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How to Optimize for Google: Part 3 of 3

2008-05-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

In Part 1 and Part 2 of How to Optimize for Google I discussed general website optimization, links, and Google webmaster tools. In Part 3 we will look at a number of other considerations which play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on some tactics which are best avoided.

Completing Optimization: Other Considerations

Redirects
If you need to use redirects on your site, it is very important to use the correct one. If a page is moving to a new location, or being removed all together, it is very important to have this page redirected to either the new location or the next closest page using a Permanent 301 Redirect.

While rare, if a page is being moved to a new location for a short term, with the intent of it returning to the original location, then and only then, will you want to use a Temporary 302 redirect. For more information please see Redirects: Permanent 301 vs. Temporary 302 .

Non WWW Redirects
To help eliminate page rank split, and provide your site with a little extra value, implement a non-www redirect. What this redirect will do is change the URL to include the "www" whenever a URL is accessed that does not include it. This can help to consolidate links to the correct page and give your site some additional strength. For more help on Non WWW redirects please see: How to 301 Redirect Non-WWW to WWW URL's

HTTP Headers
Check your page headers! If you have implemented any form of redirect on your site including mod rewrites, check your HTTP headers. You may be surprised at what you find. Some forms of redirects may use a 302 code where you really want a 301. By checking your headers you can ensure all is well, and troubleshoot problems. On our website we have added our own HTTP Header Checker for your convenience.

Home Page URL
Never have more than one URL for your home page. If your home page is available and displays on more than one URL, then utilize 301 redirects on all but the main URL you want to focus on - in most cases "http://www.domain.com/". All your links pointing to the home page should direct to the exact same URL otherwise you will split the value of your home page into multiple duplicate URL's.

Google sees "http://www.domain.com" and "http://www.domain.com/index.html" as different pages, but displaying the same content. This splits the overall value of your home page, and can decrease the chances of rankings. By keeping it consistent with a single URL, you remove this split and retain more of the strength.

In theory having your home page split like this could bring with it duplicate content penalties, however, I have yet to see this actually happen - that said, it is best to avoid the risk all together.

XML Sitemap
XML Sitemaps are great for ensuring that Google and the other engines are able to spider your entire site. While an XML sitemap will not directly impact your search rankings it can help as Google is more likely to see any SEO based changes more quickly, which in turn can have an impact.

Robots.txt
This is the first file all search engines look for every time they visit your site. While placing a blank robots.txt file in your root folder will not help with search rankings, it will help reduce 404 errors appearing in your log files.

It is also highly recommended that if your site utilizes an XML sitemap, to include a call to this sitemap within the Robots.txt file. Simply add the following line to ensure that the major engines (including Google) can find your sitemap:

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

Potential Blockages
If you are finding that your site is simply not being indexed it is possible that you are blocking the spiders in one way or another.

Start with checking your main site navigation, if you are using Flash or some other fancy form of navigation that could be your problem right there. Next check your HTTP headers to ensure that your home page is returning a 2xx code which indicates that the clients' request was successfully received. Finally take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools for any noted errors. If you are blocking Google, chances are you will be able to uncover the issue with these steps.

Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can be quite damaging to your rankings. Ensure that all content on your site is unique. Never steal or "borrow" content from another site, and never cut and paste large portions of text from one page of your site to the next. By keeping all pages of your site entirely original you stand the best chances of getting a thumbs up from Google.

Fresh Content / Regular Updates
Update your content. In highly competitive markets, sites with old static content can often slip away. Keep your content fresh and updated to keep bringing Google back to your site. If they find new pages and updated pages with every visit, they will come back more often.

Site Age
The age of your site can also have an effect on search engine rankings. While there is little you can do (short of keeping the same domain) to help on this matter, remember that the longer your site is online, the better its chances for success. It pays to select the perfect domain right from the start and not to change domains mid-stream. Older sites that stand the test of time add a level of authority in Google's eyes. New sites seldom see rankings for competitive terms in their first year.

Note: Site Age is determined not by the date the domain was originally registered by rather by the date Google first discovered content on your site.

Load Time
Load time can have an impact in your Google AdWords Quality Score but it is unknown for sure if it can also impact your organic search rankings. It is best to keep your load time to as little as possible. If it is not already a part of the Google Algorithm, it likely will be soon. Besides, it is also best in order to give your site visitors the best experience possible.

Server Up Time
This can be a rather significant issue. If you find that your web hosting company has a history of down time, change hosts. If Google comes to visit your site once and it is down, not to worry, they will come back, but if Google visits your site often only to find that it is unavailable, you can find yourself with drastically depleted rankings.

Google Local
If you have a traditional brick and mortar store, consider submitting to Google Local . While this will not directly impact your regular organic rankings, you may find your site ranking above the organic results with a "local business results" map listing. This tends to be most common when your business is near the geographic center of a city, and when the search phrase uses a geographic modifier.

W3C Compliant Code
There is much speculation as to if W3C compliant code can have a positive impact on search rankings, and the majority believe "maybe" with some saying "yes". Regardless, it is definitely a good idea to have your site be W3C Compliant if at all possible. Not only may it help you in terms of search rankings, but having compliant code can decrease load times, and help to ensure cross-browser compatibility, all of which are good things. If at all possible, it is recommended that sites be made to be compliant.

Many experts who took part in the SEOMoz "Google Search Engine Ranking Factors" lean towards it not being a big contributor, however, it may be an issue if Google has difficulties indexing a page properly.

A code validation service is available at validator.w3.org .

How to Optimize for Google: Part 2 of 3

2008-04-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

Optimizing for top Google rankings includes a number of factors. In Part 1 of 3 we discussed onsite optimization. In Part 2 we will touch on incoming links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools.

LINKS
Links are very important in today's Google rankings, but just how many links you need will depend on both the competitiveness of your target phrases, and the quality of the incoming links themselves.

Essentially the number one rule of links is to keep it relevant! Topical relevance is very important in order for inbound links to give your site the most value. If the page that links to you is relevant that is good, if the entire site linking to you is relevant, that is better.

First to get an idea of how many links you may need, take a look at the top 10 ranking sites in Google and record how many links Yahoo is noting for each site. (This is because Google does not display anywhere near all the links they have noted). The average of this count is often a good indication of how many links your site may need.

There are many different ways to get links to your site including the age old reciprocal link trade, directory links, article based links, and links from press releases.

Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal linking has seen its value drop considerably over the past few years, however, if the site you are trading with is relevant you can still receive value from these links.

Paid Links
Google frowns on paid links, however that is not to say that they don't work. Often you can find highly reputable and relevant websites which are offering paid advertising spots. If these links are coded to link directly to your website without passing through any tracking redirects, you will in many cases see value in the form of both direct traffic and increased link densities and rankings.

Articles
Writing and distributing industry specific articles is a great way to help boost both your link counts and site traffic; for examples of such content see StepForth's SEO Blog News articles. Consider writing articles on a regular basis and submitting them to some of the more popular services such as EzineArticles. Be sure to include a link to your site from somewhere within the article, or at the very least within your bio. Try to use a target phrase as part of the anchor text for additional value.

Press Releases
If something of importance has happened to your company such as a new product launch, or other notable achievement - essentially anything news worthy, put out a press release. Submit this press release through services such as PRWeb or PRNewsWire. Again, be sure to include a target phrase as part of the anchor text.

There are also a number of places you can get links that have basically turned south, and are not generally recommended. These include signatures in form posts, guest books, and other typically free links.

Forum Posts
Forum posts can help to marginally raise your link counts; however, with this one you must be careful. Only add a link to your site in your signature if both the forum allows it, and you are a respected member of the forum. If you are a solid contributor and your posts have depth and meaning, and the forum is highly relevant to your site, then having a link in your signature may give your site some juice. Posting wildly to random forums will in most cases get yourself banned, and will be both a waste of time and potentially make you and your site look bad.

Guest Books
In nearly all cases, do not post your link to guest books. If you happen to stumble upon a guestbook that is highly relevant to your site, the other comments are relevant to your site, and you have something useful (and again relevant) to say, then perhaps consider it, but typically focusing on links from guest books is considered SPAM and is best avoided all together.

Blog Comments
Having a link from your blog comments is not necessarily a bad thing. If you find a relevant blog post of use, and have something relevant and constructive to say, don't be afraid to enter your link into the "URL" field of the form, but don't try stuffing links into the comment itself.

Link Farms & Bad Neighborhoods
These are sites that allow you to simply post your link no stríngs attached. They are mostly long scrolling pages with countless links. Stay away from them. If you see one, run in the other direction. These links are bad, will not help with your rankings, and in some cases can actually damage your rankings.

Stay away from sites that cross link with obvious spammers. These networks of SPAM sites are not ones you would want your site associated with, and if you achieve links from enough of these sites it can adversely impact your rankings. Even more important, NEVER link to any of these sites - as that will certainly tie in your connection to them and give Google reason to discount your rankings.

DMOZ, Yahoo and Other Directories
Directory based links can be of significant help, especially if they are from highly reputable directories, the two biggest being DMOZ.org and the Yahoo Directory.

Getting a site into DMOZ is like Gold. Google loves links from DMOZ and your site will reap the benefits. The big catch however is actually getting your site into the directory in the first place. Find the perfect category for your site and check to see if it has an editor. If you see a link "Volunteer to edit this category" try and find another relevant location. Pages without active editors take much longer to get listed into. Once you find the perfect directory submit your site every 4-6 months until listed. If you are lucky you will get in eventually.

Yahoo Directory is seen as an authority in the eyes of Google, and getting your site in will help your link reputation. This link does come at a price of $299 per year, but will play a role in helping your website achieve top rankings.

There are a number of other valuable directories out there that can help you with your search rankings. Before submittíng to any directory the key is a combination of relevance and authority. If the directory is relevant and active, it may be worth considering.

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS
Google Webmaster Tools can be very useful for your optimization efforts. It may not directly help you obtain higher rankings, but can help you trouble shoot if you are experiencing problems. It will also allow you to remove URL's that you don't want indexed and set various preferences such as your domain, crawl rate, and geographic target.

XML Sitemaps
This is the most common reason people use Google Webmaster Tools - the submission of their XML sitemap. While you can use your robots.txt to have Google find your XML sitemap, by submitting it directly to Google you can check up on the spidering status.

Error checking
Webmaster Tools is also quite useful for checking on various error URL's that Google may know about. Under the Diagnostics > Web Crawl you can view any errors that Google has to report on your site. By cleaning up any errors you can help boost your chances of rankings.

Links
From inside Google Webmaster Tools you can get a much clearer look at what sites Google is noting as having links to you, and give you a better indication of the need, if any, to raise your link counts.

WWW Preference
Be sure to select your domain preference under Tools > Set Preferred Domain. In nearly all cases you will want to select the version including the "www" .

SUMMARY
Inbound links play a significant role in successful Google rankings. By focusing on relevant links, as well as by diversifying where you get those links from, you can build a solid foundation for your search rankings today and into the future.

Stay tuned for Part 3 (of 3) where I will discuss other considerations including redirects, HTTP headers, and a number of other factors which play a role in successfully conquering Google.

How to Optimize for Google : Part 1 of 3

2008-04-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

In today's online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.

In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.

The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly. If you are interested in reading more, please see Keyword Research for Organic SEO.

Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords, it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still provide a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.

Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word "hotel" would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to "Victoria BC hotel" you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
There are many on-site factors that play a role in your search engine rankings. Here are a number of those factors and what you can do to increase your chances of success.

Title Tag
The title tag plays one of the most important roles in search results at Google, and is almost always the heading Google chooses for each of its listings. Placement of your target phrase is best used near the start of the tag and repeated again in the middle or near the end. Three uses of your target phrase may be helpful in some instances, as long as it is not too overwhelming. For best results each page on your site should have a totally unique title tag.

It is also important to remember that because Google will use this title as the main heading for your listing, you will want to keep it attractive to potential searchers. Try to also add a call to action, or other wording to help make your listing appear attractive to searchers.

