Leaving a legacy... great for life but terrible for web pages. Find out how adding a snippet of code to your old web pages can get up to 27% more of them spidered and indexed. Not only that, your rankings could go up 5 to 8% as well. Oh yea... it's as easy as pushing a button and won't cost you anything. All this and a lot more in this issue of IMS. Enjoy!

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How to Blog for Search Engines

Rick Butts (yeh that's his real name) has 11 videos showing how to blog for profits. Using a secret "pinging" method, which Rick shows in the videos, he can get Yahoo to spider within hours. Google comes in a day or so.

If you want to be "master of your domain" and have the search engines come running like calling a puppy, this video series is for you.

Ready to go blogging? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/rbv

But wait... that's not all! Once you have your site up and running, you can now blog and ping automatically. Programmer Jonathan Leger took Rick's videos and designed a super tool to spider your site, blog your pages, ping them, submit them to Google, and send you a detailed progress report automatically. Now you can get your entire site crawled in just a couple of days, without having to do any of the work.

Want to blog and ping automatically? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/rbb

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News, Views and Clues

Up to 27% more pages in the search engines...

Are you losing web pages in the search engines. Is your positioning going down. Are newer sites coming up ahead of you? Here's something that may surprise you as being the reason why.

Very quietly on December 15th 2004, W3.org the world wide web's official "governing body" posted new architecture guidelines. You can read the full paper at the w3.org web site, but after spending the better part of a day "down the rabbit hole" I can tell you what's in there.

The web is evolving. So is the technology. Old "legacy" html code just doesn't cut it anymore and has been officially declared invalid.

Ever since the 4.01 Specification W3C recommendation in late 1999, web page authors were supposed to be putting a DTD, document type declaration at the beginning of their html code.

According to W3, "HTML 4.01 specifies three DTDs (Strict, Frameset, Transitional), so authors must include one of the following document type declarations in their documents." Notice the strong wording, "must include."

Few people did and it took a long time before html software and wysiwyg editors began inserting the code. The W3 stressed, yo dudes... "The document type declaration is mandatory at the beginning of each HTML document." Notice they've gone from "must" to "mandatory."

In case you're wondering, the DTD is the first line of your html document and should look similar to this:

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"

In addition to the DTD, we're supposed to add character encoding. Which conforms to the "Universal Character Set (UCS), defined in ISO 10646. This standard defines a repertoire of thousands of characters used by communities all over the world."

Commonly used character encodings on the Web include ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-5, SHIFT_JIS, EUC-JP and UTF-8. But it doesn't matter which one you use as, "This specification does not mandate which character encodings a user agent must support."

However, "Conforming user agents must correctly map to ISO 10646 all characters in any character encodings that they recognize (or they must behave as if they did)."

So in other words, you need a character encoding or Charset. You can use any one you want 8859-1, UTF-8, whatever, so long as it conforms and correctly maps to the IOS 10646 standard. (Both 8859-1 and UTF-8 do.)

Hmm, I thought I'd do a little investigating:

w3.org uses...
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"

Google uses...
meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"


- - Adv - -

RSS Made Easy

Want spiders to visit your website daily or even several times per day? Would you like your content to spread all over the world in a flash? Want other sites linking to you like crazy, without linking back? Want to get listed in Yahoo's directory for free?

If you've been putting off learning about blogging and RSS, then you need RSS Made Easy. It will show you how some my friends are getting tons of traffic and incoming links, not within months... but just a few days.

Ready for easy to learn blogging and RSS? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/rme

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So what was I using on my web pages? Turns out that every web page I created in since January 2004 follows the rules. But before that, it starts to fall apart. I did not include a valid Charset. And I didn't have a DTD in any article, web page or newsletter I wrote prior to July 2002 when I switched to Mozilla as my html editor.

Turns out, not only was I missing "mandatory" elements, a lot of the html code generated by PageMill, FrontPage, HomePage and other editors I'd used over the years was literally trash. How do I know? I used the W3.org's own validation service.

( If you want to clean and upgrade your code, here's the free url to push button validate your pages: http://validator.w3.org/file-upload.html )

Without the Charset in my html page, here are the results I received when I first ran the Validator on my pages:

"It is necessary to have this (Charset) declaration before the page can be declared to be valid. I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents."

Simply put... without a Charset the web page is declared officially "invalid." Very spooky indeed.


