding keywords is usually done by making the text the same color as the background and using a very small font size. You can also use hidden fields, hidden layers (use a style sheet to put a text layer under or outside of the visible layer), or simply place text inside of a "no frames tag." You can often check for hidden text by either checking the source code or clicking the top of the page and dragging to the bottom, highlighting everything in between.
Hiding links became popular because search engines rely so heavily on links to determine a site's purpose. You can easily make a link look exactly like the rest of the text on a page, or at least the text surrounding it. And any piece of text can be turned into a link, even punctuation marks. Basically, links can be hidden in the same way as ordinary text.
Some people have been known to make duplicate pages. This is where they make copies of their own keyword-rich pages and add them to their site or to a site with a different URL. The purpose of this is to get more than one top entry on a search results page (some search engines display more than one page from a site). However, search engines have tools to help find duplicate pages, so people have turned to slightly modifying the page before using it again. One of the more unethical variations of duplication is called page jacking, in which people steal pages from other sites because they have performed well.
However, all of these practices are unethical and can lead to your site being banned from the search engines. Try SEO Business Solutions. Our practices are search engine friendly and will lead to real and permanent results in the searches regarding your chosen keywords.

Creating SEO-friendly content

2008-05-17T11:35:00.002-06:00

Creating SEO-friendly content is by no means an easy task. Today’s Internet is chock-full of spectacular visuals, offering everything from streaming video to big, glossy-looking pictures. But take away all those special fonts and brightly-colored links and do away with the embedded noises and flashing banner ads, and you’re left with just the backbone of the Internet, the one thing which holds it all together: plain, simple content. Creating SEO-friendly content is a hassle, an ongoing process, a chore…and the only way to make your pages popular. Get rid of the hassle and let SEO Business Solutions create your content and optimize your website for the best ranking possible in the major search engines.

The necessity of optimization

2008-04-20T17:58:00.003-06:00

Why is SEO Business Solutions necessary for your website?

The Internet is a hub for commerce and globalization. People use the Internet to look for companies, products and services. How do they search? They use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. because they are the best way to find the information they are looking for online. Millions of people use search engines everyday to find what they want and need. A search engine is the easiest way to gather information from any part of the world. There is no doubt search engines have become a necessary tool for most of the people.
If you are selling a product and you want to reach the largest amount of people in the world, what should you do? Well, you can use standard methods such as advertising in the media. However, the cost of advertising on TV, the radio or in major newspapers has become prohibitive. In addition, these forms of media will certainly not reach the largest amount of people.
So, the question begs, what should you do? Many people choose to build a website. However, most people don’t realize that you need to advertise your website in order to generate traffic. There is a well understood formula on the Internet. Website traffic = sales. You can predict the amount of business a website will do by the amount of traffic it generates.
That’s where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes in. You can equate optimizing your website for the major search engines to having a store front on a dead end street with no parking or in a major mall. One will get almost no foot traffic and the other will get plenty of foot traffic.
If you are not in the first two pages of the major search engines, you are on a dead end street, with no parking in a high crime area. No one is going to come to your store. However, if you are in the first two pages, now you are in that great new mall just outside of town, with excellent parking, security and lots of customers to cater to, but it doesn’t end there.
It is a known industry fact that most people only look at the first two pages of a search for the results. Another industry fact is that many people don’t even go to the second page; they choose to look at the results from the first page thinking that if a site is on the first page, it is because the product is good. It is a psychological reaction.
A good SEO company understands not only the way a search engine operates, but also the psychology of searches. A company like SEO Business Solutions has spent countless hours studying search patterns, not just keywords. Keywords are what a person uses for a search. But it is also important to understand the patterns. Does a person use on keyword when he/she first searches, or are combinations used? What keyword combinations are used (i.e. two-word, three-word keyword combinations, etc.)?
There are many factors which will help optimize and position your site. If you want to use trial and error you can. It generally takes an SEO company 120-150 man hours to optimize and position a site. Can you afford to spend 40 hours a week for the next four weeks optimizing and positioning your site? If you have the time, then by all means, go ahead and optimize and position it. However, keep in mind that you first have to learn to SEO and most technicians at SEO Business Solutions receive training during a period of 6 months to learn how to do it correctly. Well, we’re talking about serious studies with lots of reading material involved.
In the meantime, while you are doing all of that SEO work, who is taking care of your business?
That’s where a company like SEO Business Solutions comes in. We already have the knowledge and wherewithal to get your site where you want it to be. Go ahead and contact us. Website traffic = sales. Good SEO = placement in the first page of the major search engines. Since most people view only the results on the first page, then Good SEO = placement on the first pages = website traffic = sales. The logical end to the sequence is an increase in sales for your product on the Internet.

Conflict of Interest ?

2008-04-19T13:45:00.003-06:00

Recently, an article appeared in the press that said Ask Jeeves and Lycos would each offer SEO (defined) services. After the piece appeared, Ask Jeeves said its only doing SEM because of a relatively small relationship it inherited when it acquired Interactive Search Holdings. Nevertheless, the article spurred some interesting and important discussion in the industry. Some search engine optimizers feel a search engine company offering optimization services is a clear conflict of interest. Others believe it’s the natural evolution of search engine monetization.

Search Engine Motives

But what are the search engines motives? Perhaps search engines feel they has something to gain by enticing potential customers with the fact its an actual search engine doing SEO, including on its own sites. The gain must outweigh the perceived loss of credibility with search engine marketers (SEMs).

In addition, the general public might not realize Lycos doesnt use its own spider-based search engine for its search results. (It currently uses Inktomi.)

Maybe offering SEO services is a desperate attempt to monetize search property for short-term value the engines can show shareholders. Is this the start of a trend?

Strained Relationship Between Search Engines and SEOs

A level of paranoia has always existed between SEO firms and search companies. SEO firms get light praise at best from search engines. SEO firms were largely responsible for demonstrating search engines monetization value. Now, however, they feel theyre being treated like an increasingly unnecessary middleman, one that can be disposed of once search engines have learned enough of the trade.

A public company can face extreme financial pressures. Its expected to always grow, which means having to be more competitive. This can lead to switching from a collaborative relationship with others (where revenues are shared) to a strained competitive relationship (where former partners are eliminated). Being one of the smaller search engines can place more pressure on a company to draw additional revenues.

Many search engine software engineers distrust most SEO firms. Then again, most SEO firms distrust other SEO firms. Search marketing has become an increasingly high-demand industry with a rather negative reputation. Ethical SEO companies appear to be the exception rather than the rule. (By ethical we mean those who actively try to give search engines relevant, valuable content and follow the terms and guidelines set forth by the search engines.)

Unfair Advantage or False Impression?

Working at a search engine company doesn’t impart you with any natural gifts for SEO. In fact, many SEO professionals seem to be quite amused at this service offering. They know how to optimize better than the search engine staff. Many search engine companies have to hire outside SEO professionals to help them optimize their own sites.