To help illustrate the fact Google takes this tag into consideration, simply do a search for your target phrase and take a look at the titles of the top 10. I tried a search for a rather broad term "hotel" and saw that all 10/10 listings had it in the title tag, and 6/10 had it as the very first word. A quick scan showed that the entire top 30 either had the word hotel, or hotels in their title tags.

If you do only one thing to your website, make sure that all your title tags are relevant, unique, and contain your target phrase for each page.

Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description tag is still occasionally used by Google as the description which appears in the search results themselves. While this used to be a more common practice Google tends to use it most often on sites with very limited content, or those which are flash based. I have seen it still used for content rich sites, however this is less common.

The Meta Description tag still has an impact on search rankings. Your best bet when using this tag is to keep it short and sweet with your target phrase close to the start and not repeated more than 3 times. Like the title tag, each page on your site should have its own unique description tag.

Meta Keyword Tag
When it comes to Google this tag is useless, and won't influence your rankings. There is some speculation as to whether a spammy keyword tag can however, have a negative effect on Google rankings. As a result, if you do utilize a keyword Meta tag for the smaller engines, it is best to keep it clean and play it safe.

Density
Keyword density plays a role in overall rankings; however, it is not as cut and dry as it once was. Once upon a time there was a magic number that when used could almost guarantee top rankings.

This is no longer the case. Today the ideal density varies from industry to industry, phrase to phrase. To find out what density you should aim for, take the top 10 or 20 search results and see what percentage those sites are using. In most cases you will find that the majority of these sites have a very similar density to one another, and this average density is a good estimation of what you should aim for.

Body Text and Keyword Placement
The location of relevant text on your site will help establish the overall importance of your target phrase. While you do not want to overwhelm the engines and site visitors with a bombardment of target phrases at the top of the page, try to sprinkle in some instances as close to the top of the page as possible.

Synonyms
Be sure to include various synonyms for your target phrases within your body text on your site. Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page for your main target phrases, which in turn can improve your odds.

To find possible synonyms you can use a thesaurus, but the best way is to search Google itself and see exactly what they consider to be similar. Simply search in Google for your target phrase preceded with a tilde, such as "~hotels". Next scan through the search results for any text Google has bolded. These are all words that Google considers to be related. Using the "~hotels" example Google brings up phrases such as 'travel', 'tourism', 'accommodation', as well as various hotel chain names such as 'Hilton Hotels'.

Keywords in Domain
There is still some speculation if having a target phrase as part of your top level domain (TLD) is of use to search rankings. From my experience, yes, there is value here, although, nothing like it was several years ago.

If you are starting off in the online world and are contemplating which domain to go for, consider one that uses your target phrase, assuming that it is both relevant to your business name, and uses no more than a single hyphen. While multiple hyphens in a domain can be successful, they are very common with highly spammy websites, so it is best to not take that route if possible.

While having a keyword located within your domain can provide some ranking juice, I would not suggest heading out and doing a domain swap. In most cases you would be better off working on your existing site than starting from scratch with a new domain.

Keywords in page specific URL
Using keywords for specific page URL's can also help add a little bit of value to your site, providing you use them responsibly. Consider using a keyword as a directory name and as part of a file name where it naturally makes sense to do so. If you have a website that focuses on tourism and includes local hotel listings, you may want to consider the following structure for your page on the Hilton:

MyTourismSite.com/Victoria/Accommodations/Hotels/Hilton.html

Heading Tags
Placement of target phrases within heading tags helps to establish the importance of those given phrases. That said do not over do it, or abuse it. Only place target phrases within a heading tag if it makes sense to do so, and don't flood a page with numerous tags. Heading tags are not as critical as they once were, but still a good contribution to a well optimized page.

Link Anchor text
This is the actual text you clíck on as part of a link. When full or partial target phrases are used within your text links they help pass on some value to the linked page for those phrases. This is also true when considering surrounding text. When the content around the link is also relevant, the link holds slightly more value.

While a link that simply states "clíck here" or "www.domainname.com" does have its place, they provide considerably less value than a link that would use "discount hotels" as its anchor.

Image Alt Text
While image alt text still plays a minor role, its biggest part is within the use of image based navigation. If you have an image linked to another page, the alt text will be attributed much the same way as standard link anchor text is.

Image Alt text should always be short and to the point and should accurately describe either the image itself, or the page the image is linking to. Do not use alt tags as a place to stuff keywords.

Inline Links
These are links that are found mid sentence or mid paragraph as opposed to a simple listing of links as found in a menu or possibly on a sitemap. Links found mid paragraph tend to pass on a little more value from the surrounding text and can provide more relevance to the linked page.

Site Navigation
It is absolutely imperative that your website be fully spiderable by the search engines. This may seem obvious, but often webmasters overlook Google's ability to crawl a website. Google has become very advanced in what links it can follow and how it can spider a website, but there are still some things that can cause significant roadblocks.

- Flash: One of the most commonly made mistakes is the use of flash. If flash is used as a sole means of site navigation then you can count on Google not viewing your internal pages, and having a significant disadvantage in terms of site rankings.

- Java Script / DHTML: These days most Java Script and even DHTML menus can be spidered by Google, however, this is not always the case. If your site utilizes any kind of fancy navigation and you are wondering why Google has not indexed your internal pages, check out Google's Cached Text version of your page. If you do not see any text links, then your navigation may be invisible to Google.

- Images: Image based navigation has been safe for many years now, but if your site uses this form of navigation it is essential to have brief, relevant alt text on all your buttons. This alt text will act much like standard anchor text for text based links. This is not only for the purpose of search ranking value, but take a look at Google's cached text version of your page. If you have image based links that do not have alt text, those links do not appear. This doesn't mean Google won't follow them, but for anyone viewing your site on a text based browser, your links will be invisible to them.

URL Structure
Avoid long elaborate URL's with extraneous characters. While Google has reached a point where they can index massive URL strings, it is best to avoid them if at all possible. For dynamic sites consider utilizing mod rewrites to significantly clean up the URL to not only make it more search engine friendly, but more user friendly as well.

MyTourismSite.com/?locid="victoria"&catid="accommodations"&type="hotel"&comp="hilton"

stands a better chance if cleaned up to read:

MyTourismSite.com/victoria/accommodations/hotels/hilton.htm

Six Quick and Simple Ways to Dominate Google Rankings!

2008-04-18T08:57:00.000-07:00

The reason Google is the most successful search engine in the world is because they provide the best search results; pages ranked by tangible value. That tangible value is a combination of content and links, with links being the more important factor (they assume any pages linking in will only link to good content or risk their own ranking.)

Here are a few tips that will help you take full advantage of Google's love of linking...

1.) Link Deep and with Relevance

So why is deeper better and what's this about relevance? Google figured out that a link to a homepage is only good if that homepage has the information the visitor needs. If a person clicks a link for "amazíng chocolate chip cookie recipe" and ends up on the home page, which has nothing of the sort, Google discounts it as a wasted link. On the other hand, if the link leads to the page containing info on the "Amazíng Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe," even five levels deep, the link has huge value to the visitor and to Google.

Want some proof? You already have it if you've ever used Google's AdWords pay per clíck service. They will not even accept PAID links to pages that are not the most relevant for their visitors, regardless of what you are willing to pay per clíck. Now that's saying something!

2.) Use Absolute Links Internally

It sounds complicated but it's not. Absolute links are those with a fixed full URL. There's another kind, called "relative" links that skip the first part of the domain and remain "relative" to the file structure. Let's take a look at the difference...

Here's the absolute link to the Google Ads page from Google's homepage: "http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/"

Here's what it might look like as a relative link: "./intl/en/ads/"

Long story short; absolute links help your SEO efforts and relative links don't.

3.) Use Keywords in Anchor Text

Use relevant keywords in your link anchor text (that is the text within the hyperlink.) Forget about "Clíck Here" like you see on so many sites. Not only does that not help your ranking, it actually lowers the relevancy of your real keywords because Google believes that if a word is important enough it will likely be used as part of a link to get the visitor where they want to go.

4.) Follow the 1% Solution

Make no more than 1% of your page text into links (both outbound and internal.) That is, if you have 500 words on the page there should be no more than 5 text links total. And don't overuse the same keyword text for the links. So if you have three mentions each of three different keywords, try to use each just once in a link. Then use similar text for any remaining links.

Example: If "chocolate chip cookies" is your main keyword phrase you might use "chocolate chip cookies" as the anchor text for one link and then "my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe" for another link.

It's also a good idea to use 10 Links Max per page whether you have 1,000 words or 10,000 words on that page.

5.) Add a Link Failsafe

This is really simple and almost nobody does it. Links get broken more often than we like. Sometimes it's because we moved a page and sometimes it has nothing to do with anything we consciously did (especially with blogs.) The solution is to create a custom 404 page (Page Not Found) that looks just like any other page on your site and has a simple note like "We're sorry we cannot find the page you are looking for. However, if you love cookies of all kinds we think you'll find exactly what you want by clicking on one of the following links..." Then of course you have a navigation system for them to follow.

6.) Get the Best Links Possible

This is extremely important yet often overlooked because it can be such a difficult and time consuming job. If you take nothing else away from this article, please take this... Finding the best possible inbound links is the single most important thing you can do to make the number one spot on Google.

Here are three tips to help minimize your time and effort while giving you results SEO experts charge an arm and a leg for.

A.) Get listed in directories.

Submít your site to the top directories like Jayde.com and DMOZ.org. Once they link to your site you will have great relevant inbound links and some instant credibility with Google.

Here are some great free directories in order of value, starting with the best... dmoz.org, jayde.com, webworldindex.com, turnpike.net, and directoryvault.com. Yahoo is important but charges $299 for commercial site inclusion.

B.) Use "Special Commands" to do the legwork for you.

The best linked sites can easily be found with a simple search command called "allinanchor:" Here's how to use it. Go to Google and type in "allinanchor:keyword goes here" (no quotes and no space after the colon.) Now hit Enter and you'll see the sites that have the highest relevancy for keywords used in anchor text. Look for any that you know are competitors and outrank your site.

Now take the URL for any of these and use this command "link:www.theirdomain.extension" (again with no quotes and no space after the colon.) This will show you all the sites linking in as well as internal pages linking back in.

In short, these two special commands give you an inside look at exactly how the competition does what it does with the results they get. This is huge!

C.) Use good SEO software whenever possible.

If you can afford to spend one or two hundred dollars to save huge amounts of time and get professional results, it's well worth it. Like many SEO professionals whose livelihood depends on results, I've been using SEO software to get top search engine placement for years. The best ones not only help you identify great link partners but will even help you contact them and make sure they don't cheat you in any way. I use SEO Elite and am still amazed by all it can do.

If possible, get a tool that also does rank checking and reporting. Once you begin you'll want to check rankings every so often and an automated tool will save you a ton of time. Oddly enough I bought SEO Elite primarily for rank checking then discovered it was worth its weight in gold as linking tool as well. So whatever tool you use, get as much out of it as you can. You might be pleasantly surprised.

About The Author
Mike Small is the founder of the free SEO (search engine optimization) site SEOpartner.com and author of numerous search engine optimization books and whitepapers including the SEO Notebook.

10 Silly Mistakes Even Internet Marketing Experts Make

2008-03-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

By Gobala Krishnan

Some of you may have seen something like the image above if you visited my blog in a few days- my domain got parked by GoDaddy. In fact I managed to renew it just in time before the domain expired and was put under GoDaddy’s expired domains market, which would mean that I will have to pay USD1,000+/- to get it back. Luckily for me, I had to pay only regular domain renewal fees.

In my case it was not a typical rookie mistake. I DID put my domain on auto-renew ever since I bought it but the problem is last month the credit card I’ve been using for over 5 years expired, and I was issued a new card. This meant that any recurring payment using the old card will fail as the new card has a different security number (at the back of the card).

To make things worse, during the renewal date I was in Indonesia for a 5-day holiday and had almost no Internet access. I went online for a couple of minutes but there were so many emails, I must have missed the warning notice from GoDaddy.

All things said, it was still rather silly on my part.

This brings me to an interesting topic - silly things we do as marketers.