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SEO course... Stomping the Search Engines

These SEO techniques brought a website from nowhere to #3 position on Google, while beating out over 3/4 million competing pages. The keyword is so competitive it gets over 300,000 searches per month. And it was achieved in a couple of months, not years.

Isn't it time you changed your online fortune? Why not start "Stomping the Search Engines" today?

Ready to stomp? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/stp

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If you're like me and have been writing articles, newsletters and making web pages for several years, chances are you've got a whole lot of "legacy" documents that are no longer valid... but how would the search engines behave if I did update and validate my html.

You guessed it! I decided to set up a little experiment. I started adding the DTD and Charset to some of my old web pages. Ones that have been around for couple of years.

Let's fire up the most W3.org compliant html editor Mozilla, which you can download for free at Mozilla.org. Here is the code it inserts in every new html document.

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type">
<title> spicy title goes here</title>
</head>

Turns out that 78% of the pages I validated and updated got respidered. Of those that got respidered, 27% of them stuck in the index, and my position in the SERPs (search engine results pages) went up an average of 5 - 8%. Woo Hoo!

Then while on the phone with my friend Leslie Rohde (who - being OptiSpider's programmer - knows more about search engines than just about anyone else) asked if we had a control set where we just changed the content but didn't add the DTD and Charset?

Without it, how would we know if the pages were getting spidered because the modification date had changed as opposed to adding the compliance codes. (Leslie reminded me that spiders always check the modification date, no change usually means the pages won't get respidered.)


- - Adv - -

Can raw beginners get top listings in Google?

Sure... you bet they can, and I have proof. Here's how beginners or anyone else, can get top 10 rankings, with no hype, or BS, even if you don't know anything about the internet, or making web pages.

Let SEO Website Builder do all the work for you. ==> http://www.cdzn.com/wsb

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Doh! Back to the drawing board... or at least I thought. Wait a minute... the experiment failed due to the lack of a control piece, but the data is very relevant.

Adding the DTD and Charset achieved several things...

1. It gave my pages the mandatory w3.org html code
2. By making a change, the modification date changed
3. Making the change = 78% more spidering activity
4. 27% more pages ended up in the index as a result
5. More pages in the index = increased saturation
6. More saturation focuses more PR and link pop
7. More PR and link pop increases position in SERPs
8. Better SERPs = better chance to be found
9. First to get found, first chance to make the sale
10. Sales have gone up as a result

So to know for sure, which changes affected the results, I'd have to set up another experiment... this time with a control piece. But I'm ecstatic about the results. Any time I can go from 100 to 127 pages in the index, just by adding a snippet of code, and move up five spots in the SERPs to boot, I'm a happy camper.

All you need to do, is verify your code using the push button validator at the w3.org web site. Who knows, by doing so, you could end up with more pages spidered and indexed and increase your overall search engine positioning.

What are you going to do with your legacy pages?

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That's it for this issue my friend. Thank you for reading. We'll chat again soon. Until then, here's wishing you all the best for online success.

Michael Campbell

President & CEO Dynamic Media Corporation
#108 - 383 East 37th Avenue Vancouver BC Canada
Providing successful marketing strategies since 1988.
For internet marketing advice phone +1 604 874-6655

Author of...

Revenge of the Mininet... Advanced linking diagrams and strategies for higher search engine positioning and increased revenue from affiliate programs.

Clickin' it Rich... The complete work from home business training system. Follow Fast Track #1 in the Action Plan and you could be making money online in as little as five hours.

Nothing but 'Net... From zero to $750,000 in less than a year, with virtually no advertising costs. This internet marketing strategy is now a free downloadable ebook.

Internet Marketing Secrets Newsletter... Learn how to harness the money making power of multiple internet revenue streams like search engines, affiliate programs, paid advertising, opt-in email, newsletters, ebooks and lot more in internet marketing secrets. Subscribe now and get a free lifetime membership.

Legal stuff... Copyright 2005 Dynamic Media Corporation. All rights reserved world wide. All trademarks and servicemarks are property of their respective owners. The information contained in this newsletter is the opinion of the author based on his personal observations and years of experience. Neither Michael Campbell or Dynamic Media Corporation assume any liability whatsoever for the use of or inability to use any or all of the information contained in this publication. Use this information at your own risk.