By: Gary Mattoc SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is often an expensive exercise both in terms of time and money.

Here is a list of 10 of the worst mistakes you could make, that at worst could get your website banned, and if you are lucky, their implementation would just impede your success in achieving higher organic search engine positions.

SEO Tips - 10 Don'ts Of SEO

1. Keyword stuffing. Needlessly stuffing your keywords on your web pages will sound nonsense not only to your human visitors but also the search engines. This tactic could actually harm your rankings.

2. Don't move or remove a popular page. By keeping a regular eye on your website statistics you should be aware of your current popular pages. If you need to reorganise your site structure then remember to 301 redirect via .htaccess from the old location to the new one.

3. Do not use images in navigation. For the moment at least images mean nothing to search engines. It is therefore preferable to use text links in your navigation and use CSS for styling. When you are forced to use an image the always use the ALT attribute and of course remember to include your keywords.

4. Do not use an incorrect robot.txt file. An incorrect robot.txt file can totally stop search engine traffic. A single incorrect command in this file can block an entire folder. If you need to use a robot.txt file then make sure you know what you are doing.

5. Do not procrastinate. SEO begins at the initial website structure planning stage and never ends. There may be lots of work involved but the sooner you start the sooner you will reap the rewards.

6. Do not exchange links with everyone. Outgoing links to bad neighborhood, unrelated or banned sites will certainly not help your SERPs.

7. Do not forget your human visitors. Do not neglect your human visitors, remember that eventually it's the human visitors who are going to do business with you, so keep them first. Reputed SEO consultants believe that websites that are human-friendly are search-engine-friendly automatically.

8. Using analytical tools will help. Analytics tools like Google Analytics and others help you know how much traffic you are getting from various sources including search engines. They also tell you which are your popular pages and for what keywords you attract maximum number of visitors.

9. Do not focus on too few keywords. The previous point mentioned long tail keywords. Your main keywords may get you lots of traffic from few sources, but your long tail keywords can get you small chunks of traffic from many sources

10. Do not be impatient. It can take a while to see good results, so be patient. For instance it may take more than 5 months for your website to even start appearing in the search results. That's why it is a good idea to start sooner rather than later.

Further information on SEO Services can be found here:
http://www.doublespark-seo.co.uk/ and http://www.doublespark.co.uk/seo/
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Why your 'alt' tags may not be working
If you've checked out your website in Mozilla Firefox or one of the other non-IE browsers, you may have been shocked to discover that NONE of the 'alt' tags you spent so long preparing are working
If you've checked out your website in Mozilla Firefox or one of the other non-IE browsers, you may have been shocked to discover that NONE of the 'alt' tags you spent so long preparing are working
What browser do you use to check your web pages when you're developing your sites (or when your webmaster asks for your approval on a new layout)? If it's Internet Explorer, you're among the majority - around 60% of users are still using Microsoft's browser.
But a growing number of users are moving over to other, more flexible browsers with less security problems, such as Mozilla's Firefox (which offers a number of advantages, not least of which is tabbed browsing, making it easier to keep a number of sites running and switch from one to another quickly). Firefox's market share has been increasing steadily every month for over a year.
When you look at your web pages in IE, you will be seeing what most other browsers see. But as usage of other, arguably better browsers increases, you need to at least double-check what these 'renegade' surfers are seeing as well.
One problem I spotted when I made the switch was that the 'alt' parameter on image tags doesn't work. I found this annoying, but I didn't realise that the problem is that the authors of Internet Explorer made an error in their implementation of the HTML specification (HTML was not invented by Microsoft, but by a completely independent entity). The 'alt' parameter is not meant to be used in the way almost everybody uses it. And because of this it will not work this way in many other browsers.
This is a serious problem for webmasters like myself who are based in the UK, because we have a legal obligation to provide tool tips for images, to help blind users to use the internet.
To illustrate what I'm talking about, you will need to have both IE and Firefox available (If you're developing pages to put online, this is a good idea in any case). If you don't have Firefox already on your system, you can download it completely free here. Why not try it (no, I am not making anything out of this in any way). You will never need to pay a licence fee and you don't need to put up with advertising banners either.
OK, so I'm assuming you now have both browsers installed on your computer. Load up this page in both of them and take a look at the picture on the left in each: Hover over it with the mouse. In IE, you should see a message (or tool tip), but in Firefox you will not see anything new.
Tool tips without Alt Now, hover over the righthand picture. This time you should see the tool tip in both browsers. So... How did I do that? It's really pretty easy, although depending on how many tags you need to change, it could take a while. (I have hundreds, which I am in the process of swapping over just now, as soon as I have finished this article). All you need to do is to double up your alt tags, substituting 'title' for 'alt' the second time, in all your <img> tags like this: where you have alt="fred", you now need alt="fred" title="fred". ALL?! I hear you say. (I just hope you have a good quality HTML editor that will do batch find and replace.) Depending on how many pages you have, yes, it could be a longish job. But it's something you can do over a period of time, as you work on a particular site. At the moment, less than half of the browsers in use are affected by this problem. But the numbers are growing every day. PS.
While we're on the subject of 'title' as a parameter in <img> tags, there's another little known use for this: you can also add a tool tip to your links in the same way!
I don't know whether you noticed earlier on, when I recommended downloading Firefox, but there was a tool tip on that link (of course, this only works in html, so if you're reading this in a plain email, you won't have seen this). I've also put the same link at the bottom of the demo-pictures page. Take a look now at the tool tip that comes up when you hover over the link. What I did there was to add the title parameter to the link (in the line below the angle brackets are replaced with curly brackets): {a href="http://www.download.com/Mozilla-Firefox/3000-2356_4-10208565.html?tag=pao" title="Download Mozilla Firefox from Download.com"}here Simple, huh? So, if you'd like to, you can add extra information to your links - or perhaps an extra 'puff' to encourage clicking... the possibilities are endless.
Well, I'll sign off now, with the hope that I haven't involved you in too much work. ;D Catch yer later
frann