Here’s a list of them, tell me if you’ve done any of it before:

Anti Domain-Auto-Renewal - As I mentioned in the story above. I’ve lost one or two domains before from this but those domains were not critical to my business. Still, the guy who got it just put up a “domain parking” page with loads of ads and is probably still getting some cash out of it.
Bad English Domains - I’ve done this with 2 domain names. The funny thing just as you hit the “Order” button you suddenly realize the spelling error but it’s just too late and you’re stuck with that domain for a year.
See Only, Don’t Buy - I once spent $230 a day in AdWords and got up the next morning to zero sales. I realized not too log after that the order link was broken - and I felt like a total idiot.
Neighborly Love is Bad - I once wrote the wrong address for my Aweber commissions, resulting in the checks being sent to my neighbor. Luckily for me, he had already move out by then and I retrieved my check from his mail box after checking my Aweber affiliate profile.
Who Moved My Affiliate Checks? - Sometimes people move around. I moved from apartment to house to apartment (5 times) in the past 4 years and I’m pretty sure there were some miniscule affiliate programs I signed up with that finally sent me a check - just to the wrong address!
Wrong Paypal Address - I did this once, send a huge sum of money to the wrong person. The I had to file a dispute and only through the grace of the receiver did I get my money back.
Come See My Download Files - In Cpanel you can choose to disable indexes of your directories. This way when someone types in yoursite.com/images they wont be able to see a listing of all the images. Most importantly, if they type in yoursite.com/download and you have no index page there (htm/html/php) they will be able to steal your products. If you have a WordPress blog, try typing in yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins and you will see what I mean
Premature Ejaculation- I’ve sent out an email for an affiliate product that read “Product X Is Live Now” only to realize that it would a good 12 hours before that happened. In my case you could forgive me because converting between time zones can be confusing.
Backups Are For Wimps - It’s soo easy to delete stuff, and by “stuff” I mean anything from your website files, your e-book source MS Word files, your database (MySQL databases are very easy to delete, just one click) and even your important emails with your login details. Then you realize you didn’t create a backup and you’re screwed. No choice but to spend another 15 days re-writing the same ebook.
[yourname, [fistname], Who’s Name? - How many times have you sent out an autoresponder broadcast email and got the variables wrong? Instead of getting “Hello Gobala” you get “Hello [firstname” - this always happens when: (a) You have more than one autoresponder service and each uses different variables, and you “copy and paste” carelessly (2) you typed in the variables manually, and you made a typo, oops!

Well there you go, 10 silly mistake even Internet marketing veterans make. I made all 10 of them, how many have you got?

SEO Copywriting Tips for Google, Yahoo and your Prospects

2008-03-24T19:48:00.000-07:00

It might not seem logical, but a web site that's well-written for human consumption with a little SEO help usually is also well-received by the robots of search engines like Google and Yahoo.

So, what does "well-written" mean? Here are some tips to good SEO copywriting for Google, Yahoo and site visitors.

SEO Copywriting Tips – How to Write Great Web Site Content

Keyword research: This topic deserves a whole article on its own, but suffice to say that you'll want to base your site content on the keyword terms that you know are most popular among the audience you're trying to reach. There are online tools available that can help you determine the right keywords for your company. Among them are WordTracker and Keyword Discovery.
One topic per page: If your company makes 5 different products, you'll need to devote at least one page per topic.
Details, details: Each topic should be covered in enough detail that the site visitor can determine whether to contact you for more information. From an SEO standpoint, the more detail you provide on each topic, the more easily the search engines will be able to determine the relevance of your site to that keyword.
Kill the sales brochure: Internet users don't appreciate going to your web to find only a sales brochure. Avoid flowery language; it usually signifies a page that's light on content and heavy on sales pitch, which the search engines won't rank well. Good SEO copywriting will focus on objective facts about your company's products and services, with a call-to-action for more information.
Create a content hierarchy: The more detail, the better, but be considerate of your site visitors' time. Good SEO copywriting separates content into multiple pages and creates a hierarchy for your pages with most important information first, least important last. The most important pages you'll want on your navigation bar, with lesser pages linking off those. Make sure you include a site map, though, that lists all your web site's pages.
Keyword density: In order for search engines to be able to rank your pages for a particular keyword, that keyword has to be used on your page. At the same time, the more often you use it, the more relevant the page will seem. ONE CAVEAT: Don't go overboard. Writing should sound natural to the human visitors you're trying to reach. Search engines can penalize you for "overoptimizing" by using the keyword too often (known as keyword stuffing or spamming).

Types of Content to Consider for Your Company Web Site

Part of the SEO copywriting process is project planning. It's important to take the time to consider what information people would want to know about your company. Here are some types of content well received by Internet visitors and search engines:

Product details, including features/benefits, specifications, data sheets, diagrams, flow-charts, video demonstrations and photos (with alt tags, see below)
Technical tips, product troubleshooting guides, user manuals
Customer testimonials, case studies
Industry definitions
Product selection guides, comparative information

Advice on Adding PDFs to your Site

Search engines have become more sophisticated in being able to index varying file types. PDFs work fine for information that site visitors might want to print out and keep. But, if you use PDFs, make sure they open in a separate browser. Also, add a link to your home page somewhere on each PDF; otherwise, site visitors that enter your site from a search engine via the PDF won't have navigation to take them to the rest of your site.

Where to Get Ideas for Good SEO Content

Type your top keywords into Google and Yahoo and see what sites and pages come up on the first or second page of results. This will give you a good idea of some of the content that search engines like. More specifically, take a look at:

Competitor sites
Industry portal sites
Industry magazine sites
Resource sites

See what types of content they provide that your site could emulate (not copy).

Other On-Page SEO Copywriting Tips

Once your content is written, it's time to place it on the page. Here are some additional details you'll need to be concerned with to complete the SEO copywriting process:

Title tags: Make sure each page title tag is unique and complements the content of that page. For instance, if your page is about "blue suede shoes", then your title tag might be "Blue Suede Shoes | ABC Company"
Description tags: Likewise, you'll want each page description tag to be unique and complementary to the page it describes. This is the information that many of the search engines use to display a description of your page.
Keyword tags: Most search engines have de-emphasized use of the keyword tag, but we feel it's a useful tool to help you organize your site content. If you followed the advice above regarding one topic per page, then your keyword tag would be pretty short and limited to that topic. It'll probably have more than one term in it as there might be multiple ways to describe the topic, but this is a good check that you're in the process of writing a well-optimized page.
Alt tags: You can use the meta alt tag to help search engines interpret what your nav buttons and images are about. Search engines can't "see" images, so unless you specifically tell them, that information will be ignored. If you have a picture of blue suede shoes, use the Alt tag to label it as "blue suede shoes."
Internal linking: Build your keyword phrases into the links on your pages that are used to navigate from page to page. For instance, a call to action might be "Contact ABC Company for more information about our blue suede shoes," with the phrase "more information about our blue suede shoes" as the link. Avoid using "clíck here" as the link.

I've created quite a to-do líst of SEO Copywriting Tips, but when done properly, your SEO copywriting efforts will help yield long-term results in the way of top placement on Google and Yahoo and, most importantly, increased opportuníty to reach new potential customers.

About The Author
Angela Charles is president of Pilot Fish, an Akron, Ohio, search engine optimization and web design firm specializing in industrial clients.

Search Engine Optimization is Only the Beginning to Marketing Online

2008-03-23T20:36:00.001-07:00

Search Engine Optimization is Not Always the Answer

Search engine optimization has a purpose. Keyword targeting lets search engines link their users to your website when they look for your keywords. They will not do this satisfactorily without optimizing your site with proper web design techniques. Unfortunately, however, it is more complicated than that. Have you ever wondered why Google will almost always place Ebay on the first few pages when anything is entered into the search field accompanied with the word buy? The word buy has been targeted from more sites than you could count so what makes Ebay special.

For example, take the word bike. If a person uses Google by searching for the string 'buy bike', a page from Ebay will usually be listed before any of the major bicycle makers. It goes without saying that any of the major bicycle dealers have spent a great deal more time targeting keywords related to bikes than a site that manages hundreds of thousands of different products. The answer to this problem is the nature of this article.

Can My Website Compete?

The answer is to increase the importance of your site in the eyes of the major search engines. Ebay gets searched before many other sites because it has been decided by the search engines to be more popular with internet users. So what I am offering the little guy is a way to do what Ebay and the other 'big dogs' have done to become popular.

The world of search engines boil down to the stereotypical high school hierarchy. Search engines pay more attention to those that are popular. In high school, teens usually become popular by having popular people associate with them. The online world is no different. But how do search engines know that popular sites are associating with you? That is an easy one - they link to your website. The three biggest search engine players all crawl the web indexing links to and from all the websites that they have found. They create a ranking system based on many factors, but the most substantial one is how many sites link to you. It could be argued that an optimized site is key, and my opinion expressed here is based on the assumption that your site has been built with proper design techniques. It is also assumed that you have well written content based on your main products or ideas. If you feel that your website does not currently qualify as well written or properly designed, I recommend that you rectify these issues before attempting to build your popularity as it may turn out to be a waste of time.

Do Not Jump Right into Getting Links

There are many tempting ways to get other sites to link to you that are very unsavory. I choose to address these first. These include:

sites that promote linking as a primary activity.
sites that have illegal or inappropriate content.
sites that are entirely unrelated to your target market

Sites that do nothing more than link to other sites may look like a great option but a site without content is not very popular with the search engines. They need to provide something to internet surfers in order to be important. If they are not important to the search engines then a link from them should not be important to you. Link marketing is based on quality links not the amount of links. I advise staying away from these sites all together. Next, it goes without saying, sites with illegal and inappropriate content are never a safe bet.

Getting a Good Start with Link Marketing

Most of us do not have a lot of expendable income starting out so I do not spend much time explaining the options that involve paying large sums of money. In my experience, webmasters with that kind of money contact a company to handle this for them (I have had enough of them as clients to know). I intend on putting out another article to cover this option more in depth, however this article only covers the less costly options.

There are 3 cheap ways to get get some link popularity:

Ezine articles
Field related forums
Banner/Link exchanges

Ezine Articles

Ezines are online magazines. Ezine articles provide two great benefits. First and foremost, they allow you to link to your site from your article or resource area. Also, they provide a chance to show off the knowledge you have in your field. Although this is essentially a free way to get a quality link, it does come with some work. You must be able to write a content rich article on a topic related to your site. Most Ezine sites do not mind giving you the opportuníty to get your name out there but you need to provide them with a well written article that offers something to their users. Searching for ezine databases on any major search engine should provide you with a líst of great sources for this linking method. Be sure to consult the guidelines of an ezine site in which you decide to submit articles.

Related forums

Forums are another great opportuníty to get your site out there without paying up. Again, it does take some time. Find forums that cater to questions about your field. For instance, if you sell natural supplements for joint pain, search for forums related to arthritis. Find strings that are talking about different options for arthritis or ask about what works. This opens a perfect opportuníty to link to your site. It is important to know that most forums are not keen on letting sales pitches post for long. The trick here is to provide quality information on these posts. You could compare your arthritis product to others, you could even provide a plug for a competitor (attempting to prove yourself superior, of course). This makes your post look less like a sales or link pitch and helps make the internet more content driven like it was intended to be.

Banner/Link Exchanges

There are usually two main ways you can get a banner or link on another site without offering any content. You can pay them a fee, or you can propose a trade. Like the other two options, only target sites that are related to you in some way. Exchanges require a little research on your part. You want to search for your potential link partner to see that they are worth the trade. A easy rule of thumb is to check their pagerank compared to yours. You can use this free tool to compare at CheckPageRank.net. Put your web address in and look at your pagerank as well as theirs. If you are paying for a link and they have a pagerank of zero it would be wise to save your money. If you are trading links, use your better judgment. If they have a quality site it may be worth the exchange in hopes that their site takes off and they can share a little of their success with you.

Take note that a link from no single site will boost your website's importance significantly. Every quality link helps a little bit so you need to practice all methods for some time before you see the results you want. Stick with it and be patient.