Having access to your own search engines algorithms (which might be construed as a huge breach of integrity) doesn’t automatically make you an SEO expert. That only comes with years of actual experience in optimizing sites.

Search engine staff might have access to search data, but they don’t always have access to data from Web analytics software, usability tests, focus groups, and sales. Do search engine employees understand site design, information architecture and making a site search engine friendly without compromising its user-friendliness and ability to convert visitors into buyers?

In this situation, the engines are “newbies”, which is where SEO Business Solutions comes in. SEO Business Solutions has been at the vanguard of search engine optimization since the term was coined. That’s years and years of experience in search engine optimization. While the search engine companies were trying to understand optimization, SEO Business Solutions was already optimizing.

We have tried to establish a working relationship with the search engine companies. Rather than trying to cheat our way to the top, we discovered techniques which are very search engine friendly and slowly but surely get websites to the very first page. It is a known industry fact that most searches don’t go beyond the first two pages, and most don’t go past the first page. The payoff for being on the first page of a search is incalculable in sales and prestige.

Do you want your site to be relevant? Do you want your site to be found in the search engines? Are you tired of seeing your competitors rank much higher than you in the search results? Do you want an increase in website traffic? How about an increase in sales? If answered yes to any of these questions, then it’s time for you to optimize your site. Only SEO Business Solutions will get your site positioned where you want it to be in an ethical and search engine friendly way.

Conflict of Interest

This new search engine service can be problematic ethically. One reason natural or spidered search results are so popular is they level the playing field. Small and medium-sized businesses can compete with larger companies.

Just because a large company has the budget to purchase loads of pay-per-click (PPC) ads doesn’t mean its site contains the most relevant information people are searching for. Relevancy applies to all types of businesses: small and large, profit and nonprofit, commercial and noncommercial. End users ultimately decide if a small company contains more relevant content than a large company through (ethical) link development.

Once search engines start offering paid natural search results, many SEO firms feel the search engine index becomes tainted. Money takes priority over relevancy. It’s OK with ads because ads are clearly labeled. But paid relevancy isn’t OK with spidered search results.

Paid inclusion has always been a hotly debated topic. Yahoo claims participating in its Site Match program doesn’t boost positioning, but some prominent SEMs don’t believe it. (View the Site Match submission page and Content Guidelines.)

Yahoo currently doesn’t openly disclose which sites participate in its paid inclusion programs. Would search engines label the search results that have been optimized by their SEO staffs?

Conclusion

We understand search engines need to make money and continually provide relevant results. We have no problem with paid inclusion programs, because they allow sites with problematic URLs (such as Session IDs) to be indexed without having to undergo costly redesigns.

However, SEO Business Solutions has decided to remain neutral on whether there is an inherent conflict of interest. We will let the industry be the judge as matters develop on SEM and SEO done by search engine companies and there is more empirical evidence to weigh.

SEO Business Solutions and Google

2008-04-01T16:26:00.002-06:00

Here are some tips from Google on choosing an SEO Company
Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue. Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. Be careful if a company won't clearly explain what they intend to do. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google.
At SEO Business Solutions, we understand Google. We know how search engines work. We will not say that we understand them entirely because only they know their algorithms, but we know what works. We have tried and proven methods which garner results. We will not guarantee you a number one position on any page. But we can guarantee a first page position. If you allow us to work with you and you follow our advice or allow us to position your site, then you will see your site where you want it to be and increase your website traffic and your sales.

2008-04-01T16:23:00.002-06:00

Experience has taught us that working with the search engines, rather than trying to trick the search engines is the best approach to Search Engine Optimization. The search engines have a job to do, which is to provide search results that are relevant to what the users type into their search pages. Our job as an Search Engine Optimization company is to help the search engines find that relevant content on your website. Our goal as a Professional SEO Company is to provide you with great service at an affordable price. The only SEO services we provide are those with a proven track record.
SEO Business Solutions believe in results which last, not results which will quickly move you up in the search engines and just as quickly get you banned and/or blackballed. Visit our home page, read about us and the ask us for a free quote. You will not be disappointed.

Why choose www.SEOBusinessSolutions.com?

2008-03-18T16:44:00.001-06:00

Search optimization is a hyper-competitive endeavor that requires intense focus and a thorough, up-to-date understanding of how the search engine algorithms and robots operate. The staff at SEOBusinessSolutions.com has been in the search engine marketing industry for over a decade and our tactics continuously evolve to meet the needs of our clients. In the uncertain world of search engine optimization, our step-by-step and very straight forward approach has consistently delivered results. We will not do anything to get your site blackballed or banned from the search engines. There are some SEO companies which are not too scrupulous in their methodology and will do anything to get you positioned. The problem is that doing “anything” most certainly means using practices which are not search engine friendly; said practices will end up hurting in the process.
There are certainly quick fix methods to search engine optimization. However, we have been in the search engine optimization business long enough to know what works and what doesn’t, what is scrupulous and what isn’t and what will get you banned and what won’t. With SEO Business Solutions at the helm of your search engine optimization, you will see your site slowly but surely move up in the search engine results. We will steer you clear of all of the pitfalls which will ensnare you and most assuredly get you banned.
There is a great plus if you use Search Engine Optimization. Most optimization companies charge thousands of dollars per month to position your company. In the end, you will spend thousands of dollars for nothing because you will end up right back where you started from. Most SEO companies will charge you $50 to $500 per hour. However, we have based our technical search engine positioning staff in Costa Rica. Since doing this, we have lowered our operating costs and can now charge anywhere from $25 to $50 per hour. When you take into account that keeping your site positioned takes anywhere from 10 to 20 hours per month, it can really add up in a hurry if you are spending the industry average of $179 per hour instead of the SEO Business Solutions average of $37.50 per hour.
Every “Johnny-come-lately” can claim to be the best Internet marketing firm around, but the real proof is in the results. SEOBusinessSolutions.com has true success stories from real-world clients to show you what you can expect in terms of return on investment (ROI). We understand that top rankings are important for your business, but even more important is that those top search rankings are bringing in targeted traffic that converts to sales.
If you’re ready to find out how we can improve your website’s search engine ranking, go to our Contact Us page and ask for a free site analysis and quote. You won’t be disappointed and the results will most certainly be more than you expected.

