There's no question that search engines provide a tremendous amount of traffic but now it seems that social networks are also proving to be the big traffic generators.

It seems that Facebook is driving the most repeat visitors according to a study conducted by online ad network, Chitika. We know that traffic is great, but traffic that returns is going to be even better for your conversion rate.

20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the site four or more times per week. Digg was second with slightly over 16%, followed by Yahoo, Google, Bing and Twitter respectively.

"While Google naturally wins in sheer numbers, if a website owner can drive a thousand people to their site via Google, or they can drive the same number via Facebook, Facebook seems to be the way to go for creating a loyal reader," says Chitika.

We suggest you take advantage of the sheer popularity of Facebook and spend time on the site in order to drive repeat traffic for your website.

I have previously written an article about the top SEO hints and tips you should implement into your search engine strategy to rank high in search engines amongst your competitors. Now I am about to tell you the major “don’ts” of SEO so you can avoid those crucial mistakes so your website can carry on succeeding in the world of search engine optimization.

• Firstly, do not leave SEO from your website for too long. You should always be considering your SEO strategy from the beginning of your website development. SEO plays one of the most important parts in your website and needs to be thought about from the start.
• Do not waste your time submitting your website to countless search engines. Crawler-based search engines will find your website more quickly as soon as you get a link from another website that is already being crawled. Search engine submission is a thing of the past.
• Never make your website un-crawlable. You should always make sure that your website can be crawled by search engine spiders, because if it cannot be crawled then the search engines will not find you. An un-crawlable website can be due to having a convoluted navigation menu that spiders can’t follow, developing an all flash site, or even simply too many variables in your domain name.
• Make sure you don’t target keywords that are too ‘general’. If you want the best chance to rank high, then don’t target keywords that are crowded with competition. You need to do keyword research on your website and find out the best keywords, with a fair amount of competition, this will give you a chance of ranking for number one!
• Don’t ignore usability. You should always make your website user friendly and efficient for users and search engine spiders. This can be achieved with proper site structure, local navigation and sitemaps. So avoid over complicating your website and making it harder to use and navigate.
• You should never give up on creating good content for your website. As I have said before, content is key. The less content you have, then the less chance you have to fill your website with keywords which gives you less chance of being linked to by search engines. That is why the more content you have, the more search engines will link to you because your website would be more relevant because of more keywords. Simple.
• Never spam to help your website get found. This will NOT work. Search engines disapprove of websites that use spam to rank higher, so this will not work to improve your rank on search engines. So you should avoid posting your link on blog comments, guestbook’s ECT, stuffing META tags with keywords and also putting keywords into your footer with lightly coloured or hidden text.
• Patience is a virtue; don’t give up on SEO once started. SEO is a long, time-consuming process and demands time, attention and commitment. You need to be patient when doing SEO work on your website, because it may take months to see the results.

Well there you have it. I have just told you what NOT to do if you wish to succeed in the search engine world. If you read my previous blog then you will also know what you SHOULD do if you want to succeed. Thank you for reading; I hope I helped you understand the fundamentals of SEO success!

If you would like more information about SEO success, please read my other blog.

Top SEO Hints and Tips

After 15 long years we finally say goodbye to GeoCities forever.

GeoCities was an instant hit when it first opened in 1994. This service did more for the web than almost all other Internet services ever designed, and it played a major role in the web’s popularity. Many believe that the Internet wouldn’t have become so popular if it weren’t for GeoCities.

GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML.

In 1999 Yahoo bought GeoCities for about $3 billion, which is probably one of the worst deals ever as the service is closing today, 26th October 2009.

You will no long be able to develop a free website using this service. Yahoo already announced that GeoCities is closing many months ago as the service is no longer helping its customers.

Yahoo is developing other services to allow users to build relationships online. Many are happy that GeoCities is gone because the service is “so 20th century” and we’re moving towards a new Internet with new services.

As they say, all good things must come to end!

I am about to tell you some very useful and proven techniques to guarantee you and your website SEO success. These are the best ways to make sure your website is found among the other competing websites in search engines, such as Google or Bing.

• Before you do anything, you need to find out who your target audience is for you business/website. When you find out who they are, you need to optimize your site for your target audience so it is more likely to be found. To do this, you need to find out the most relevant keywords for your target audience and input them into your website.
• Google Adwords is an extremely good tool to find the best keywords for your business/website. This is so when you want to put keywords into your website, you know the best ones to go for that many people search for.
• When selecting the domain name for your website, try to include the keywords that you are trying compete for. This is an excellent way to rank high in a search engine for the keywords that you select. However try not to use too many hyphens in your domain because this may not look professional. A good example would be (www.keyword-keyword.co.uk)
• Content is key! A very useful technique would be to create as much content for each page as you possibly can with keywords written in it. This will help search engines find your website easier if they type in a phrase or keyword that happens to be written in you content, and more content gives you more of a chance of being found!
• The title for each page that is created in your site should be optimized with the keywords that you have selected for your website. This is a very useful method because the keywords in your title tag are partly how they rank websites in their ranking system.
• Headings play an important role in organizing information on a webpage. So when you are creating the page template, try to include at least H1-H3 for your headings. Headings make it easier for search engines to locate information which increases your potential to be higher up in the search engine.
• Another good tip for SEO success is to re-name all images and media with the keywords that you have chosen for your particular website. Such as (keyword-keyword-01.jpg). This helps because a search engine like Google will see your webpage more relevant than others because it will have more keywords in more places.
• And finally, another way to climb the search engines ranks is to link build! Link building can be done in a number of ways, from article submissions to website directories. These methods are extremely useful and there are a number of other link building techniques that will help you with achieving SEO success!

Thank you for reading my blog about how to make your website successful by using Search Engine Optimization. Now you are ready to take on the World Wide Web!

Microsoft and Yahoo have both agreed to sign a 10 year deal for Microsoft’s Bing to power Yahoo’s searches. Their main goal is at “changing the search landscape.” This deal means that Bing will be powering Yahoo’s searches and Yahoo, in return, will be selling premium advertising for both Yahoo and Microsoft and sharing the revenue between them.

Microsoft has big plans for the future of Bing and Yahoo through this deal and wants to make searching on the web more efficient and better value for advertising.

"Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” says Ballmer.

"Success in search requires both innovation and scale. This agreement with Yahoo will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness." he concludes. The financial details of the deal are not clear; however neither company had anything bad to say about the implications.

However, this is not the first time that Microsoft has tried to buy Yahoo! They tried to make them an offer of a huge sum of $44.6 billion back in February 2008, but their former chief executive Jerry Yang declined their proposal and the deal seemed to fade away. Since then, Yang has been replaced with Carol Bartz and claimed that any partner trying to make a search deal, they are going to need “boat loads of money and solid technology”.

Microsoft now has the technology to carry this deal through, which leaves the money. When reports of the deal first became public, there were rumours that Microsoft would offer Yahoo $3 billion, however there has been no mention by the companies of money being exchanged upfront.

Analysts have warned that antitrust regulators could possibly stop the merging of the second and third ranked search engines in the world. For example, Google and Yahoo had to drop plans of forming an advertising partnership in 2008 due to the US Department of Justice.

Hopefully this will be a step forward in the search engine world!