No Dummy: What is a link farm?

I get this a ton...What's a link farm? A link company in the Midwest? The place not so far from Kansas? A factory for links on the web? NO DUMMY:

A link farm, while not a puppy mill is just as risky and dare I say, inhumane(:D). A link farm is any group of web sites that link to every other page in the group. It is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing). Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites, and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

All in all - it's not good and is considered spam! While it can be a temporary fix when the Search Engines figure out what's going on, you risk getting the Kabash(spelling?)!

What is Zen Cart SEO?

Shopping cart software is a program that is used in e-commerce to assist people in making purchases online. It collects and stores shopping information in a website session, including items, quantities, taxes and shipping. It also collects payment billing information from the customer to ensure a safe and efficient transaction. Shopping cart software typically interfaces with third-party secure payment gateway software that resides on a different server for secure payment transactions.

This type of software is something that anyone needs who is starting an online business or website where they are looking to market and sell some type of product. While the first step is always deciding on what service or product you are going to market, the very next step is to figure out what software to use to se up your site. There are many different programs to choose from like Zen Cart SEO, Miva Merchant, OS Commerce and BV Commerce. It is important to take the time to do a little background research about each company so that you know which one is best for you.

Most of these shopping cart solutions provide you with everything you need to make your site completely SEO friendly. Miva Merchant guarantees to its customers that it is SEO friendly right out of the box, but the truth is, so are Zen Cart SEO and the other programs too. These will help you with pricing, shipping, payments and just general organization. Having some type of shopping cart software is imperative to having a successful site and keeping everything in order. It also helps you to secure the payments that are transacted through your site which gives your customers a good piece of mind.

Many shopping cart software solutions provide the user with multiple language support, multiple customer modes, unlimited category depth, multiple sales and discounts, multiple display modes, unlimited extra pages, multiple ad banner controller, various shipping options, a choice of payment options, a newsletter manager, discount coupons, gift certificates, quantity discounts, and external modules. If you are building a site then I am sure that all of these sounds very attractive to you which are why shopping cart software are an essential step in the process. Regardless of which program you choose, you will find that it will make your site much easier to manage and simpler for the user to navigate. It also may be a good idea to consult some online sites for information on the steps to building a successful website so you can turn your dreams into a reality.

Get Help With Shopping Carts Like Zen Cart SEO

The steps to building a site and optimizing it can pretty much be classified into eight different categories: choosing you product, picking a domain name, registering and hosting your domain, choosing keywords, page optimization, site optimization, registering with directories, and building links. Using shopping cart software like Zen Cart SEO, Miva Merchant or OS Commerce can actually help smooth out many steps to this process. Zen Cart and Miva Merchant are SEO friendly right out of the box and have many other functions, so these may be products that you want to look into for your site.

Choosing a product is the foundation for your site and often determines how successful it will be in the market. When you decide on a product it is important that you analyze the product and the market that it will be competing in; you want to avoid creating something that already has an oversaturated market because you will have trouble coming out ahead. Picking your domain name is important, but it should not be something that you spend too much time on. You should try to pick something that can be branded easily or use your site keywords in the domain name. You can also think about buying multiple domain names so you can target a bunch of niche markets. After you choose your domain name it is important to register it right away, especially if it is a .com one. There are many different ways to register a domain, but be sure to use an accredited one.

After your domain is registered you should spend some time picking out relative keywords to target. This is a very important step in building a successful site because it will help determine your rankings on search engines. Typically, you want to look for words that have a lot of traffic, but do not have a lot of competition. This is easier for older and established websites so you may need to start slowly and pay your dues. One of the best ways to get your site on the first page of search engines is to write articles that use these keywords, but are also relevant to your site in some way. You should generate articles that are informational or general how to articles because these will get picked up better than sales articles. The all you have to do is submit the articles with anchor texts and link backs to your site homepages and sub pages and you will see your traffic skyrocket.

Building a Successful Internet Marketing Company

Building a successful website or internet marketing company can be a very big challenge because so many people venture into without educating themselves beforehand. So many people just spend a little bit of time learning a few of the basics and then they think they are ready to take on the virtual world. There are so many common mistakes that people make regarding search engine optimization so hopefully this article will help you to avoid them and rise to the top.

The first thing you should accept is that you are never going to have a perfectly optimized site; there is no such thing. When a search engine displays results, they are not showing the pages that are the most optimized; they are showing those that satisfy the goals of the search the best. One of the worst things you can do for your site is having your page title and H1 header be exactly the same. This is bad because then if all of your internal links and inbound links from other sites are pointing to that page then it will look very fishy to a search engine. It will appear to any search engine as though you are trying in some way to manipulate the rankings for your site. When this happens search engines start to filter out so it could actually end up really hurting you in the end.

Many people make the mistake all too often of not going through the steps to make their site more stable. To figure out exactly what you need to do in order to increase the stability you should look at it like a search engine would. There is something in the SEO world that is known as poison words. If you have things like link exchange, add URL or link partners on a given page, then you run the risk of a search engine placing much less weight on that particular page and all of its outbound links. Placing less weight refers the relevancy within a search so this is definitely not a good thing. Years ago there were actual poison words, but now that term refers more to content that is of a lower quality or is related to spam because this makes it more likely to be deweighted. A good rule of thumb to remember in search engine optimization is that you will almost always be penalized for anything that is related to spam.

Could Flash search change internet marketing rules?

Story from http://www.clickthrough-marketing.com/ which I found interesting:

New developments in Flash search indexing could lead to significant changes in search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies.

Adobe has revealed that it is providing its Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to help the two engines make improvements to their search indexing of Flash SWF file formats.

This could eventually lead to greater visibility of Flash content to search engines, helping web users to find more of the kind of information they are looking for, Adobe said.

According to Mashable, this development could rewrite the rules of SEO, which have historically suggested that those looking to improve search rankings should avoid Flash content as it is not easily picked up by engines.

"We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users," commented David Wadhwani of Adobe.

Google has already started rolling out the Flash Player technology across its engine and has developed an algorithm that looks at text in Flash elements such as buttons and banners, according to a recent Official Google Blog posting.

News brought to you by ClickThrough - specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing