Hi Jill,

I’m an avid reader of your newsletter and have gained much from your advice, for which I thank you very much. My question is one that I have not seen addressed, unless I somehow missed it.

If you’re serious about having a successful online business, you need to spend some time studying the search engines and how they operate.

Jill Whalen is well known for her search engine optimization talents. She’s equally well known for her ezine, High Rankings Advisor. From its inception in 2000 until today, she has built an exceptionally loyal subscriber base of over 15,000 that would literally follow her to the ends of the Net and back. How did she do it? We’re about to find out!

Hi Mike, there are a few quick and easy changes you could make to your site that would make it more visually appealing and rank higher in the search engines.

Greetings from North East Scotland! I enjoy your emails very much as SEO is important to us. Would there be any chance of you reviewing our site from a SE rankings perspective? We have difficulties competing on terms against free translation providers (like Babelfish and freetranslation who have huge link pops) and would like help in overcoming this.

Hi Dan:

I have recently changed the look of my website of four years, I have added a Flash page that seems to have deleted me from the search engines almost completely ( I was between 10th and 15th on almost all engines) with my URL so unique to the keywords… Hotelphotography.com. and a lot of submitting, I had good positioning.

My site at http://www.jodee.biz ranks 3/10 on google, and on alexa it ranks: “Traffic Rank for jodee.biz:337,641.” Other sites that link to this site: 447. What I would like to know is: how can I improve my ratings more for some of my keywords such as “grilling net gurus.” I am on the first page on others it can’t be found any suggestion I do trade links with other sites plus I have now added more content by way of articles and newsletters

Dan Thies is the author of “Search Engine Optimization Fast Start,” and a frequent contributor to WebProNews. He has more books coming out soon on pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, e-zine publishing, and a beginner’s book on building a small business website.

Dan is happy to answer “almost any” question, but if you would like an intelligent answer, please stick to the general topics of online marketing, website promotion, and search engine positioning (including pay per click). Please include your website’s URL, and as many details as possible.

Analyst group Gartner has released its latest customer relationship management (CRM) Magic Quadrant, and concludes that Siebel remains the indisputable category leader. The quadrant is a pictorial representation of how Gartner feels e-business software vendors stand within a given category represented by axis that divide into four boxes: leaders (big on both execution and vision), challengers (big on execution, not as big on vision), visionaries (long on vision, but less ability to execute), and niche players (narrow vision and execution alike).

Increasing numbers of companies are recognizing the importance of high search engine rankings as part of their overall marketing strategy. Unfortunately, many do not recognize that search engine marketing is an ongoing process, rather than a one-time “quick fix”. Protecting high rankings, once attained, is critical to the ongoing success of any search engine marketing initiative. It is also important to approach your monitoring efforts with a solid strategy and a proper mindset. The following five tips can help.

Ever since there have been search engines, there have been techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady search engine optimization firms have used to artificially boost their rankings.

As search engines caught on to these techniques, they devised ways to detect them without having someone physically look at each site (a practical impossibility, considering that several individual engines now index well over a billion pages).

1. Page Link Names – place a primary keyword in your page link names. Rather than using a link in your navigation bar like "services", add a keyword to that page link. If you offer web hosting services, it could be "webhostingservices.htm"

Is Your Framed Site Doomed? Not Necessarily!

The question of whether or not to use frames when designing a Web site seems to be as old as time, or at least as old as frames themselves!

Frames
If you have information inside frames, you probably face a challenge gaining rankings in AltaVista, but it is not an absolute barrier. AltaVista indexes the outside of the frame as a distinct page. It will also index each pane of the frame window as a separate page. That means that if the content matching a query is in a pane, then visitors clicking on those links will see only the pane, not the full page as it was originally designed. So if you want visitors from AltaVista to experience your pages in a certain way, you should have non-frames as well as frames versions of those pages, and submit the non-frames versions.