Content for Search Engine Optimization

2008-02-28T13:21:00.000-06:00

Content is a huge part of website development, but what is it? Lest you think I’ve gone and flipped my lid, let’s be honest: The definition and nature of content has changed since 1999. To hear some people talk about it, you’d think content was nothing more than words on a web page. But there’s more to it than that.
Essentially, content is anything that contributes to the essence of your website. By essence I mean its meta-qualities - not meta as in metatags, though it does include your tags - but meta as in over and above merely what you see on the page. There are three types of content within this definition:
On-page content
Off-page content
“Behind the curtain” content
Your on-page content is anything that is visible to the human eye on each web page of your website. That includes text, photos, videos, graphics, your template or website design, etc. Those are your visible elements. Off-page content refers to anything off site that contributes to the essence of your website. That includes inbound links, blog content on off site blogs that you own and link back to your site, articles, social networking content, wiki entries, directory submissions, etc. I include these elements in my working definition of content because that’s what they are - in a word, they are content and they work for you.
“Behind the curtain” content is a little bit more mystical. It includes meta tags, of course, but it’s more than just meta tags. It also includes link attributes, site navigation paradigms, XML pages for your RSS feeds, sitemaps, and anything that contributes to user value but cannot be construed as either on-page or off-page content. In other words, your “behind the curtain” elements are primarily content fed to search engine spiders, but that also provide your users with some benefit. It is essentially, code.
Now what is your content supposed to do? Ultimately, your content - all of your content - has one job: To lead your site visitor to implement some action. That action could be a sale, a newsletter sign up, post a comment, something. Whatever it is, there needs to be a call to action. But not every piece of content requires a call to action. Some content - called pre-sell content - should actually be used to channel your site visitor to the place where you want them to respond to your call to action. You are actually canalizing them into responding to you.
So when you develop your content - whether it be off site link building content, visible on site web page elements like graphics and page text, or meta-content - each piece must contribute to the whole. Every piece of content must do its job or be cut from the team. The bottom line is, content teamwork is the most important thing. Every individual piece must work for the good of the team either by closing the sale, delivering traffic, or contributing to your search engine positioning. If every piece of your content is working for the good of all, then your content is selling. If not, then you need to rethink your content.

Search Engine Optimization

2008-02-14T11:22:00.000-06:00

SEO, to many people these three letters sound like a secret code. But, to Internet marketers these three little letters are priceless. SEO stands for search engine optimization. The process is one that is absolutely necessary for anyone trying to market their website and gain traffic.
SEO helps to make a site and its content highly relevant for search engines and searchers. It aids the searcher in finding your site by putting out specific keywords and phrases for your site into the search engines so that they can be found. Successful search engine optimization can help a site to gain high rankings in the search engines, allowing it to be found more easily.
Here are a few ways to easily search engine optimize your website:
1. Make sure the first 100 words of your website are full of keywords that you want people to be able to search and find your site using.
2. Be sure to use your top keywords in any links back to your site. Have those who link to your site use those top words when linking to you.
3. Target one keyword per page. You can't expect to try to cram every keyword on every page. It is much more useful to do one per page where once visitors are at your site they can more easily find the info that they need.
4. Use your top keyword in your header. Either as your title of your site or as a tagline works well.
5. Use top keywords in both the top and bottom sections of your web copy with a few keywords sprinkled in the middle as well. Keyword rich copy is very valuable for search engine optimization.
6. It is important also that when you do obtain links back to your site, try to only have sites which link back to you with the same information on their site that you are trying to target. It does not help to have a site about baby food with a link back to your site about how to sell computers.
7. Continue to have unique content by adding fresh pages to your site on a regular basis. Search engines love fresh content not "Duplicate Content"! This will increase your chances of having people find your site on a consistent basis.
These are just a few tips which should help to properly search engine optimize your website. Search engine optimization sounds scary at first but is really not so difficult once you get started and learn the terms and how to use them and put them into place on your website.

Or let SEO Business Solutions do the work for you. Visit us and find out what we can do for you.

SEO Business Solutions

2008-01-29T17:10:00.000-06:00

Don't be fooled by pretenders and by search engine optimization sites that promise you the moon and can't even deliver cheese. Only SEO Business Solutions will get your site positioned where you want it to be on the search engines. We have verifiable results. Try us! We will not disappoint you.

SEO Mistakes

2008-01-25T16:22:00.000-06:00

Everyone learning a new skill makes mistakes. In some fields, the necessary skills are tricky enough to keep up with that even old hands will make mistakes. Search engine optimization is no exception to this rule. Avoiding the most obvious mistakes can help put you ahead of the game. SEO Business Solutions will help you to avoid making those mistakes and to avoid the pitfalls that can possibly get you banned from the search engines. Let us help you get your site where you want it be on the major search engines.

Search Engine Optimization

2008-01-22T11:32:00.000-06:00

SEO Business Solutions is a California-based SEO specialist. The objective of our search engine optimization programs is to secure top organic search engine rankings against keyword search terms within the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Based on our extensive experience, SEO Business Solutions has identified some key components to a successful approach to Search Engine Optimization. When taken together, the following strategies will go a long way toward placing your site where you want it to be in the major search engines.

Keyword Research. Selection and Placement within the website content
Correct use of Meta Tags
Quality Page Content Relevant to the Keywords.
Quality Website Design
Topic Related Inbound Links (IBLs)
Proper Marketing Strategy
Website Design or Redesign
Placement on the Search Engines and Internet Directories
Website Maintenance

SEO Business Solutions

2008-01-21T12:38:00.000-06:00

At SEO Business Solutions, we are the only verifiable solution for your search engine ranking needs. From website optimization, editing, placement, design, redesign, maintenance and marketing, you cannot make a better choice. We will do it all for you at the most comfortable prices in the market.

What is SEO

2008-01-07T09:42:00.000-06:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.

The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers", a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

If you are looking to have your site optimized, visit our page and let us give you a free site analysis.

Visit SEO Business Solutions

SEO Business Solutions is expanding

2008-01-04T12:12:00.000-06:00

Due to our growth, especially in the international markets, we have decided to expand and add offices in Latin America, Europe and Asia. Visit the SEOBusinesssolutions website and see the job offers available in your area.

Happy Holidays

2008-01-02T12:49:00.000-06:00

From SEO Business Solutions to you:

Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year.

We are back and in full effect and hope that the information provided on this blog will help you make the proper decision in the optimization of your website.

Snippets

2007-11-27T20:51:00.000-06:00

The Snippet

The snippet is where the webmaster has the most control of what is displayed about his or her site. Google often pulls the snippet text directly from the meta description tags, and Cutts recommends experimenting with the text to see what yields the best results for individual sites.

Longer snippets, as we've noted before, help searchers with informational queries, and may also be of benefit for SEO reasons. Shorter ones work better for navigational queries.

Google may also pull snippets from other places as well, depending on the query or situation. If no description is available, Cutts says Google may grab information from the Open Directory Project (dmoz) or other directories. Or, to find the context of a query, Google may look to beyond meta description tags to increase relevance.

SEO Business Solutions. Search engine optimization for your business needs.

SEO Ethics

2007-11-25T12:50:00.000-06:00

Does SEO look like voodoo magic to you?