About The Author
Mason Curry is Lead Designer for Vexart Studio Web Design.

Search Engine Optimization is Only the Beginning to Marketing Online

2008-03-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Do Not Jump Right into Getting Links

There are many tempting ways to get other sites to link to you that are very unsavory. I choose to address these first. These include:

sites that promote linking as a primary activity.
sites that have illegal or inappropriate content.
sites that are entirely unrelated to your target market

Ezine articles
Field related forums
Banner/Link exchanges

About The Author
Mason Curry is Lead Designer for Vexart Studio Web Design.

All Optimized and Going Nowhere?

2008-03-18T22:16:00.000-07:00

It happens sometimes. Here are some of the common reasons you may not be indexed:

Index Time: It hasn't been indexed yet. The amount of time before the engine indexes your site should be listed on the search engine's submission page, but these aren't always accurate or may be out of date. On the average, index times range from one to eight weeks depending on the engine. Some engines like AltaVista and Inktomi provide paid options if you wish to be indexed more quickly.

TIP! Time frame and expectations: Allow up to 4 months, if you are number 10 and want to be number 1, then it may just be time that is needed - but if you aren't showing up at all, then you need to look at keywords, content, title, description and keyword tags.

Already Indexed: The major engines won't tell you if you're listed; it's up to you to find out. The method to discover if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another. Don't assume you're not indexed just because you searched through keywords and you didn't come up in the first few pages of results. You could still be indexed and end up at the bottom of the heap.

Roadmap from Home Page: Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. HotBot has been rumored to do this. Think of your site links as a series of roads from one page to another. If there's no road from your home page to the page you want indexed, a search engine may decide the page is unnecessary.

External Links: Some search engines like Google and HotBot have been known to refuse to index Web sites that don't link to any other sites. Or, they may index your home page but refuse to index any other pages unless there are links from another domain. Or, they may index you for a while but then "prune" their database later because you didn't achieve any external links after a certain period of time.

Frames: Content inside of HTML frames can cause problems with submissions because the search engine may index the main content of the page, but not the surrounding menu frame. Visitors to your site find some information but miss the associated menu. It's generally better to create non-framed versions of your pages.

Spider Blocks: Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require a registration or password, and they can't fill out forms. This also applies to indexing of content from a searchable database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines can find and index without performing a special action on your site. Depending on your database system, there are both utility programs and companies that can assist you with this.

Free Sites: Because of all the "junk" submissions from free web sites like Geocities, many engines choose not to index sites from such domains or limit the number of pages they accept.

Guilt Through Association: If your Web site shares the same IP address as other Web sites on your host's Web server, you may find your IP quietly banned because of something someone else did. Ask your hosting service if your domain name has its own unique IP assigned to it. If not, ask them to move it to its own IP to avoid being penalized because of someone else.

Dynamic Pages: Dynamic pages with URLs containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) are ignored by many engines. Pages generated on the fly from a database often contain these symbols. In this situation, it's important to generate "static" versions of each page you want indexed. Fancy scripts and code on a page can hurt your rankings. When it comes to search engines, simple is better.

Large Pages: If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider finishes indexing. To avoid this, limit your page size to 50K or less. A good rule of thumb is that: page size + cumulative image sizes on the page = 50K-70K. If it is greater than that amount, visitors with dial-up connections will leave before the page fully loads.

Unreliable Hosts: It pays to have a reliable hosting service. If your web site doesn't respond when the search engine spider visits, you won't be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you could be removed from the database. Spam: If you use questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background) an engine may ignore or reject your submissions.

Redirects: Redirects or meta refresh tags sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. If the engines think you are trying to "trick" them by using "cloaking" or IP redirection technology, they may not index the site at all.

Proper Directory Submissions: When submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, LookSmart, and others, a live person reviews your site. They decide if the site is of sufficient "quality" before they líst it. These directories can help you get listed with other engines, so make sure you give your directory submissions the attention they need.

Page Limits: Search engines will only spider so many pages of your Web site. This could be a few dozen or three or four hundred depending on the engine. Google is one engine that tends to crawl deeper into your site. How deep they go may depend on factors like your link popularity. Sites with higher link popularity are deemed "worthier" of more thorough indexing.

Random Errors: Sometimes the engines simply lose submissions at random because of bugs and technical errors. Mistakes happen - remember, they're managing a database containing hundreds of millions of pages.

About The Author
Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing and co-owner of EcomBuffet.com . Since 1998, her expertise in onlíne marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue and achieve their business goals. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on Search Engine Optimization and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer can be reached at Jennifer@ecombuffet.com.

Get Your Blog Google-Ranked In 30 Days or Less, Part 1

2008-03-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

Blogs have been around long enough to become standard elements of the web landscape. They're easy to construct and manage, they create fresh, user-generated content and, if well-executed, blogs draw crowds and the attention of search engines.

Whether starting out with a new domain name, or a domain that's been around for a decade, you can rank your blog on Google if you just do what Google wants you to do. So here are 25/50 tips to get your blog ranked by the world's biggest SE.

50. Build a blog or move to Wordpress. Wordpress is a blog platform that's open source (free), robust, extensible and easy to use. Add Feedburner, which equips site owners to broadcast RSS feeds and develop user metrics. Next, synch up Google Analytics and a sitemap plug-in to simplify populating the blog and developing useful, actionable metrics. Also, make sure your blog is pinging www.technoratti.com and other social-ranking sites like www.digg.com.

49. Don't worry about page rank. PR is highly over-rated as a yardstick of online success. Connectivity within a web community and expansion through content syndication and guest blogging are more critical to building site credibility than page rank. PR will take care of itself over time if you do it right.

48. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground.

47. Use a conversational tone. Dry, starchy academic writing is strictly for the textbooks. Write words that people "hear" instead of read.

46. Provide a "Tell Your Friends" link on your blog. Birds of a feather do, indeed, flock together. So, if one of your regulars shares an interest in philately, chances are s/he has other friends with an interest in stamp collecting.

45. Study the competition. They're studying you. Check out spyfu.com to do a little undercover work on search analytics employed by competitor sites and their visitors. You can't touch the content but you can't copyright an idea, either, so pick up some new paths of thought from others in your site's arena.

44. Remember SEO basics. Use provocative, keyword-rich title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and only link to high-quality sites. Never over do it. Keep your posts relevant, natural, accurate and, above all, current.

43. Don't stuff blog post titles with keywords. It's a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be 40% keywords, 60% non-keywords.

42. Submit your URL to blog directories. There are "best of the web," and paid directories, like Yahoo, and free directories like the Open Directory project at www.dmoz.org. Every directory listing is another link to your site and another way visitors can find you. Just google them to find more.

41. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a "site hosting" or "site design" blog.

40. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don't forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year's "next big thing" is this year's hackneyed cliché.

39. Vary topics, content length, relevancy and posting times. However, be consistent, as well. Keep blogging. It can take time for a blog to catch the notice of a search engine spider.

38. Get guest bloggers. Add links from their blogs and establish your site's link community. There are people within your web neighborhood with opinions and good information. Contact them to invite submissions to your blog and your site in general.

37. Don't use duplicate content. The only duplicate content that appears in your blog posts are quotes, and they should be identified with quotation marks.

36. Call posters by name. If Bob M. from Athens, Georgia, posts to your blog, recognize his contribution with a "Thanks, Bob" at the end of your response.

35. Make friends with other bloggers in your commercial, business or NFP space. Ask to become a guest blogger, or seek endorsements from the "names" within your site sphere.

34. Send a personal note to posters. Not all bloggers have the time to do this but if you can send a personal email thank-you note to a poster, you've increased the chances of that poster becoming a member of your site community.

33. Encourage viral link building. Take a stand. Introduce the coming paradigm shift in web commerce, provoke controversy. It sells. Just ask Ann Coulter.

32. Ensure the blog is optimized for Technoratti. Claim your blog, set an avatar and pings, use tags where appropriate and be sure to ping various blog tracking sites.

31. Don't place ads on your blog, yet. If you feel you must (you're seeing nice PPC revenues), determine that your site's HTML is optimized to position those ads at the bottom of each blog page.

30. If your blog isn't pulling, have the code reproduced so it's as semantic, accessible and code-to-content optimized as possible. Also, hire a code expert to position content above ads or any other content in the site markup.

29. Ignore Alexa. A lot of new site owners rely on Alexa for site metrics but remember, Alexa is a popularity metric since only Alexa toolbar users contribute data – and that's a less-than-universal test population.

28. Build credibility. Publishing authorities on your site's topicality usually does the trick. Once blog credibility is established, identify trends, solve new problems and gradually expand the topic range of your blog.

27. Buy or build a screamin' hot blog design and submit it to design galleries. Hire a site/blog designer, or bring your vision to fruition. This enables your blog to appear five or six demographic iterations from your home site, expanding the site's reach outside the immediate site community. This creates new marketing channels fast.

26. Develop some friendly contacts on social media sites and participate in the community. Ask contacts to promote your blog content. Also ask for contributors. People love to express their opinions.

To learn even more about making the most of your site blog, check out Get Your Blog Google-Ranked In 30 Days Or Less, Part 2. You're going to love it.

About The Author
Frederick Townes in the owner of W3 EDGE Web Design. W3 EDGE is a Boston web design company that specializes in search engine friendly design, Internet marketing and conversion optimization. Contact them today for a quotation and more information on how to make the most of your online presence.

The 10 Step Plan To Successful Email Marketing

2008-03-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

Author: Matt Jackson

When website owners and marketers talk about online marketing, they often refer to SEO and PPC. Email marketing can sometimes be overlooked despite being one of the most powerful methods to reach potential customers and to keep existing customers coming back for more. Perhaps a factor in this is that direct email campaigns are commonly associated with spam emails, but careful list management ensures that this need not be a problem.

There are a number of stages to a successful email marketing campaign and by nailing as many as possible you can improve your results. The key to success, though, most commonly lies in the planning stage – if this is your first foray into email marketing then be prepared to treat it as a test run. The more direct email marketing campaigns you run, the more opportunity you have to optimize the process and improve your results. Here are ten of the most important steps to an effective email campaign.

1 – Determine Your Ultimate Goal

This might sound obvious, but having a clear goal in mind will help to concentrate your efforts. There are many effective uses of an email marketing campaign from increasing brand awareness to pushing a new product or seasonal promotion. Each of these uses typically demands a different campaign with its own style and its own components.

Increasing traffic to your website is not usually a bottom line target. The reason for increasing traffic to a website is normally to improve sales and increase profits. In the majority of cases, it is more desirable to attain greater sales through fewer visitors, than having a site awash with visitors but with a poor conversion rate.

A prolonged and careful email marketing campaign will naturally help to improve brand awareness. Your readers will naturally remember your name and the products or services that you sell as they gain more and more exposure to your marketing emails. Similarly, as long as you produce relevant and useful emails, your potential customers will grow to trust you making it more likely that they will purchase from you now or in the future.

2 - Your Opt-In Email List

There are a couple of key aspects to this section. YOUR opt-in list will generate better results than the use of somebody else's list. If you have taken the time and put in the effort to grow your own list, then the members of that list will already have some degree of awareness for you, your products, and your website.

Developing your own list can take time and money. To get a head start it is possible to buy or rent email lists from others. In these cases it is particularly important to pay attention to the second important factor – the list MUST be an opt-in list. Every member of that list must have opted in to receive marketing communication from you and they MUST be given adequate opportunity to opt out of future communication.

Particular care needs to be taken with your list management techniques to ensure that you are not deemed as being spam. If you purchase lists or partial lists then members that opt out need to be recorded separately. If you purchase another list that includes the same name and you subsequently email that person without their express request to be re-included in your list then you face the very real possibility of being flagged as sending spam email.

3 - Establish Performance Tracking Techniques

Tracking the performance of any advertising campaign should be foremost in your mind. This is the only true method of determining its worth and is the only way you can optimize your advertising to generate the best possible results. Web analytics are an absolute must-have, and with the wealth of affordable and even free choices available today there is no reason not to have a good analytic package in place.