Articles Source - Free Articles About the Author Frann Leach is webmaster of InformationZone.biz: Internet Marketing resources and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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10 Top Tips To Make Traffic Exchanges Work For You

Have you ever tried using a start page exchange to get extra traffic to your site??
There is no doubt Traffic Exchanges can provide you with lots of extra FREE traffic, and if you use the right strategies you can turn those start page hits into high quality targetted visitors For those of you new to internet marketing who need an introduction to the Traffic Exchange world here a brief introduction A Traffic Exchange allows you to join for FREE, register your site, and earn credits by viewing other sites. You can then use those credits to receive traffic from the exchange to your site. People must view your site for a minimum number of seconds before passing on to the next site
Here are 10 Top Tips to make Traffic Exchanges work for you
1) Spread Your Surfing Across Lots Of Exchanges
Many Traffic Exchanges have fairly small active memberships. This means the number of people who are actually surfing, at any one time, is limited. Even the larger exchanges may not have more than 100 people surfing in any one day. In addition most of the hits to the exchange are accounted for by a small number of determined, committed surfers i.e. a few people are surfing alot of sites The way Traffic Exchange scripts work means, that people who surf, are shown sites which have credits remaining in their traffic account. So if you earn alot of credits on any one exchange the chances are your site will be shown repeatedly to the same people over and over In order to combat these problems you should surf for a small number of credits only, on each exchange you visit. By surfing like this on many different exchanges you will pick up hits from all the small number of people who are "stuck" on one exchange or other. By surfing for a small number of credits on a large number of exchanges you are likely to get far more unique hits, and, just as important, you will be "hitting" a large number of interested business opportunity seekers spread across many exchanges By "unique", we mean that only one person has seen your site in a 24hr period.

2) Surf Sets Of Exchanges At Once
One of the easiest ways to click up a really large number of credits and therefore generate a large number of hits, is to surf multiple traffic exchanges at once. If you use a tabbed browser you can surf each different traffic exchange in a different tab or window. This will work best if you have a reasonable amount of memory (RAM) on your computer and a broadband or fast internet connection My own recommendation is to surf 7 exchanges at once in different windows or tabs. It is best to do this for no longer than 20-30min so as not to earn too many credits on any one exchange

3) Use Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is an extremely good surfing browser, which enables you to have many "tabs" or separate windows open, but with only one main browser window open. This is a very clever browser which is far better than Explorer, and includes lots of extra features such as RSS Feeds and most important of all anti virus protection Firefox enables you to disable websites downloading software by default. This means that everytime someone tries to download something as part of a web page - an all too frequent method for bad sites to get viruses/spyware onto your computer - an alert box will deploy giving you the chance to say "no actually I dont want your silly software thank you very much!!" Mozilla is also much faster than other browsers at displaying the pages, especially if you install the "FasterFox" addon There is also a very nice addon from Firefox which gives different colors to the different tabs you have open, making it easier to see where you are