The search engines are trying to keep a level playing field and rank sites based on merit. Unfortunately the ranking process is driven by a very complex set of rules executed by “machines”, known as algorithms. The job of a reputable SEO company is to figure out those elusive search engine ranking rules and translate them into actionable optimization and link building techniques.
This is where things get tricky. Some SEO companies may take risks getting your site ranked in the top 10, but we don't. We are one of the handful of 100% white hat SEO companies in the world. We follow the Google webmaster guidelines, which ensures the work we do on and off your site will not get you into trouble with the engines.

You need our ethical search engine optimization services that work across many market segments and business models. You need a search engine optimization company like SEO Business Solutions to start the enlightenment process.

SEO Tools

2007-11-25T12:47:00.000-06:00

Can SEO software tools help you get higher ranking?

How can some of your competitors' web pages on Google, Yahoo and MSN out rank you site, yet there are no visible differences in the content between your web pages and theirs?

Luckily, a little reverse engineering with the right search engine optimization tool can enable you to read your competitors' web pages like an open book.

SEO software reviews are raving about the in depth keyword and link analysis features not found in any other seo tools on the Internet. SEO Business Solutions' free SEO tools will uncover every conceivable Google, Yahoo and MSN ranking factor for you to incorporate into your own site including backlink analysis.

SEO Business Solutions

2007-11-22T10:33:00.000-06:00

Search engine optimization is continuous and complicated practice; it requires dynamic and aggressive approach for better performance. In today’s competitive market, you need organization that provides you extreme attention to the basic groundwork of search engine optimization in order to achieve and exist in the top position of search engines.

At SEO Business Solutions, we understand the complexities of search engine optimization and the effect search engine placement can give your company’s marketing ROI. We offer you distinguished results using effective search engine optimization practice designed to meet your specifications and exceed your marketing goals.

Our complete Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization services typically generates new targeted traffic for companies that rely on their website for exposure, sales, and trade leads. So you get immediate return on investment. We deliver detail reporting on how our search engine optimization process will improve your ROI, and also we guide you regarding the latest Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization initiatives and protocols.

Search Engine Optimization takes time

2007-11-14T12:24:00.000-06:00

The Small Business Technology Blog has a good, short article on Three Myths about Search Engine Optimization. The bottom line is this: be wary. The best Search Engine Optimization happens as a result of good content and knowledge about what gets sites to the top.
Good SEO takes time, and it can be done. But no one can promise that you'll be #1. Those that do often find their clients' sites banned from the Search Engine indexes (meaning death for an internet company).
We prefer to do SEO organically. We'll make sure your site is visible, that it has the right words and content, and then teach you how to create the content correctly. Then we can discuss strategies to obtain inbound links. It make take a bit longer, but the results are far more sustainable, and you will certainly not be banned by Google.
That's why you should let SEO Business Solutions optimize your site for high rankings. Our methods are search engine friendly so that your site can gain in the rankings but avoid the pitfalls that are encountered with other SEO companies. Our methods may take longer, but they are tried and true and will get your site where you need it to be. Make the right choice. Make SEO Business Solutions your company for search engine optimization.

Tired of seeing your site ranked low?

2007-11-12T18:41:00.000-06:00

If you are tired of your low rankings in the major search engines, then you should give SEO Business Solutions a try. We will get you ranked where you want to be ranked.

SEO Business Solutions

2007-11-09T16:06:00.000-06:00

Only SEO Business Solutions has a proven track record of placing companies in the first page of the major search engines for any given keyword. SEO is a time consuming task, and not many people have the time it takes to optimize their site for all the major search engines.
Therefore, if you are sick and tired of doing a search for the products that you sell and finding only your competitors but you lack the time to optimize your own website, let SEO Business Solutions save you that most precious of all commodities....time!
We will do a free evaluation of your website and send you a report with the things that you need to to in order to optimize your site. If you do not have 3 or 4 hours per day free time to spend on your website optimizing it for the next 3 to 6 months, then let SEO Business Solutions do the work for you.
You will rise above your competitors in the rankings, and you will see your site visitors and sales increase accordingly. There is no doubt that more traffic on your website means an increase in sales. Visit our website www.seobusinesssolutions.com and ask for a free ranking and optimization report. That's where it all begins, and you are on your way to having a spider friendly site which will rank highly in all of the major search engines.

References

2007-10-15T10:22:00.001-06:00

References

^ Top Ten Web Site Optimization Forums. about.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-11.
^ Boston Globe: "Finding keys to the Web," Sept. 23, 2007[1]
^ Playing the Search-Engine Game. wsj.com (June 16, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-09-11.
^ When Sales Hit a Wall. inc.com (August 2004). Retrieved on 2007-09-11.
^ Writing and Ranking for the Search Engines. clickz.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-11.
^ Duplicate Content Penalty Myth. searchengineland.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-11.
^ Boston Globe: "Finding keys to the Web," Sept. 23, 2007[2]
^ Boston Globe: "Finding keys to the Web," Sept. 23, 2007[3]
^ Boston Globe: "Finding keys to the Web," Sept. 23, 2007[4]

History of Search Engine Optimization

2007-10-15T10:19:00.000-06:00

History

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.^[1] The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase "search engine optimization" was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.^[2]

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta-tags provided a guide to each page's content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, because some webmasters abused meta tags by including irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for their website and to increase their ad revenue. Cost per thousand impressions was at the time the common means of monetizing content websites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta data in meta tags caused pages to rank for irrelevant searches, and fail to rank for relevant searches.^[3] Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.^[4]

By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

While graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed "backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.^[5] PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.^[6] Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered, as well as on-page factors, to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.^[7]

To reduce the impact of link schemes, as of 2007, search engines consider a wide range of undisclosed factors for their ranking algorithms. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.^[8] The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.^[9]^[10] SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

SEO....what is it?

2007-10-15T10:18:00.001-06:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as Black Hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove their listings.

Have you ever wondered what Spanish is?

2007-09-27T16:43:00.000-06:00

WHAT IS SPANISH?

Spanish or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language originally from the northern area of Spain. It is the official language of Spain, most Latin American countries, and the official language of Equatorial Guinea, in Africa. In total, twenty-five nations and territories use Spanish as their primary language. It is one of six official languages of the United Nations.

Spanish originated as a dialect of Latin along the remote cross road strips among the Cantabria, Burgos, Soria and La Rioja provinces of Northern Spain. From there, its use gradually spread inside the Kingdom of Castile, where it evolved and eventually became the principal language of the government and trade. It was later taken to the Americas and other parts of the world in the last five centuries by Spanish explorers and colonists. The language is spoken by between 322 and 400 million people natively, making Spanish the most spoken Romance language and possibly the second most spoken language by number of native speakers. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 500 million, likely making it the fourth most spoken language by total number of speakers. Spanish is also considered to be among the fastest growing languages in the globe at the native level, largely due to higher than average birth rates in much of Latin America.

The language is spoken most extensively in the Americas, Spain and in Africa and Asia Pacific. It is also the second most widely spoken language in the United States^] and by far the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and Universities. Due to many linguistic similarities and close territorial ties, Spanish is also a very popular second langauge in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, and France where these countries together form a considerable proportion of the langauges non-native or secondary speakers.

Naming and origin

Spaniards tend to call this language español (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages of foreign states, such as French and English, but call it castellano (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, as opposed to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. the other Spanish languages). Article III reads as follows:

El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. (…) Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas…

Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. (…) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in their respective Autonomous Communities…

The name castellano is however widely used for the language as a whole in Latin America. Some Spanish speakers consider castellano a generic term with no political or ideological links, much as "Spanish" is in English. Often Latin Americans use it to differentiate their own variety of Spanish as opposed to the variety of Spanish spoken in Spain, or vice-versa, to refer to that variety of Spanish which is considered as standard in this one.

Classification and related languages

Castilian Spanish has closest affinity to the other West Iberian Romance languages: Asturian (asturianu), Galician (galego), Ladino (dzhudezmo/spanyol/kasteyano), and Portuguese (português), as well as, in some ways, to Aragonese (aragonés) and Catalan (català).

Catalan, an East Iberian language which exhibits many Gallo-Romance traits, is more similar to the neighbouring Occitan language (occitan) than Spanish and Portuguese are to each other. In fact, it wasn't until the earliest years of the 20th century that Catalan was considered a variant of the Occitan language. Spanish and Portuguese share similar grammars and a majority of vocabulary as well as a common history of Arabic influence while a great part of the peninsula was under Islamic rule (both languages expanded over Islamic territories). Their lexical similarity has been estimated as 89%.^[19] See Differences between Spanish and Portuguese, for further information.

Ladino

Ladino, which is essentially medieval Castilian and closer to modern Spanish than any other language, is spoken by many descendants of the Spanish Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15th century. In many ways it is not a separate language but a parallel dialect of Castilian. Ladino lacks Native American vocabulary which was influential during the Spanish colonial period, and it retains many archaic features which have since been lost in standard Castilian. It does, however, contain other vocabulary which is not found in standard Castilian, including vocabulary from Hebrew as well as Turkish and other languages spoken wherever the Sephardim settled.

Vocabulary comparison

Spanish and Italian share a very similar phonological system and do not differ very much in grammar. At present, the lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 82%.As a result, Spanish and Italian are mutually intelligible to various degrees. Mutual intelligibility with French and Romanian is lower (lexical similarity is respectively 75% and 71%) and for French "understanding" of Spanish from French speakers (with no knowledge of the language) falls at an estimated 45% - as much as English. The common features of the writing systems of the Romance languages allow for a greater amount of interlingual reading comprehension than oral communication would.

Characterization

One defining characteristic of Spanish was the diphthongization of the Latin short vowels e and o into ie and ue, respectively, when they were stressed. Similar sound changes can be found in other Romance languages, but in Spanish they were particularly significant. Some examples:

Lat. petra > Sp. piedra, It. pietra, Fr. pierre, Port./Gal. pedra "stone".
Lat. moritur > Sp. muere, It. muore, Fr. meurt / muert, Rom. moare, Port./Gal. morre "he dies".

More peculiar to early Spanish (as in the Gascon dialect of Occitan, and possibly due to a Basque substratum) was the mutation of Latin initial f- into h- whenever it was followed by a vowel which did not diphthongate. Compare for instance:

Lat. filium > It. figlio, Port. filho, Fr. fils, Occitan filh (but Gascon hilh) Sp. hijo (but Ladino fijo);
late Lat. *fabulare > Lad. favlar, Port. falar, Sp. hablar;
but Lat. focum > It. fuoco, Port. fogo, Sp./Lad. fuego.

Some consonant clusters of Latin also produced characteristically different results in these languages, for example:

Lat. clamare, acc. flammam, plenum > Lad. lyamar, flama, pleno; Sp. llamar, llama, lleno. However, in Spanish there are also the forms clamar, flama, pleno; Port. chamar, chama, cheio.
Lat. acc. octo, noctem, multum > Lad. ocho, noche, muncho; Sp. ocho, noche, mucho; Port. oito, noite, muito.

History

The Spanish language developed from Vulgar Latin, with influences from Basque, and to some minor extent Celtiberian and Arabic, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, between Biscay and current Cantabria's corners, partly as strongly innovative and differing variant from its nearest cousin, Leonese speech, with a higher degree of Basque influence (see Iberian Romance languages). Typical features of Spanish diachronical phonology include lenition (Latin vita, Spanish vida), palatalization (Latin annum, Spanish año, and Latin anellum, Spanish anillo) and diphthongation (stem-changing) of short e and o from Vulgar Latin (Latin terra, Spanish tierra; Latin novus, Spanish nuevo). Similar phenomena can be found in other Romance languages as well.

During the Reconquista, this northern dialect from Cantabria was carried south, and indeed is still a minority language in the northern coastal regions of Morocco.

The first Latin to Spanish grammar (Gramática de la Lengua Castellana) was written in Salamanca, Spain, in 1492 by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. When Isabel de Castilla was presented with the book, she asked, "What do I want a work like this for, if I already know the language?," to which he replied, "Your highness, the language is the instrument of the Empire." ^[^{citation needed}^]

From the 16th century onwards, the language was brought to the Americas and Spanish East Indies by Spanish colonization. Also in this epoch, Spanish became the main language of Politics and Art across the major part of Europe. In the 18th century, French took its place.

In the 20th century, Spanish was introduced in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara and parts of the United States, such as Spanish Harlem in New York City, that had not been part of the Spanish Empire.

Geographic distribution

Spanish is one of the official languages of the Organization of American States, the United Nations, the Union of South American Nations, and the European Union.

The Americas

The vast majority of the world's Spanish speakers are located in the Americas. Of those countries with the largest numbers of Spanish speakers, only Spain is situated outside of the Americas. Mexico boasts the world's largest number of native speakers. At the national level, Spanish is the official language of Argentina, Bolivia (co-official Quechua and Aymara), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama , Paraguay (co-official Guaraní), Peru (co-official Quechua and, in some regions, Aymara), Uruguay, and Venezuela. Spanish is also the official language (co-official language English) in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

The non-Spanish speaking Americas

Spanish holds no official recognition in the former British colony of Belize. However, according to the 2000 census, 52.1% of the population speaks the language "very well."^[20] ^[21] It is mainly spoken by Hispanic descendants who have remained in the region since the 17th century. However, English remains the sole official language.^[22]

Spanish has become increasingly important in Brazil due to proximity and increased trade with its Spanish-speaking neighbours, for example, as a member of the Mercosur trading bloc.^[23] In 2005, the National Congress of Brazil approved a bill, signed into law by the President, that makes Spanish available as a foreign language in the country's secondary schools.^[24] In many border towns and villages (especially along the Uruguayan-Brazilian border) a mixed language commonly known as Portuñol is also spoken.^[25]