Tracking code can also be placed into an HTML email. You need to operate a degree of caution when implementing code into HTML emails, because it could lead to your email being blocked by over zealous spam filters. If you can use hyperlinks that include tracking code, and your analytics package includes referral data, then this can generate the majority of the information you require.

The more information you can gleam from an advertising campaign, the better. You will be using these results to fine tune future advertising campaigns, so too much information is better than too little. If in any doubt then consider using an email marketing management service to conduct the tracking on your behalf.

4 – Ready Your Website

Directing visitors to your website is only a portion of the battle ahead. Once a reader clicks through the links in your email, you then need to be confident that your web pages are optimized to complete the sale. Conversion rates need to be high on the pages you direct traffic to, but you also need to target the traffic to the most appropriate pages and vice versa.

Consider the anchor text, or link text, that you will be using in your email. If you are encouraging readers to learn more about a product then don't direct them straight to the purchase page unless that page includes the inferred information. Similarly, if you have pre-sold your readers so that they are poised and ready to buy, and your CTA (Call To Action) indicates that this is the next step then you can navigate readers through to a more direct sales page.

Introducing a new product or a new concept will usually take more information than you can provide in a single marketing email. If necessary, add a page or multiple complementary pages, to your website. Direct readers to these pages so that you can combine the use of your email marketing and your optimized and informative content to really persuade and hammer the message home hard.

5 – An Effective Subject Line

The subject line of your email is the first thing your readers will read, and you need to ensure that it won't be the last. Human spam filters can be just as difficult to avoid as software spam filters, even for genuine email. You should certainly avoid the use of typically spammy subject lines and opt for a more effective approach.

There are many ways to write an appealing subject line. A newsworthy subject line will often grab the attention but only works effectively in limited cases. Otherwise, try to evoke an emotive response from the reader. The strongest emotions include greed, love, and even hatred or controversy. With these latter two it is again important that you exercise appropriate caution otherwise you may alienate your readers against this and future marketing emails.

Intrigue and appeal work very well. An intriguing headline will draw your readers into the main body of the content and the subject line will have then done its job effectively. Never mislead in the subject of your email but do try to peak your reader's curiosity to the extent that they can't help but open the email and read it fully.

6 - Email Body Content

Finally we reach the main body content of the email. That it's taken to point six to do so is an indication of how important the planning and preparation stages are. The subject line has hopefully driven a good portion of your list to open the email, and those readers should be intrigued enough to want to read more.

Research shows that the more personalized the message, the more likely it will be to succeed. Start with a personalized greeting and use a friendly, even conversational tone, throughout the message. Inform readers of what they need to know but do so informally and in as friendly a manner as is possible by email.

The email absolutely has to be grammatically and factually correct, and must not contain typos. These types of errors can be an instant turn off for readers. Run a spell check. Twice. And then check it manually and have somebody else check it again for you. At the same time check the links and ensure that they do indeed direct to the proper pages.

Include a Call To Action, or CTA, rather than just a link. A CTA is a direction that points your visitors to perform your desired action. This could be to click a link, make a purchase, or even forward the email to friends. The CTA needs to be clearly defined an, obviously, as effective and accurate as possible.

7 - Hyperlinks To Your Site

The entire point (although probably not your ultimate goal) of your email is to get readers to click on links and visit your website. Include two or three links in the body of your email and make sure they are relevant without being too obvious. Lead readers to click the links rather than directly point it out and find something more effective than “click here” to use as your anchor text.

Two to three links is the ideal number. Too few links and your email won't prove effective at driving traffic, while too many links will detract from the actual content of the email. If your email is very short then offer two links, or offer three links within longer messages. Contextual links (that is, those that appear within the body of the email rather than at the end) are usually significantly more effective.

Check and double check that links work and direct to the correct page. Once you've done this, have somebody else check them too. The number of marketing emails that have failed because of broken or incorrect links is alarmingly high and this is not a trap that you want to fall into.

8 - Choose The Best Time To Send Your Email

The time you send your email can have a significant impact on its effectiveness. During the night, most people's emails fill up. In a lot of cases, this can mean that your reader will be faced with tens of emails in the morning, many of them rubbish. This leaves a very real chance that they will simply ignore or delete your email without noticing who sent it, what it is about, or whether they have any interest in reading it.

Consider your target market and when they are most likely to be sat in front of their email. Those with a global market may find this more difficult because of the time difference, but otherwise bear this in mind too. Not every website or marketing email is geared towards residents from the same country.

9 - Test Email

Initially, send a test email to yourself, friends, family, or colleagues. This is more to determine that it arrives looking as expected. Once you have done this and are happy with how your email looks, you should then move on to send a second test email to a small selection of your list. This gives you ample opportunity to make any last minutes changes or tweaks according to how this small test run performs.

You might even consider sending several tests out to different groups, if you have a large enough list. This enables you to test the subject line, content, and product price, by making alterations before each test run. Be sure to test the different components separately, though, so that you can determine what needs changing and what works well.

A test email also gives you chance to check that you are set up and able to track the results and any other information you want to track. A good email marketing service will do this by default, because the test email can prove to be one of the single most effective ways to improve the performance of a one-off email shot.

10 - Monitor, Optimize, And Start Again

Being careful not to send emails too frequently, you should send regular communication to your list. An unloved list will be more likely to unsubscribe and readers become most responsive after approximately seven items of communication from you. Monitor results, check bounce rates, and look for ways that your campaign could be improved.

Once you've found the best ways to improve a campaign make the improvements and begin the procedure again from the beginning. This process of monitoring, optimizing, and starting again will help to increase exposure, improve brand awareness, and generally improve results and profit levels.

Why Your List Is So Important

A list can last you a lifetime and it is possible to continue selling to the same list members over and over again. In fact, once a list member purchases from you, and presuming that everything goes smoothly during and after the sale, they will be more inclined to purchase from you in the future. You will have won their trust, gained their favor, and they can be relied upon to help you with extra sales in the future.

Look after your list and your list will look after your profits.

8 Useful SEO Techniques - Every Webmaster Should Know

2008-03-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

Every webmaster should have some basic understanding of these simple SEO techniques if they want to achieve Top Rankings for their site. The more you know about these Search Engine Optimization techniques; the better your web pages will fare in the different search engines, especially Google.

Optimizing your pages for the search engines should be your main priority because conquering and dominating your chosen keywords is often cited as one of the major determining factors in the success of your online site or business. You must have a rudimentary grasp of how SEO can work for you and your site.

These simple SEO Tips will help you understand the basics and help you reach your online goals.

1. Title Tag

The Title Tag is located at the top of your html page and it tells the search engines what your page is about. When you open your page in a browser these are the words at the very top of the screen. Despite its simplicity, the title tag is crucial to 'on-page optimization'; it should include your main keywords and it should be 63 characters or less if you want your title to appear in full on Google.

Many SEO experts create web pages in a three-prong approach. They place the title in:

- the title tag - on the webpage itself - and in the URL for that page

Sometimes they will just pick the main keywords from the title and place them in the anchor url instead. For example: www.yourwebsite.com/keywords.html

2. Meta Description Tag

The Meta Tag contains the description for your web page. Your description will show up in all the search engines so you have to be careful to write precisely and objectively. It should be about 140 characters or around 20 words. Make sure to include your keywords but don't spam - don't repeat your keywords more than twice - using variations is helpful.

Keep in mind, successful webmasters make their descriptions stand out from the crowd and entice the surfer to click their link. It is also the first contact with your potential visitor or prospect so make a good first impression.

3. Anchor Tag or URL

The anchor tag is used to form links within websites or from site to site. This tag should have your title or the main keywords from your page title to be the most effective.

Anchor text is also important to know - these are the underlined, clickable text or words in a link.
anchor text

If you want to check Google for all web pages containing your keywords in the anchor tags.

Just type into Google Search: allinanchor:yourkeywords

4. Finding Backlinks

One of the keys to higher rankings is building quality links from relevant, related quality sites. The search engines, especially Google, count each link as a "vote" for your site or content. Many experts suggest you include your main keywords in the anchor text of these inbound links in order to rank high.

If you want to find the number of backlinks your site has.

Just type into Google Search: link:yourURL

and it will give you the number of backlinks you have.

Google doesn't give you all your existing backlinks, so you can try Yahoo! to find a more exact number.

Just open Yahoo! and type in: linkdomain:yourURL

5. Checking Indexed Pages

If is very important for you to know what content the search engines have indexed from your site. You can also check to see how your links are displayed and to see if any titles or descriptions are missing from your pages.

You can see how many of your pages are indexed in Google by using the site command.

Just type into Google Search: site:yourURL

Another way to look at your pages in Google is to type in "http://yoursite" and "www.yoursite" with the quotation marks to see the exact number of listings for each.

6. Checking Google Cache

You can also check to see the Google Cache of your site by using the cache command. You will also discover when it was last retrieved.

Just type into Google Search: cache:yourURL

7. Finding Associated Keywords

Keywords are the heart of the Internet, you must dominate the search engines for your chosen keywords if you are to succeed online. So make sure you have your main keywords in the Meta Keyword Tag on your page. Many experts suggest you place your page's main keywords in the first and last 25 words on that page.

You must also be able to find and use variations of your keywords to completely conquer your targeted niche. To find what other keywords Google has associated with your main keywords, just use the tilde ~ command to find associated phrases in Google.

Just type into Google search: ~keywords

Variations will be highlighted in bold print.

8. Finding Titled Keywords

If you want to find competing sites that have your keywords in the title just use the allintitle command.

Just type into Google search: allintitle:yourkeywords

In summary, if used consistently, these basic SEO techniques should help improve your rankings and keep you in the picture with regards to your standings in the search engines. Your site's stats or raw traffic logs will also confirm the rise or fall of your keyword rankings. You must have complete knowledge of both your site and your keywords in the search engines, especially Google. Since Google will deliver most of your quality traffic, you must optimize for it and be aware of what is happening to your site and keywords within Google. This is yet another example where knowledge equals success.

About The Author
The author, a former artist and teacher, is now a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: BizwareMagic or MarketingToolGuide
2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Silent Google Page Rank Update - Did it Really Happen?

2008-03-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

Monika Mundell

Yesterday I had a rather pleasant surprise. While navigating around my blog to check out my latest readers from MyBlogLog I noticed that my page rank bar looked rather fat. I did a double take and sure enough I had been upgraded from the almighty to a page rank 4.

While it isn’t really that important to even bother about page rank, it sure as hell is for credibility amongst other bloggers.

I’m not sure what you guys do when browsing blogs. But when I check out what’s happening in the blogosphere I normally always glimpse in that toolbar to see where they stand in terms of page rank.

When I see a decent enough figure it tells me that this person is credible enough and obviously has a decent blog with decent traffic. Do you do this too, or do you focus more on the content of the blog itself without bothering to look at the little bar (come on, be honest here).

I know it is probably silly, but I have always done that, ever since I learned about page rank and how Google rules the Internet.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t read a blog that hasn’t got any page rank, or even think that they are not worth anything. Far from it actually.

But this little green bar just has that special attention grabbing effect, that coupled with a great headline will make me read on for more.

I wonder whether anybody else has experienced the same on their own blogs?

Before You Ask Questions Google It

2008-03-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

Did you know that you can Google pretty much any questions you have to bring you relevant answers? The reason I’m asking is that I keep getting an increasing amount of questions sent via email or my Manifesto’s contact form with bloggers asking me many questions.

Now here is the thing. I love helping others. So much so that I actually spend around 30 minutes a day to answer people’s questions when all they could have done is Google it first. With an increasing workload I simply don’t have the time to answer questions such as:

How to insert an image into a blog post or
How do I transfer my blog from one host to the other

These are questions that with a little time on your behalf you can dig up quite easy while reading our blog or else Google it.

I’ve always lived by the practice of trying to get my questions answered with Google first and spend time reading and actually applying what is recommended to fix a problem - before I go and bother somebody else.

Like most people I’m very impatience when it comes to solving problems but I never bother somebody unless I have at least tried to find a solution first!