4) Use Splash Pages
Splash pages are simply quick loading web pages, which are generally the size of a normal web window i.e. no scrolling down is required. There is normally a link which can be clicked to open the main target site in a new window The best way to use splash pages is to combine them with a name/email lead capture box, so that you have the chance to follow up on leads later Many splash pages are poorly designed or badly worded and therefore fail to achieve their full potential. You should remember that the "ad copy" in a page is the most important element. Poor "ad copy" will reduce the effectiveness of a spash page to virtually zero You should also be careful with images, as images will always draw the eye away from your "ad copy". So its important that any images underline the message you are trying to put across on the page. An image should "say" in summary what the words are saying in the "ad copy". If the image is suggesting something different to the message, then its likely people will see the image - even remember the image - but have no idea whatsoever what the page was actually about!! Avoid using the "STOP" sign in splash pages. Some people take up most of the space in the window by displaying some kind of "stop surfing" message. However this means someone then has to scroll down the page to see what the message of the page is. It is absolutely essential that people can "get your message" in no more than 5 seconds. You can do this by a great proven headline

5) Concentrate On Lead Capture Pages
The biggest mistake people make with Traffic Exchanges is signing up for some affiliate scheme, and then clicking for credits for the affiliate URL. This is a recepie for disaster!! People will rarely if ever respond to an affiliate URL or sales page - this is in part because they are concentrating on earning credits However if the main purpose of your page is to collect names and emails then you can add these people into your autoresponder automatically and send them a series of email messages over the next few weeks. You will be surprised how many more people will respond to emails, than just visiting your site "blind"

6) Surf For Banner Impressions
One of the things you will notice about all Trffic Exchanges is that they have a banner displayed somewhere in the surf frame. When someone clicks on this banner - no credits are earned - and the page opens up in a new window. So when people visit your site, as a result of seeing your banner, they are of much greater value to you. This is because they are actually interested in visiting your site. They are not earning any credits and so there is no timer. These people are many times more likely to join your program or buy your product, than people who view your site while surfing

7) Use A Rotator
A rotator is a single URL which rotates the different sites you have added to it. So if you had 10 sites in a rotator, then every time your rotator URL is "called" then a different one of those 10 sites would display. This has the advantage on a Traffic Exchange that if repeat hits were sent to the same person, they would actually get a different site

8) Track Your Advertising
Its very important in any advertising to monitor your responses. Its much easier to do this with a Lead Capture page, than with any other page. You can simply add a piece of code into the HTML FORM code, so that when someone enters their name/email, an extra variable will be sent to you, to show which page or site they were on when the form was filled in. At its simplest this could be done by changing the subject line of the CGI email that is used when the details of the webform are transferred into an email. In case you are unsure about all this, CGI Email, is a program hosted on your web server, which turns the contents of a webform into an email and sends it to you

9) Concentrate On Exchanges With A Longer Count Down
It is simple common sense that the longer your webpage has to be seen by other surfers the greater the chance that your page will convert to sales or signups. If a Traffic Exchange has a very short counter then it could be that your page wont display at all - especially if someone has a slow dial-up connection
Traffic Exchanges with longer count downs also perform much better for banners i.e. you will often get a much better click through rate - the number of times a banner is clicked per thousand impressions. As banners provide you with the best possible traffic from start pages, its worth spending more time on exchanges with longer timers

10) Compare The Alexa Rankings Of Exchanges
One useful shorthand guide to how good a Traffic Exchange is can be achieved by looking at its Alexa Ranking. Obviously if a Traffic Exchange is not in the top 200,000 out of all sites then its probably best left alone
If you follow these strategies you will have an excellent method of getting the very best from the time you spend surfing traffic exchanges


  Articles Source - Free Articles

About the Author Tim Fulcher is an independent writer and webmaster and maintains a number of websites including:
www.ebiz4every1.com
www.traffic-exchange-monitoring.com
www.profitchargerhits.com

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Most of MSIE's advantages are Firefox's disadvantages, and vice-versa. This article will discuss some advantages and disadvantages of MSIE in relation to Firefox.

Advantages

Integration with other Microsoft products
Microsoft often offers its customers good integration among its products, and MSIE is no exception. One can drag an Excel bar graph from an MSIE webpage onto an existing Excel document, or view a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation from within MSIE. Within a Microsoft-only corporate intranet, this integration is very helpful. However, for a business interacting with the outside world, the argument weakens since the foundation of the Internet is to share among different platforms. Outside users expect documents to be in platform-agnostic formats such as HTML or Acrobat PDF files. MSIE also offers strong integration with its Microsoft operating system, though is a double-edged sword, since it contributes to its security woes.