In the United States, 42.7 million people were of Hispanic heritage according to the 2005 census. Some 32 million people, or 12% of the whole population aged 5 years or older speak Spanish at home.^[26] The Spanish language has a long history in the United States (many states from the south used to be part of Mexico) and has recently been revitalised by heavy immigration from Spanish-speaking Latin America. Spanish, moreover, is also the most widely taught foreign language in the United States.^[27] Though the United States has no formally designated "official languages," Spanish is formally recognized at the state level, alongside English, in the U.S. state of New Mexico, where it is spoken by almost 30% of the population. In total, the U.S. contains the world's fifth-largest Spanish speaking population.^[28]

Europe

Spanish is official in Spain, the country for which it is named and from which it originated. It is also spoken widely in Gibraltar, although English is used for official purposes.^[29] Likewise, it is spoken in Andorra though Catalan is the official language.^[30][31] It is also spoken by small communities in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.^[32] Spanish is an official language of the European Union. In Switzerland, Spanish is the mother tongue of 1.7% of the population, representing the first minority after the 4 official languages of the country ^[33]

Asia

Although Spanish was an official language in the Philippines, it was never spoken by a majority of the population. Its importance fell in the first half of the 20th century following the US occupation and administration of the islands. The introduction of the English language in the Filipino government system put an end to use of Spanish as the official language. The language lost its status in 1987, during the Corazon Aquino administration. According to the 1990 census, there were 2,658 native speakers of Spanish.^[34] The number of Spanish speakers, however, are not available in the ensuing 1995 and 2000 censuses. Additionally, according to the 2000 census, there are over 600,000 native speakers of Chavacano, a Spanish based creole spoken in Cavite and Zamboanga. Many Philippine languages have numerous Spanish loanwords. See also: Spanish language in the Philippines

Africa

In Africa, Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon (only Cocobeach). It is also spoken in the territories of Peñón de Alhucemas, Ceuta, the Chafarinas Islands, Melilla, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, and in the autonomous community of Canary Islands. In Morocco, a former Franco-Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish.^[35]

Oceania

Among the countries and territories in Oceania, Spanish is also spoken in Easter Island, a territorial possession of Chile. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 95,000 speakers of Spanish in Australia, 44,000 of which live in Greater Sydney.

The island nations of Guam, Palau, Northern Marianas, Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia all once had Spanish speakers, since Marianas and Caroline Islands were Spanish colonial possessions until late 19th century (see Spanish-American War), but Spanish has since been forgotten. It now only exists as an influence on the local native languages.

Variations

There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In Spain the Castilian dialect pronunciation is commonly regarded as the national standard, although a use of slightly different pronouns called laísmo of this dialect is deprecated. More accurately, for nearly everyone in Spain, "standard Spanish" means "pronouncing everything exactly as it is written",^[^{citation needed}^] an ideal which does not correspond to any real dialect, though the northern dialects get the closest to it. In practice, the standard way of speaking Spanish in the media is "written Spanish" for formal speech, "Madrid dialect" (one of the transitional variants between Castilian and Andalusian) for informal speech.^[^{citation needed}^]

Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: tú, usted, and in some parts of Latin America, vos (the use of this form is called voseo). Generally speaking, tú and vos are informal and used with friends (though in Spain vos is considered an archaic form for address of exalted personages, its use now mainly confined to the liturgy). Usted is universally regarded as the formal address (derived from vuestra merced, "your grace"), and is used as a mark of respect, as when addressing one's elders or strangers.

Vos is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun in many countries of Latin America, including Argentina, Costa Rica, the central mountain region of Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, the Antioquia and Valle del Cauca states of Colombia and the State of Zulia in Venezuela. In Argentina, Uruguay, and increasingly in Paraguay, it is also the standard form used in the media, but the media in other countries with voseo generally continue to use usted or tú except in advertisements, for instance. Vos may also be used regionally in other countries. Depending on country or region, usage may be considered standard or (by better educated speakers) to be unrefined. Interpersonal situations in which the use of vos is acceptable may also differ considerably between regions.

Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural for daily use, ustedes (formal or familiar, as the case may be, though vosotros non-formal usage can sometimes appear in poetry and rhetorical or literary style). In Spain there are two forms — ustedes (formal) and vosotros (familiar). The pronoun vosotros is the plural form of tú in most of Spain, but in the Americas (and certain southern Spanish cities such as Cádiz or Seville, and in the Canary Islands) it is replaced with ustedes. It is remarkable that the use of ustedes for the informal plural "you" in southern Spain does not follow the usual rule for pronoun-verb agreement; e.g., while the formal form for "you go", ustedes van, uses the third-person plural form of the verb, in Cádiz or Seville the informal form is constructed as ustedes vais, using the second-person plural of the verb. In the Canary Islands, though, the usual pronoun-verb agreement is preserved in most cases.

Some words can be different, even embarrassingly so, in different Hispanophone countries. Most Spanish speakers can recognize other Spanish forms, even in places where they are not commonly used, but Spaniards generally do not recognise specifically American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate and albaricoque (respectively, "butter", "avocado", "apricot") correspond to manteca, palta, and damasco, respectively, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The everyday Spanish words coger (to catch, get, or pick up), pisar (to step on) and concha (seashell) are considered extremely rude in parts of Latin America, where the meaning of coger and pisar is also "to have sex" and concha means "vulva". The Puerto Rican word for "bobby pin" (pinche) is an obscenity in Mexico, and in Nicaragua simply means stingy. Other examples include taco, which means "swearword" in Spain but is known to the rest of the world as the Mexican foodstuff. Pija in many countries of Latin America is an obscene slang word for penis, while in Spain the word signifies "posh girl" or "snobby". Coche, which means car in Spain, means pig in Guatemala^[^{citation needed}^] while carro means "car" in some Latin American countries and "cart" in others as well as in Spain.

The Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy), together with the 21 other national ones (see Association of Spanish Language Academies), exercises a standardizing influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar and style guides. Due to this influence and for other sociohistorical reasons, a standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media.

Writing system

Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of the character ñ (eñe), which represents the phoneme /ɲ/ and is regarded as a letter of its own distinct from n, despite being typographically an n with a tilde. The digraphs ch (che) and ll (elle) are considered single letters, with their own names and places in the alphabet, because each represents a single phoneme (/tʃ/ and /ʎ/, respectively). However, the digraph rr (erre doble, "double r", or simply erre as opposed to ere), which also represents a single phoneme /r/, was not similarly regarded as a single letter. Thus, the traditional Spanish alphabet had 28 letters (29 if one counted w, which is only used in foreign names and loanwords):

a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.

Since 1994, the two digraphs are to be treated as letter pairs for collation purposes. Words with ch are now alphabetically sorted between those with ce and ci, instead of following cz as they used to, and similarly for ll. Nevertheless, the names che and elle are still used colloquially.