Unfortunately many bloggers don’t seem to adhere by this principle and I find the only way we can make those aware is by telling them our side of the bargain.

I also understand more and more on how the big A-listers don’t reply to “slack” questions like that anymore. It is simply a waste of their time.

Now before any of you get upset, I want to make clear that asking questions is fine, if you try to find a solution on Google first. I don’t mind helping those who have tried all avenues before like reading the instructions, Googling the information and trying to apply what they have learned.

What do you think? Do you have the same problem, or are you a person who asks before trying?

How to Add Audio and Video to Your Blog

2008-03-10T19:33:00.000-07:00

If you’re thinking of blogging with audio and video, then PodPress is the plugin to get. Available for free, this plugin is perhaps the most complete solution to creating a multimedia-rich blog.

Watch the video as I show you step-by-step how to install PodPress, tweak the basic settings, and add audio to your blog. If you’re interested in creating audio products to sell, or just to create “podcasts” like this one to provide more value to your blog readers, this tutorial will be very useful.

If you want to create interview products and sell them online, take a look also at Easy Audio Products.

Use SnagIt To Capture Content For Your Blog

2008-03-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

SnagIt is a fabulous software. Before knowing it even existed I struggled with various screen capture tools but not having had much luck, I often got frustrated with the lack of functionality they give.

While the Firefox extension Fireshot proved pretty satisfactory, it never did everything I wanted it to do. While you can do a lot with Fireshot, the best thing is that it is free to download. It sits in your browser and with the click of your mouse you can capture a window, or parts of it.

Another tool I’ve used was Window’s very own Snipping Tool that comes free with Windows Vista at least. But again, while the Snipping Tool was ok, it wasn’t great. But then a client of mine suggested I use the SnagIt tool and since it came with a free 30 day trial, I had plenty of time to compare it to the tools I had used before.

I have to say, that after using SnagIt for 30 days on all the blogs I write and edit, I am very pleased to say that this week I purchased my license.

This is one of the best software I have come across since being online, because I use it pretty much every single day. Therefore it’s value has paid off in itself before I even paid for it.

Here is what SnagIt can do:

You can also:

record movies
use time delay to capture those hidden windows
capture any part of any site
capture scrolling windows in websites and on PDF’s
and lots more

If you are a die hard Internet marketer, user, blogger or creative enough to show a lot of images and screen shots on your blog, then SnagIt is for you.

It normally costs $39.95 for a full license, once the 30 day trial is up.This includes all future updates too. But you can also do a search on Google for vouchers like this

Vouchers+snagit

and you will come across a big range of free downloads and discounted ones too. While I don’t mind saving some money, I would be very careful with freeware downloads as they often contain viruses.

Don’t Underestimate The Slug!

2008-03-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

I bet you wonder what kind of slug I’m talking about, it is the WordPress slug. In case you still have no idea on what I’m talking about, then take a closer look at your WordPress editor inside your admin.

If you take a closer look at the image above you can see where the two arrows point within the editor. The arrow on the left show you the title of this post to make it more appealing and interesting for the reader -you!

The second arrow on the right is for search engine purposes.

This is especially important in niche marketing, when you are trying to rank well for a certain keyword. Inserting a keyword rich slug will help your post to rank better than using (the diluted version) of your posts title.

In this case the three words [don’t underestimate the] in the title do nothing for SEO and are therefore worthless to have any chances of trying to rank this post for WordPress slug. Not that I’m trying anyway, otherwise the structure of this post would differ from what it is right now.

But many bloggers totally under utilize the WordPress slug and never even use it. They wonder what purpose it might serve and then forget all about it.

Don’t make the same mistake. Use the WordPress post slug efficiently whenever you can since it does help you with your search engine rankings. The more you know about SEO, the better and more valuable the slug will become for you.

Ad Blindness Is Nothing New ... and it's No Surprise Google Is Seeing It!

2008-02-25T17:56:00.002-08:00

By Rich Ord

Google Ad Click Rates Are Going Down and YouTube Isn't Helping

Google's stock is down because its rate of growth is down according to Google's latest quarterly financial report. Google still had a 30 percent increase in payments from clicking ads, but that was substantially down from the 45 percent increase they had a year earlier.

Google is blaming this slowdown in growth on difficulties it is having monetizing its social media properties. Boiling this down Google can't get the YouTube kids to click ads! By all accounts Google is also experiencing a lower click rate on ads on its own search results and especially their Adsense partner sites.

This was entirely predictable and is likely to continue to go lower. Every ad type from banner ads to ads in emails received a high click-through rate when first introduced on the Internet and then progressively lowered to a norm of about .25 percent.

Google is battling this by dramatically increasing the number of ad impressions it serves via partnering with more content sites, acquiring sites like YouTube, increasing the number of ads per page and blending the ads in content more effectively so that people don't think they are clicking ads.

The problem for Google is that there are really no more tricks possible that will significantly combat ad fatigue. I also sense another under the radar battle the Google folks are fighting and that is complaints of lower conversion on content partner sites and extremely lower conversion for advertisers on social media sites.

This is caused by a simple fact... everybody isn't surfing the web to buy products, and especially the kids on YouTube.

Google has a great business with search precisely because there are a large number of people searching for product information. A much higher percentage of people who click an ad from a search result have a purchase intent. This is just not true when reading a news site or looking for that funny video.

AdSense Earnings Down?

2008-02-25T17:56:00.001-08:00

By Jason Lee Miller

Up for some, Down for others

There's word around the Webmaster World forum that publishers have been experiencing a sharp decline in AdSense earnings over the past month. There's been little consensus, lots of possible explanations, but nothing you might call conclusive.

A small poll at Search Engine Roundtable (43 participants as of this writing) shows just over half reporting a decrease in AdSense earnings, the other half reporting that things are on the level or increasing.

It's hard to say that's a representative sample with just 40 respondents, but it does match a bit with the reports at Webmaster World: some are losing, some aren't.

Many plausible explanations have been proffered without any real, thorough site examinations, as no URLs have been given by those complaining. The center of conversation though, has been around Google's "smart pricing," and whether that is the cause of lower returns on ad clicks.

An ad's cost-per-click is determined by a number of factors, according to the AdSense blog's explanation:

"More than conversion rate goes into determining the price of an ad: the advertiser's bid, the quality of the ad, the other ads competing for the space, the start or end of an ad campaign, and other advertiser fluctuations."

Keep in mind also that Google has the leader in CPC inflation rate, also.

Google denies that clickthrough rates affect the price of an ad click, though they don't go into how much weight is put on user action beyond the click, i.e., sales completed, forms filled out, engagement on the site that follows. Google describes smart pricing this way:

"Google's smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results -- such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups -- we reduce the price you pay for that click."

But observers are right also to note that the higher quality the site, the higher likelihood the publisher gets high quality, costlier, better-converting ads. AdSense Publisher Support pretty much says so, reminding publishers that content is king:

"[Smart pricing] leads to higher payouts for publishers by drawing a larger pool of advertisers and rewarding publishers who create high quality sites…. The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users.

"This also means driving targeted traffic to your site -- advertisers don't gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR."

So, this is Google's usual stance: create some relevance and we'll help create you some revenue.
Things like that have added to the cynicism in the aforementioned forum, as one member notes the lack of examples to test, and, without naming names, notes that some complaining members' sites are nothing to write home about with potential quality problems like:

Obviously made for AdSense (which implies lack of content)
Too many ads, including unrelated ads (lack of focus on content, lack of central theme)
Confusing layouts (not end-user focused)

Webmasters also reported conversations they had with the Google AdSense team, who told them the sharp decline likely has to do with advertiser budgets, many of which would understandably be tightened after the holiday crunch, and perhaps even more so during economic uncertainty.

So recession in the economy might mean recession in your AdSense take-in, too.

An interesting frustration was also presented. Google's smart pricing, according to forum members applies account-wide. A webmaster with many sites but one AdSense account could experience a hit on all of his or her sites, instead of just one or two. This brings down the revenue potential of the more popular sites the webmaster owns.

The suggestion, then, is that Google adjust so that smart pricing affects individual sites and pages, rather than targeting an entire account.

8 Theories For AdSense Fluctuations

2008-02-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

By Jason Lee Miller

In brief: find another basket for your eggs

Recently, many web-publishers reported drastic drops in their Google AdSense earnings and offered up many theories as to why that occurred. The problem was reported in web forums, on popular SEO blogs, and in the comments section of the last WebProNews article on the subject. After all that, we've narrowed it down to 8 possible explanations.

In other words, we're closer, but not there yet. It could be innocent, accidental, natural, or orchestrated, but the majority of you seem to be reporting steep (and for some of you, I mean steep) drops in AdSense earnings. The Search Engine Roundtable poll mentioned last time grew to 135 respondents, and the percentages stayed the same: 55% are reporting decreases in earnings.

It could also be that angry people speak the loudest, but many seem pretty sane in their reporting, saying earnings are declining despite level page views and click-through rates.

But we're going to err on the side of the smaller guy, assume you're getting screwed by the big guy, and propose the most possible and/or likely reasons for that. Included with this assumption is that all of you are on the up-and-up with great content, great SEO, great business savvy, and have done everything right but still find yourselves victims of the corporate machine.

See how nice that is? Here goes.

It's the economy, stupid.

This explanation wins the Occam's Razor Award—i.e., the simplest explanation is the correct one. As the economy enters a slow-down period, many advertisers are trimming their budgets, decreasing how much they spend on branding-related advertising and redirecting those funds to more direct response ads, which would include AdWords.

One commentator noted the golden rule of the economy: It will fluctuate. This could be what's happening, and that fluctuation could be swelling on the political side of the content fence as Presidential primaries take center stage on the Information Highway.

Advice: Look into AdWords and improve organic SEO. Otherwise, wait it out like the rest of the economy.

Google got stingy with the AdSense real estate

During an increased focus on conversions rather than clicks and intensified efforts to combat click fraud, Google made AdSense ads more difficult to click. A few have reported that since "the clickable area" of ads was decreased, CTRs have also decreased. At the end of the day, the AdSense drop many publishers are experiencing is a direct result of Google's offensive against accidental clicks.

Google is another good company gone public

This is a more cynical, greed-driven, conspiracy explanation that may resonate with more distrustful element of the audience. You know how everything seems designed to make you pay more at the gas pump? Reports come out that $3.71 per gallon is the tipping point where Americans will drive less, oil is at record prices as companies collude on what to charge on a street-by-street level, and Exxon cites less supply while setting yet another quarterly profit record by pulling in $1,300 per second, and the oil profiteers in the White House hadn't seen any type of crisis on the horizon for the past 30 years.

Phew. Try to say all that in one breath. But the theory goes like that. Shareholders like profit.

So, between the third quarter 2007 and when the fourth quarter report came out last week, Google's stock plummeted from $747 to just a little over $500. No doubt they saw this coming well in advance of their earnings report and looked for ways of tightening things up earnings-wise. It's especially troubling for Google because not only do they control two-thirds of the search market and 75% of the search ad spend, they report consistent growth that would impress anybody, that would be calls for champagne for any company, except the analysts who expect more of them.

If so, it should make you feel better that they missed estimates anyway.

But as a part of that plan to maximize earnings, Google found a way to decrease what they paid out to publishers while increasing what they took in from advertisers. This would also help offset Google's recent moves against made-for-AdSense sites developed expressly for domain tasting, an action that costs Google a reported $3 million.

Admittedly though, when you're dealing in billions, a few million isn't much – unless you're trying to make estimates. But Google also reported a 30% increase in AdSense clicks over the fourth quarter 2006, and a 9% increase since the third quarter 2007. So over all, clicks are up.

Even though clicks are up, and revenues seem down for publishers, Google still reported a 34% increase in AdSense revenues over the same period last year and a 12% increase quarter-over-quarter. This is interesting because Google's traffic acquisition cost—the portion of revenue shared with Google AdSense partners—went up only 1%.

The short version: Clicks are up, revenues are up, amount shared with publishers is level.

