The cost of Pay-Per-Click advertising is high and rising. Click fraud (estimated by some to be as high as 35%) just makes things worse and increases click costs. And now, more and more people are saying they do not click on sponsored ads. Why you ask? Simple, they do not trust they will get relevant information when they click on a sponsored ad versus an organic link. Web surfers now understand through personal experience that PPC ads simply go to the highest bidder pretty much without regard for relevancy. In the early days (i.e. - 3 to 5 years ago); this was not the case. Back then, relevancy mattered (Overture, now Yahoo, was a leader in this area)..

Improved search engine rank is attainable through good search engine optimization, part of which is the maximizing of your Google Page Rank through intelligent linking with other web pages. In this article we will look at the argument for attaining high listings through a linking strategy.

Google Page Rank is a buzz term at the moment since many believe it to be more important to your search engine listing than search engine optimization. If we ignore for the moment the fact that Page Rank is, in itself, a form of SEO, then there are arguments for and against that belief..

Most webmasters go totally "gaga" for top 10 rankings in Google. And for good reason, Google is the most dominant search engine on the net and will deliver the largest amount of traffic.

Even those webmasters who are fortunate enough to get No. 1 rankings for their keywords in all the three major search engines will tell you Google is the one that will deliver the majority of their traffic. Hands down.

More importantly, those same webmasters will also inform you, getting top 10 rankings in Google often means your site will prove profitable. Mainly because obtaining targeted traffic is usually your first obstacle in creating a viable online business. In other words, if you get top ten listings in Google for good searchable keywords, it is almost impossible not to earn money..

My top 10 ways to improve search engine rankings are based on 7 years of banging my head against the world wide web's search engines and reading numerous books on top 10 SEO tactics.

Let me say first of all that there are a lot of books, sources and tutorials that make promises of getting your website into the top 10 spots on the major search engines. Most of these are self promoting and the end result is that you have to hire these people to accomplish the things they say you can do on your own..

As a Web Developer and SEO consultant I deal with many existing website owners who are looking to modify or improve their website. I also deal with many people who are looking to start their web presence with a new website. Through both of these interactions there is often a common theme; a misunderstanding or an attitude. I call this a misconception of reality, as often the reality of what the Internet can actually do for the persons business and what they think it can do differ massively.

Often it is presumed that by simply owning a domain and having a website built and published on the Internet, thousands of people will magically find the website, visit it and buy their products. "If you build it, they will come" should be removed from the vocabulary as soon as possible if you are to adjust attitudes to the underlying search technology..

Ask Google - search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others.

For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn't have as much value and doesn't receive the same weight as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link - the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred..

A robots.txt file, commonly mis-represented as a robot.txt file, is a file encoded in the ANSI text format. This basically means it is a simple text file which should be created in Notepad. It controls how search engine crawlers (robots) look at your website and can be used to specify how certain areas of your site is indexed or to give instruction to specific search engines..

The Google PageRank Toolbar in SEO circles is a hotly debated item, as are most issues dealing with Google. Some say it's useless, others say it gives you a general overview of your site's standing in Google. Regardless of who is right, this Toolbar shouldn't be ignored nor worshipped, just closely watched..

If you've ever used the removal tool, you'll notice that the page count of the website in question has not been changed, but rather the pages simply fail to show up. Why is this? Because with the URL Removal Tool, these URLs have not been deleted; they have only been filtered out. So even though these pages appear to have been removed, they are certainly still in the database somewhere.

There is a patent application in the US Trademark Office from Monika Henzinger, published in July, 2005, that certifies that she has figured out a way of determining a document's "freshness." In an attempt to associate this new term with Google's other patented terminology (namely PageRank and TrustRank), forum posters are now referring to the concept as "FreshRank."

If you run an online website or business you have probably already heard about Google's Supplemental Index. You may have even heard it being referred to as Google's Gulag, Google's Digital Dungeon, or the moniker that seems to have stuck: Google Hell.

Hate it or love it, webmasters are passionate about the big G. There's no argument on that point for one good reason: Google simply delivers the most search engine traffic on the web. For any webmaster with at least a few white SEO connected brain cells Google can supply 60% or more of their traffic..