With the exclusion of a very small number of regional terms such as México (see Mexico: Toponymy), pronunciation can be entirely determined from spelling. A typical Spanish word is stressed on the syllable before the last if it ends with a vowel (not including y) or with a vowel followed by n or s; it is stressed on the last syllable otherwise. Exceptions to this rule are indicated by placing an acute accent on the stressed vowel.

The acute accent is used, in addition, to distinguish between certain homophones, especially when one of them is a stressed word and the other one is a clitic: compare el ("the", masculine singular definite article) with él ("he" or "it"), or te ("you", object pronoun), de (preposition "of" or "from"), and se (reflexive pronoun) with té ("tea"), dé ("give") and sé ("I know", or imperative "be").

The interrogative pronouns (qué, cuál, dónde, quién, etc.) also receive accents in direct or indirect questions, and some demonstratives (ése, éste, aquél, etc.) can be accented when used as pronouns. The conjunction o ("or") is written with an accent between numerals so as not to be confused with a zero: e.g., 10 ó 20 should be read as diez o veinte rather than diez mil veinte ("10,020"). Accent marks are frequently omitted in capital letters (a widespread practice in the early days of computers where only lowercase vowels were available with accents), although the RAE advises against this.

In rare cases, u is written with a diaeresis (ü) when it comes between g and a front vowel (e or i), to indicate that it should be pronounced, rather than silent as usual (e.g., cigüeña, "stork", is pronounced /θ̟iˈɰweɲa/, /s̟iˈɰweɲa/; if it were written cigueña, it would be pronounced /θ̟iˈɰeɲa/, /s̟iˈɰeɲa/).

Interrogative and exclamatory clauses are introduced with inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation marks ( ¡ ).

Sounds

By the 16th century, the consonant system of Spanish underwent the following important changes that differentiated it from neighboring Romance languages such as Portuguese and Catalan:

Initial /f/, when it had evolved into a vacillating /h/, was lost in most words (although this etymological h- is preserved in spelling and in some Andalusian dialects is still aspirated).
The bilabial approximant /β̞/ (which was written u or v) merged with the bilabial oclusive /b/ (written b). There is no difference between the pronunciation of orthographic b and v in contemporary Spanish, excepting specific areas in Spain (particularly the ones influenced by Catalan) and Latin America.
The voiced alveolar fricative /z/ which existed as a separate phoneme in medieval Spanish merged with its voiceless counterpart /s/. The phoneme which resulted from this merger is currently spelled s.
The voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ merged with its voiceless counterpart /ʃ/, which evolved into the modern velar sound /x/ by the 17th century, now written with j, or g before e, i. Nevertheless, in most parts of Argentina and in Uruguay, y and ll have both evolved to /ʒ/ or /ʃ/.
The voiced alveolar affricate /dz/ merged with its voiceless counterpart /ts/, which then developed into the interdental /θ/, now written z, or c before e, i. But in Andalusia, the Canary Islands and the Americas this sound merged with /s/ as well. See Ceceo, for further information.

The consonant system of Medieval Spanish has been better preserved in Ladino and in Portuguese, neither of which underwent these shifts.

Lexical stress

Spanish has a phonemic stress system — stress is fixed, and different stress patterns of the same word can result in separate meanings for one and the same word. Spanish makes abundant use of this feature, especially in distinguishing verb conjugation forms. For example, the word camino (with penultimate stress) means "road" or "I walk" whereas caminó (with final stress) means "you (formal)/he/she/it walked". Another example is the word práctico (first-syllable stress) "practical", which is different from practico (second-syllable stress) "I practice," and practicó (last-syllable stress) "you (formal)/he/she/it practiced." Also, since Spanish syllables are all pronounced at a more or less constant tempo, the language is said to be syllable-timed.

As mentioned above, stress can always be predicted from the written form of a word. An amusing example of the significance of stress and intonation in Spanish is the riddle como como como como como como, to be punctuated and accented so that it makes sense. The answer is ¿Cómo "cómo como"? ¡Como como como! ("What do you mean / 'how / do I eat'? / I eat / the way / I eat!").

Grammar

Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but limited inflection of nouns, adjectives, and determiners. (For a detailed overview of verbs, see Spanish verbs and Spanish irregular verbs.)

It is right-branching, uses prepositions, and usually (though not always) places adjectives after nouns. Its syntax is generally Subject Verb Object, though variations are common. It is a pro-drop language (allows the deletion of pronouns when pragmatically unnecessary) and verb-framed.

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Top Ten List
Reasons to learn Spanish.

10. Learning Spanish is necessary to keep pace with popular culture.

Learning Spanish will enable you to keep pace with Hispanic influence on culture which is strong and getting stronger. For example, do you remember that Taco Bell commercial with the little dog? Did you know that his motto, "Yo quiero Taco Bell" is actually a play on words? In Spanish, "yo quiero" means both "I want" and "I love." So, that cute little dog was actually pulling your leg as he said both: "I want Taco Bell" and "I love Taco Bell."

9. Learning Spanish is actually a medical device!

Research indicates that knowing and using two languages reduces your chances of developing dementia, including Alzheimer's Disease. The scientists who studied this were motivated by earlier studies which showed that bilingualism enhances mental abilities in both children and older adults. Other studies show that studying languages can improve your memory and slow age-related decline in mental acuity. And studying another language makes you smarter! Your critical thinking skills will be improved as you learn to view things through a different lens. Learning a second language stimulates creativity!

8. For many, learning Spanish is rapidly becoming a business necessity.

Spanish is becoming more and more important with regards to business. Learning Spanish will enable you to better communicate with Spanish speaking employees or co-workers. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to offer your product or service to the 350 million people whose mother tongue is Spanish? In North America, Hispanic consumers are the fastest-growing market segment. As for job opportunities, it certainly wouldn't hurt to have Spanish on your résumé. In the United States, knowing Spanish can be particularly helpful if you work in healthcare or education. Increasingly, the building trades are employing more and more Spanish speaking workers. One thing is certain. If you are bilingual, you will be more marketable and have more career choices than your monolingual counterpart. Globalization, with it's accompanying free trade agreements is shrinking the business world, and those who know more than one language will definitely have the edge.

7. Spanish, Spanish everywhere.

With well over 35 million Spanish speakers in the United States, and with over 40% of the population growth being among the Hispanic people, the stage is set for an enormous increase in Spanish usage in the United States. This has sparked a lot of interest among US citizens, a group not particularly known for their multilingualism. This interest will only increase as the Hispanic population of the US approaches 50 million by the year 2015. But it's not only in the US where Spanish is popular. In Europe, Spanish is the second most popular second language, after English. With some 400 million speakers, Spanish is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the world. Only Mandarin, English and Hindi have more speakers. If you count only native speakers, Spanish outranks English. Spanish is an official language on four continents and is the mother tongue in 21 countries. The sheer number of Spanish speakers and their rate of growth makes learning Spanish a smart choice.