ActiveX and VBScript support
ActiveX refers to small Windows executable programs that can be run from MSIE, and VBScript is a client-side script for Windows code. Some business have heavily invested in either developing or purchasing custom ActiveX software (and/or VBScript), for applications ranging from web-based accounting to e-learning simulators.
The Firefox team made a conscious decision to support neither ActiveX nor VBScript, since they are not accepted web standards and are often the source of the security vulnerabilities within MSIE.
Since Firefox will not likely ever support ActiveX and VBScript, businesses whose products revolve around these technologies would be better served with MSIE than with Firefox.
Still some MSIE-only webpages Since MSIE formerly had such a large marketshare, some businesses' webpages still only display correctly in MSIE.
However, Firefox's increasing marketshare has caused many companies to revamp their pages to work correctly in Firefox also.
There are several reasons.
Businesses want to ensure that they can sell to the Firefox customers. Moreover, many of the users who purchase with credit cards have moved to Firefox because of the extra security for that sensitive transaction. Finally, many businesses see that it costs less to fix the pages, than to cover the "Why doesn't work in Firefox?" technical support calls support calls.

Arrives with a new Windows computer MSIE arrives installed new Windows and Mac computers; Firebird does not.
However, the initial MSIE is unpatched and thus riddled with security holes. Thus, novice Windows users are often disappointed as their computers become increasingly unresponsive with viruses and spyware. Thus, the convenience of having MSIE preinstalled on Windows is minimal, since Firebird can be downloaded and installed about as easily as patching the initial insecure MSIE. Microsoft has ceased new development of MSIE for the Mac, so it has decreasing usefulness on the Mac as an out-of-box browser.

Disadvantages

Closed source and tied to a U.S. company
Closed source prevents users from reviewing the code to ensure that there are no security backdoors included in the software.
This is particularly important for Internet communication software, as the U.S. government may approach Microsoft to either divulge or include security backdoors that can be used for information surveillance, especially on foreign governments or high-risk suspects. Some governments don't want to have a foreign country's closed source software at the heart of their information network. This may partially account for the higher adoption rate of open-sourced Firefox in countries outside the U.S.
Selling of other Microsoft items and forced end-of-life Part of any corporation's mission is to maximize profits. For Microsoft, this includes selling the maximum number of its own products and services.
So to use the newest MSIE, one has to purchase a license of their newest OS. MSIE's built-in search only works with Microsoft's MSN search, versus Firefox's built-in search toolbar that uses technically superior Google as the default and is user-selectable. Moreover, since MSIE is closed-source software, users always face the possibility of forced end-of-life of the MSIE software and anything the user has built around it.
Total cost of ownership
Both browsers can be downloaded and used free of charge, so their initial cost is equal.
For technical support questions, both are widely enough used that many solutions to common problems can be found in free online public forums. Telephone support for Firefox costs $39.95 per incident, and Microsoft costs between $35.00 per incident and can cost over $200.00 for advanced issues.
However, MSIE has heavier ongoing support costs due to the nearly monthly security patches that are required. Also, there are ongoing costs from lost work time due to the poor stability and viruses when using MSIE. Finally, with MSIE requiring the newest version of their operating system, it forces the total cost of ownership to include the cost of updating all licenses to Windows XP SP2.


About The Author:
Matt Bacak became "#1 Best Selling Author" in just a few short hours. Recent Entrepreneur Magazines e-Biz radio show host is turning Authors, Speakers, and Experts into Overnight Success Stories.
Discover The Secrets http://promotingtips.com

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Magazine Resources
Before building an online store, it's important to research and understand your niche market. Building an e-commerce store is the easy part, compared to making sure that you understand the market. A great way to gather research about online retailing is by reading magazines dedicated to online marketing and your market niche. There are several magazines dedicated to online retailing, as well as many other more general magazines that will help you get started.

Practical eCommerce Magazine
Practical Ecommerce is a very resourceful magazine. It's full of online retailing advice on subjects as diverse as search engine optimization, shopping cart software, usability, customer conversion, pay per click advertising and product sourcing. You can subscribe online for both print and digital versions.

Internet Retailer Magazine
Internet Retailer is another resourceful magazine for the e-commerce merchant. Internet Retailer's website provides daily news about what's going on in the e-commerce world. It provides case studies that you can learn from and explores a variety of e-commerce tools and topics such as using e-mail to boost conversion rates, search engine spiders and holiday traffic and sales.

Entrepreneur Magazine
For general reading about building a business, a new eCommerce merchant should check out Entrepreneur magazine. Entrepreneur Magazine often has great articles for online retailers, as well as inspirational stories from successful business owners as well as tips and tricks for business owners.

Best of luck! ePro Sales