Search clicks are better

One proposal says that Google is lowering the estimated value of content clicks in order to protect the value of search clicks, as advertisers shift from network ads to search ads in a slower economy.

You're being better-dealed

Not much explanation needed on this one. Google's making more money from big-name advertisers and big-name websites. Smart-pricing is hitting you hardest because you can't compete with international brands and websites with millions of page views. It also serves as a decent explanation for why Google is sharing the same amount of money with publishers while increasing clicks and revenues.

No fixed advertising contract means no fixed advertising pay-out

One theory is that Google is making deals with others (bigger, higher-budgeted companies) for fixed compensation while slowly increasing their take among AdSense publishers, who have little-to-no control over CPC, or even context. If you don't have a very specific deal with Google, they can pretty much do what they want.

Ad blindness and Firefox adoption is hurting you

This is an interesting theory because it is simple and plausible. People are ignoring ads at a higher rate, and this has been evidenced by eye-tracking studies, especially when the ads appear in the places they expect them to appear. But also there are ad-blocking programs available via the Firefox browser (and other browsers) that block ads altogether.

It may be that your visitors just can't see your ads, either by choice or by software.

Google needs a real competitor

Not only does Google run two-thirds of search, but also controls 75% of the search advertising spend. Yahoo gives them a run for their money in display ads, but nobody is even close to knocking the king off the hill.

If you were in that position, what would you do? Would you make it easier for publishers to make money while you made less? When there's no alternative, you can pretty much do what you want.

What we're left with

We're left with what we're always left with: the same as when webmasters lose ranking in the SERPs. If there's a sudden drop in search ranking, businesses are on the line, most often because the business is relying too much on Google. We could theorize all day, but if your entire business model is based on what Google can do for you, then your entire business model has a good chance of being sunk.

All your eggs + one basket = fail.

Got Conversion Optimization?

2008-02-25T17:51:00.000-08:00

By David A. Utter

Google suggests ways to make CPA work well

Google has ideas for advertisers who want to capitalize on cost-per-acquisition (CPA) through the AdWords bidding process.

Google's playing with words again. Most people think of CPA as cost-per-action, but Google did a Microsoft on that and tacked a couple more syllables onto it. Google also calls tags 'labels', while 99.9999 percent of the Internet (figure provided by Aether Statistical Service) calls them tags.

Let's talk about money. Google wants AdWords clients to make more of it. Doing so means taking greater advantage of conversion opportunities, advice for which appears on the Inside AdWords blog.

The tips published here cover a lot of the more frequent questions hitting Google about using Conversion Optimizer with their campaigns. Google needs to see 200 or more conversions track through the campaign on a monthly basis to be eligible, for starters, so it isn't available for new campaigns.

Some suggestions were about what Conversion Optimizer can't do. Campaigns using it can't be modified from the AdWords editor, and it won't use conversion data from Google Analytics.

The AdWords editor probably has Conversion Optimizer functionality in its future, as Google noted it's a commonly requested feature.

Google's biggest tips concern bids when using Conversion Optimizer, something advertisers need to keep squarely in mind:

The Conversion Optimizer works on a maximum CPA, not an average CPA. While we aim to avoid any conversion that costs more than your maximum CPA bid, changes in your conversion rate may cause your average CPA to exceed your maximum CPA.

Keep in mind that if you choose a CPA lower than the recommended maximum CPA bid, you are likely to get less traffic than you did with your old CPC bids. It's a good idea to start with this recommendation and adjust based on the results you observe.

More tips may be found from the webinars Google conducts on the Conversion Optimizer feature.

YuMe Serving Google AdSense For Video Ads

2008-02-25T17:48:00.001-08:00

By David A. Utter

AdSense for Video beta should debut today

Online video ad network YuMe has a deal in place to overlay display ads in the Google AdSense for video beta program.

Everyone online loves videos, but few have figured out how to turn that interest into sweet revenue streams. An assortment of technologies compete for the best way to mate ads with videos.

YuMe gets their shot as part of Google's AdSense for video beta program. The company announced its InVideo ad technology will place display overlays for its publishers who are currently AdSense participants as well.

Google could more fully disclose its video advertising plans as early as today. The New York Times cited a Google product manager, who called AdSense for Video "a one-stop shop for people interested in in-video advertising."

The one stop includes the hugely successful YouTube video sharing site and the AdSense network of publishers who display Google advertising. According to the Times, the AdSense for video beta will start with about 20 partners, who stream at least a million videos a month.

Google Prepares Video Ads For Search Results

2008-02-25T17:24:00.000-08:00

By David A. Utter

Revenue knocks at Google's once-pristine door

Visual ads, long absent from Google's search results, opened on the site in the form of expandable video ads today.

Google took another step away from its history as a minimalist provider of relevant search results. Along with the One Box ads atop search results, and the right sidebar of ads, Google will place another monetization component on those pages.

Details of the move appeared on the Bits Blog. Google VP Marissa Mayer described why after all of their success with text ads that they needed to take this step:

“The big insight of Google wasn’t text ads; it was that the ads should be conducive to the format,” Ms. Mayer said. “We were doing text-based search that was all textual. Visual ads don’t work in that format.”

By contrast, she said text ads are not as effective on pages with search results that include images and video. The eyes of users automatically gravitate to the images more than the text, she said. Now that Google’s main search results pages include more images, video links and other elements, it is more appropriate, she argued, to have corresponding advertising formats.

"It’s the end of what was once considered one of Google’s major strengths, and opens the doors for up-and-comers to go back to Google’ s original spartan approach to search," Mashable editor Adam Ostrow commented.

Google is in a position where they may feel a pressing need for better ad performance. Between a small slip in their Q4 2007 financials, and Microsoft ready to raise the Jolly Roger and pillage Yahoo, there's probably no small amount of The Fear wafting through the Googleplex these days.

How Google Applies Science to Search (Part 1)

2008-02-25T16:22:00.000-08:00

Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealander who joined Google in 2000 as a Senior Research Scientist to develop more precise search techniques. Previously, Craig was an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University, where he conducted research in data compression, information retrieval and computational biology. Before that, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry Department of Stanford University, where he developed a software suite used by pharmaceutical research laboratories to identify the role of particular proteins within cells.

A scientist at heart, Craig is probably best known as the developer of Froogle (recently re-named Google Product Search) and the founder of Google's software engineering center in New York City.

This article is a summary of his presentation at Webstock 2008.

Google's Spelling Bee

Craig started his presentation by talking about one of his first challenges in his job at Google: the spelling correction tool. As the popularity of the search engine grew, Google needed to be able to spell-correct lots of obscure words. So his solution was to take a sampling of content from the entire web. Craig's team came up with a algorithmic model and ran it over the web. He discovered that there were several correct answers to the same question. For example, words like "kofee" could mean either the searcher is seeking a cup of java or information about Kofee/Kofi Anan.

To combat this, Craig came up with an interesting solution: the "Did you mean?" alternative spelling option, based on predictive examples of searcher spelling patterns. You can see this in action if you type in "kofee anan" in Google. Above the search results is a line that reads: "Did you mean: kofi annan" and links to the search results for this spelling variation too.

But the research went even further. Craig's team worked out how to take into account the context of the search query by studying the two or three other keywords surrounding the query, for example "kofee cup" or "kofee anan". The research used the science of bigrams and trigrams to better understand how people search. Bigrams are groups of two written letters, two syllables, or two words, very commonly used as the basis for simple statistical analysis of text. So Craig and his team applied this knowledge to Google's spelling correction system and now, Google's algorithm can determine the searcher's intent with much more accuracy, based on the context of the search query.

As an example of the spelling challenges that Google faces, Craig showed the audience the huge number of ways "Britney Spears" is misspelled on the web. He said it's encouraging to see that the most popular spelling is also the most correct one. Scale is important!

Google Maps Lead to Apps

The Google team wrote the code for Google Maps many years ago but the code was actually built into your browser. When Google maps first launched, people took the dense data-script and worked out how to reverse engineer it for their own use. Google engineers decided to release an API key to make these mash-ups easier after seeing so many people reverse engineer Google Maps without Google's help. Now people can mash-up Google maps within minutes to create their own applications.

To show how easy this is to do, Craig took the audience through the steps to create an interactive application with Google Maps. In the space of about two minutes, he signed up for an API key, grabbed the HTML code and pasted it into his page. He then hacked the map to show Wellington Town Hall (our location) and made the point how easy it is to create really useful tools out of technology that is already available.

As an example, Craig showed the audience Seattle Bus Monster. This site uses an API key for Google Maps to make Seattle bus data and tracking available 24/7. Anyone who needs to catch a bus can look online and instantly find their nearest bus location and run to the bus stop in time to catch it. It's these types of interactive applications that add value to both corporate and government sites.

Craig referenced Rodney Brooks from MIT whose provocative paper "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" offered new logic and a completely different view of machines. The idea is that there is no center of control among robots so you should make lots of them; don't treat them so precious. Craig said developers should use this logic to create lots of small apps that you can replicate and tweak, rather than one big expensive app that can go horribly wrong. Scale trumps smarts every time!

Experiments in Scale That Have Impacted Google's Operations

Precision vs. Recall

Back in the early 90's, information retrieval on the web was limited to things like Lexus/Nexus. So at that stage, Google would take queries and apply it to the broadest possible search. This was great recall at the cost of precision. But Larry and Sergey wanted something better so they decided to use Boolean search. At the time it was heresy because everything was focused on recall. But the Google founders knew that things had to be super relevant so they developed an algorithm - the core algorithm. It was very simple and relied on Boolean search to determine relevancy.

Genomic Sequencing

In the mid 90's a large project - the Human Genome Project - was underway. The race was on to sequence the genome. Scientists decided to feed this out to a bunch of different people. They chopped up the genome for researchers everywhere and allowed it to replicate. The researchers mapped each chunk with genetic markers and computed a tiling path of tiny fragments.

Sequencing was very expensive, so the data was computed based on a minute number of chunks - very labor intensive. The sequencing took forever and reassembling was a long way off. But then a company came along that said they could do it faster. Sequencing becomes cheaper by automating the job using machines rather than individual people so this company used a clever computer algorithm to conduct the sequencing. This reduced the cost and the researchers were therefore able to reassemble more fragments and achieve a rough draft of the genome in 2000. This sequencing approach was the shotgun approach, where accuracy is lower, but the larger scale allowed the impossible to become possible.

Web Definitions

Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for "definition of...", or "what is a...." etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.

The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.

Now Google allows you to use the "definition:" query and the question format to get definitions from around the web. Type in "what is a blog?" and you'll get lots of results from Craig's original script.

Protein Sequencing

In biology, Craig says, you're constantly producing proteins. The proteins fold up with particular sequencing. Within computing, you can use this knowledge to do amazing things. You can conduct computations with this type of data but it's time consuming. Somebody at Stanford University noticed that proteins spend a lot of time moving about before folding into an alpha helix. So it was suggested they start the computations with lots of configurations. In this way you can parallelize the data by scale and one will be magically close to a folded protein. So they worked out a way to reduce the problem to a simple process based on mass scale. This is why Google uses maximum scale to conduct algorithmic computations.

Chess vs. Go

You can now compute the value of any potential move in chess. Based on that information, you can compute your projected probability of winning the game from any move. Chess grand masters put a lot of time into this knowledge. But the opposite is true for the game Go, because there is more randomness to the game play.

Recession-Proof Your Business by Building Links

2008-02-21T16:34:00.000-08:00

By Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch

Can you feel the nervousness in the business community? I sure can. SES Chairman Kevin Ryan recently wrote about it in "A Gloomy Searchonomic Forecast."

Even search -- the golden child of marketing -- has been getting pushed around by the market. People are starting to look extra hard at the bottom line, asking, "How much did this cost me for what I got in return?"

Today's economic turbulence reminds me of the 2001 recession in an evolved form. At the end of the dot-com bubble, investors -- and online advertisers -- asked for the first time, "What am I getting for the money I'm spending?"

Until then, companies were online because "they had to be." Everyone wanted to be a "first mover" and put down stakes in the hottest online real estate they could find.