6. Learning Spanish will (truly) expand your universe.

According to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "the limits of my language are the limits of my universe." There is no doubt that learning Spanish will expand your own personal universe. As the Hispanic population continues to grow at a disproportionate rate, it becomes more and more likely that you might marry into a Spanish speaking family, have Spanish speaking neighbors or encounter Spanish speaking people in your daily rounds. No longer are the Spanish speakers in the US confined to the border states and big cities. Today, nearly all areas have some sort of Hispanic population. Wouldn't it be nice to say hello and chat with your fellow paisanos (countrymen)?

5. Knowing Spanish will completely transform your travel experience.

While it is certainly possible to travel to a Spanish speaking country without knowing any Spanish, your trip will in no way compare with the incredible adventure that awaits the traveler who speaks Spanish. If you only speak English, you will be forced to confine yourself to popular tourist resorts where nearly everyone speaks some English. But if you want to explore the area and get to know the local people, you need to know Spanish. Even simple things, such as reading signs and menus, asking directions or telling a cab driver where you want to go requires some knowledge of the language. Hispanic people are amazingly generous, and if you speak Spanish you will find yourself being welcomed in a way that would never happen if you spoke only English. Simply put, when you travel to a Spanish speaking country, knowing the language will allow you to move from the role of observer to that of an active participant.

4. Knowing how to speak Spanish will enable you to help others.

If you are the type of person who likes to help others, learning to speak Spanish will put you in a postion where you can help both Spanish speakers who don't speak English and English speakers who don't speak Spanish. Now that's what we like to call a "win-win" situation. Unfortunately, the standard of living in many Spanish speaking countries is rather low by normal Western standards. Sometimes, it is appalingly low. Without stereotyping Latin America as a poverty stricken region (in many cases that simply is not true) there are nonetheless a lot of people in serious need. Learning Spanish will prepare you for taking the next step, --- actually going there and making a difference!

3. There are reasons to learn language for language's sake.

While Johann Wolfgang von Goethe may have been exaggerating when he said, "he who knows no foreign language, knows nothing of his own," it cannot be denied that by studying Spanish you will without doubt gain a better understanding of English. Spanish is what we call a "Romance" language, meaning that it is based on Latin, the language of the ancient Roman Empire. Many English words are also of Latin origin, and so when you learn vocabulary in Spanish you will simultaneously be expanding your English vocabulary. You will also find that your understanding of the deep meaning of these Latin based English words is greatly enhanced. Also, as you study the grammar of Spanish, you will notice how it is similar to English, as well as how it is different. This will raise your awareness of the grammar of your native language. Because Spanish is very nearly phonetically perfect, you can look at almost any word and immediately know exactly how to pronounce it. This characteristic makes Spanish one of the easiest languages to learn. And, when it comes to learning a third language, such as French or Italian, already knowing Spanish will be a huge advantage because these languages, too, are Romance Languages.

2. Learning Spanish will allow you to better appreciate Hispanic cultural contributions.

For many people, developing a deeper understanding of Hispanic culture is becoming more and more important. There is no more certain way to gain this insight than to learn to speak Spanish. Reading Latin American or Spanish newspapers and magazines will open a window into the Hispanic mind. Knowing the language will prepare you to better appreciate some of the great Hispanic modern and classic cultural contributions. From Miguel Cervantes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hispanic literary contributions are monumental. From the royal portraits of Goya to the surreal depictions of Picasso, Spanish influence on the fine arts has been substantial. And let's not ignore gastronomy! Learning Spanish can be the perfect excuse for enjoying the cuisine of Spanish speaking peoples. Burritos, tamales, paella, papusas, arroz con frijoles, ceviche, --- the list goes on and on, and is a delicious indicator of the vast diversity of Hispanic culture. Is it any wonder then that more and more people want to partake of these cultural delights?

1. Learning Spanish is fun!

Learning Spanish opens up lots of opportunities to have more fun. Who doesn't enjoy reading a good book or watching a good movie? Music? You bet! Food? The best! The satisfaction of accomplishment? It's there waiting for you to grab it! For all of the reasons mentioned above, and a whole lot that haven't been mentioned, learning Spanish can be one of the most enjoyable things you will ever do. Whether your motivations are practical, intellectual or sentimental, learning Spanish is something that will benefit you for the rest of your life!

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2007-09-25T13:38:00.000-06:00

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WHY CHOOSE INTENSA SPANISH LANGUAGE SCHOOLS?

There are many Spanish language schools all over the world from which to choose. Once you have chosen to make Costa Rica your language learning destination, why should you choose INTENSA Spanish language schools as your language learning center? Well, the reasons are manyfold. However, one of the main reasons is that we are not new on the map of Spanish language schools in Costa Rica. INTENSA has a 27 year history as a language institute. Along with such a rich history and tradition comes the experience that is gleaned from teaching people from outside the country to learn Spanish. It is experience that has been earned through hard work and dedication. In addition, our teachers are natives of Costa Rica. They are dedicated educators who know how to impart quality lessons and courses. Consequently, the excellent quality of the language lessons and courses that you will receive can not be overstated. You will be given lessons and courses which have a proven track record of enabling students not only to quickly and efficiently learn the Spanish language, but also to apply it in a meaningful way and in any given situation. After all, learning the language is only part of the equation. The other part is being able to apply the lessons and courses you have endeavored so diligently to master.

In oder to make your learning experience more meaningful, we have now added fun and adventure to the mix. You can come learn the Spanish language in Costa Rica and have some fun in the sun at the same time. We have put together a combination of immersion lessons, courses and fun which we believe is unsurpassed and definitely unparalleled. Added to the equation is the fact that, if we don't offer the adventure that you have dreamed or thought about, we will go to almost any length to ensure that we can make your dream come true. All it takes is an email or a phone call with your ideas, and we will take care of the rest. So make the right choice. Choose INTENSA Spanish language schools in Costa Rica. We are the region leader in Spanish language immersion lessons, courses, fun and adventure!

Should you decide to study Spanish with us, we would like make your stay in Costa Rica as convenient, comfortable and fun as possible. INTENSA has three Spanish language schools for your comfort and convenience. The main campus is located in a quiet suburb, Barrio Escalante, which is about 10 minutes from downtown San José, the capital and cultural center of Costa Rica. The school in Alajuela , which has more of a small town atmosphere, is situated 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of San José, not far from the country's major international, airport. The school in Escazú is housed in a modern office building about 7 kilometers (4 miles) southwest of San José. Each of our three schools is within easy reach of public transportation.

No matter which school you choose, you will receive the same quality Spanish language courses and lessons. We are but a phone call or email away. Contact us and let the adventure begin!

Call us 506-281-1818 or contact our information department for further details.

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SPANISH LESSONS

2007-08-14T15:07:00.000-06:00

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