There was no concern for making a return on investment. A dot-com funded with $100 million told me the money was literally endless.

Web 1.0 Wake-up Call Results in PPC World

One day, everyone woke up and realized it would all end. The revelation was a dunk in an ice bath. People sobered up real quick, went back to their Web developers, and asked some hard questions.

Looking back, it was clearly for the better. As much as you'd like to, you simply can't indefinitely exist in a drunken dream world. You need to wake up and stare reality in the face for a while.

For the last couple years, I've seen a strong dedication to paid search. Marketers love the control, tracking, and relative ease the PPC (define) world has offered them. I've heard more discomfort recently about the high cost of PPC than ever before.

I'm seeing a greater interest in CPA (define) models where the company only pays for the lead or sale generated. Companies look closely at how much a lead or sale costs and wonder if they can get it cheaper from somewhere else.

SEO and CPA

You simply won't find a lower CPA than through SEO (define). Of course, there are risks. There's no guarantee if, how, or when a search engine will rank your site for a particular key phrase.

Even if your site is doing well now for a particular ranking, there's no guarantee high rankings will last. These are the major reasons people often forgo SEO in favor of paid search. If the lowest CPA is your goal, then SEO needs a serious review.

The secret to SEO is simple: Have more -- and better -- content and links than the people you're competing with for organic search listings. The links must follow the content. The content is the horse and the links are the cart of the metaphorical cart and horse.

Once you've developed a strategy of creating interesting, ongoing content, then you're off to get your links.

Think of Links as Referrals

If you're like many businesses, referrals are a major part of your new business funnel. New customers are referred to you by happy existing, or previous, customers.

Links work the same way. If you want to get links, you must build up online networks of friends and associates (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, etc.). There are many discussion forums teeming with people who'd enjoy the content on your site.

Just as you go to your local chamber of commerce and other networking groups, you want to find online groups to become involved with. And as with your offline networking groups, you get your best results by being an active member over time. You'll want to pick a couple and commit some time.

The 3 Don'ts of Link Building

A word of warning: have you seen first-time visitors to networking groups asking as many people as they can possibly corner, "So, who does your payroll?"

You hate that person, right?

Don't be that person online.

Don't plow into an online community and start begging for links.

Don't throw heavy-handed spammy links around the community.

Become a good member. Participate. Have fun. You'll know when the time comes to put a link out or to ask for some link love.

Just as offline networks will help you ride out rough financial times, online social networks will help you glide right through the choppy seas of the recession-ridden market place.

SEOs, Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!

2008-02-21T16:32:00.000-08:00

By Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch

For hardcore business knowledge there's only one source: The Harvard Business Review. You'll find the brightest minds discussing some of the most forward-thinking business strategy you'll find anywhere. HBR is probably the biggest influence on my business strategy.

The January edition featured the CEO of Lazard, Bruce Wasserstein, in "The HBR Interview: Bruce Wasserstein on Giving Great Advice." He's brokered more than a thousand merger and acquisition deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars. If there's a person who knows business inside out, it's Wasserstein.

At one point in the interview he was asked what CEOs need to know to understand their business landscape. Wasserstein said, "Remind the CEO that corporations have to change in order to prosper and that inaction isn't prudent -- it's radical."

"Inaction isn't prudent -- it's radical."

That's a profound statement. Is the best move no move at all? The conservative road is the safe road. What if being careful is a faster road to extinction than being bold and taking action?

I was reminded of Wasserstein's advice while reading "Link Building Case Study for Luxury Hotels" by my Link Love cohort, Justilien Gaspard. In the "Build Links by Fighting Conventional Wisdom" section, Justilien gave the example of a hotel creating a mapping or review tool other hotels could use on their sites. In effect, helping the competition.

At Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Seth Godin was asked how a small diving school could stand out from the competition. Seth suggested becoming a diving association -- offer package trips, news, advice, and so forth.

Yesterday's News, Google Kiosks, and the Demise of Google

The mantra for the 21st century: To prosper you must change. The newspaper industry, for example, needs to change. They need to throw away the word "paper." They're the news all right (yesterday's news).

Organizations formerly known as "newspapers" need to be online social centers for their communities. They should have informational kiosks at restaurants, gas stations, and malls. They should be the Twitter and the Facebook of their community. Now they can't be those things because Twitter and Facebook have done it for them.

Google filed a patent last year for an interactive kiosk designed for shopping malls. Billboards and kiosks would display audio, video, or graphical ads, matching the ads with inventory in local malls. Haven't seen any Google kiosks yet, have you?

Google's online advertising market share will continue to erode because the world is passing them by. Local search will kill Google.

iTunes Puts Music Biz in Wooden Kimono

The music industry needs to change. Suing moms and kids isn't a successful hearts and minds marketing initiative. Music is moving to free. If they want to survive they will figure out how to compete in marketplace. Otherwise, iTunes will do it for them.

Every time the words "that won't work" come out of your mouth, you need to think again.

We're living in a peer-to-peer, decentralized world. That's the model you must adopt. If you don't, someone else will. The marketplace will reward those who change and adapt. The marketplace will punish those who feel it's prudent to do nothing.

"So what does this must do with linking, Sage?" It has everything to do with linking. If you want links to your site, you must do and be something others simply are not. You need to give something worthwhile to the Internet community.

Justilien gave the idea for hotels to consider a mapping and review tool other hotels could use. Here are some more ideas:

Build a Web site that's the tourism center of your community. I assure you, you can do it better than what your community's already done.
Shoot video reviews of all the hotels in your area. Give them away.
Shoot free video reviews of all local restaurants.

Inaction isn't prudent -- it's radical. I'm here to tell you, business is nothing like it has been for the last 100 years. The Internet has changed everything for everyone. If you don't believe and act on that, you won't survive, plain and simple.

Who you are at the core of your business must reflect the changes of a decentralized marketplace. The customer is the controlling party who dictates how business should be run.

At the end of Justilien's column, he writes: "The question now: 'What user problems or issues can you solve for your particular industry?' Ask yourself: 'What are the linking opportunities? How can we capitalize on them?'"

When you change your business to reflect the new market, you can truly address the problems of your industry. Then you can develop a content strategy that goes to the heart of a well-run linking campaign.

5 Ways to Discover Link Building Ideas

2008-02-21T16:28:00.000-08:00

By Justilien Gaspard, Search Engine Watch

Coming up with great link building ideas can be a challenge. It requires creativity, research, and thinking outside the box. Let's review some techniques to get your business started in the process.

One of the most direct methods to discover link building ideas is by solving customer problems. I illustrated this in link building case studies for B2B and the travel industry. By solving a customer problem, I discovered great link building ideas -- a.k.a. link bait (define).

Why is this simple method often overlooked and forgotten? Pretty simple: it isn't sexy enough for an industry that thrives on buzz and hype.

Here are five techniques to uncover customer problems you could turn into a great link building strategy.

Keyword Research

Use your favorite keyword research tool to find out what people are searching for. Look for phrases that indicate the person is looking for answers to a problem. These could include such words as "how to," "help," "tutorial," "fix," and "problem." Now you know specific problems that customers need to have solved. Use this information to create a great link building strategy -- and gain new customers at the same time.

Customers

You can discover link building ideas simply by talking to customers and uncovering their challenges. This includes conducting a survey, making phone calls, or asking customers in your brick-and-mortar locations.

B2B? Conduct a survey of clients to find out their challenges for the upcoming year. Make sure to ask open-ended questions. That's the best way to find the less obvious opportunities.

Staff

Talk to your account managers, customer service staff, and salespeople. They're the people in your organization who have the most contact with customers and the best understanding of their issues.

Tip: Have customer service representatives keep track of problems or questions customers have throughout the week.

Forums, Blogs and Social Media

Spend time reading forums, blogs, and social media sites in your industry to discover recurring problems people face. For blogs and social media, pay close attention to the comments people leave. Much is revealed in those comments.

If someone said something you want to explore in more detail, don't hesitate to contact them directly. Many will be willing to elaborate.

Consumer Review Sites

Spend time researching consumer review sites for your industry. Try to spot recurring issues. Review sites provide a wealth of invaluable customer data.

Use the information gathered about what customers are searching for and brainstorm link building ideas with your staff. Include people from different departments since you never know who'll come up with that incredible idea.

Be different: put a spin on the idea. It's easy to copy what another company has already done. It's just as easy to be ignored by the Web.

Dare to be different. As Sage Lewis pointed out in his link column last week, "If you want links to your site, you must do and be something others simply are not. You need to give something worthwhile to the Internet community."

Is your idea worthwhile? Is it different? What sets your strategy apart from the competition?

Good link building is just good marketing. It's about solving problems, being creative, doing research and thinking outside the box.

Use Directory Rating Websites to Find Top Directories

2008-02-20T18:23:00.000-08:00

By Gobala Krishnan |

Paid directory submissions can be scary.

Unlike submitting to free directories, it’s way more stressful to send a Paypal payment to the owner of a directory and never really know if your site will ever be listed. Most web directories appear to be lifeless, and you don’t know if the webmasters that manage them are still actively accepting submissions.

So you fill-up their form, make a payment, and wait for a response. A week passes, then a month, and eventually you’ll forget about checking if your site is listed. Not to mention that by now you’ve already submitted to so many paid directories that you can’t keep track of them all. What a way to waste cash.

Isn’t there a better way to find directories worthy of your hard-earned money?

This is where directory rating sites play an important role. Simply put, these sites attempt to find, organize and rate the thousands of free and paid directories available on the Internet.

Here are two of them:

Directory Rate

DirectoryRate.com allows you to rate the top directories, so you can read other people’s ratings and experience before you decide to submit. It’s also easy to see which directories are active, and the overall SEO power of each. The site assigned it’s own rating system, and the active directories will display this rating on their sites.

Directory Critic

DirectoryCritic.com works the same way. When a directory gets listed high here, it’s providing social proof that they have an active submission process, and you can even get testimonials of how much traffic to expect from your submissions. It’s a win-win situation for the directory owners and for you.

If you submit your blog to a directory via these services and get good service, make sure you go back to the sites and submit your own rating or review. This would help other webmasters find good directories. You can also share your list via StumbleUpon or other social bookmarking sites.

If you own a directory, consider listing your site in these sites and instantly improve your reputation and daily submissions.

Your blog can be featured for free...

2008-02-20T18:21:00.000-08:00

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Keyword Basics Part 5: Using Keywords in Linking Text

2008-02-07T20:01:00.001-08:00

Mike @ Wordtracker to me

Hi farhan,

Keyword Basics Part 5: Using Keywords in Linking Text

Using keywords in both internal and external linking text is a must-do for any optimization campaign - and it's not as difficult as you might think. We'll show you how in your final Keyword Basics lesson:
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-five-gh.pdf (pdf)

Great January discount!

Get maximum value from this course by using the full version of Wordtracker.

You can get great offers on one week, one month and one year subscriptions.

There's never been a better time to find out what your customers are really looking for online. Just follow this link today:
http://www.wordtracker.com/offers/keyword-basics.html

And remember, it's entirely risk free - if you're not satisfied for any reason, we'll refund your money in full with no questions asked.

Wishing you every success online,

Andy Mindel & Mike Mindel
Co-founders, Wordtracker

Rivergold Associates Ltd
Unit 11, Apollo Studios
London
NW5 2SB
United Kingdom

P.S. If you missed any of the past lessons, follow these links:

Part 1: How search engines work
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-one.pdf

Part 2: Discovering the keyword matrix
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-two-ak.pdf

Part 3: Choosing your best keywords
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-three-yz.pdf

Part 4: Using keywords in website copywriting
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-four-ss.pdf

Keyword Basics Part 4: Using Keywords in Website Copywriting

2008-02-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

Mike @ Wordtracker to me

Hi farhan,

Keyword Basics Part 4: Using Keywords in Website Copywriting

Now that you've got your best keywords, how do you use them effectively in your website copy? We'll show you how in today's lesson. Just follow the link:
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-four-ss.pdf (pdf)

Coming up: Keyword Basics Part 5: Using Keywords in Linking Text

Great January discount!

Get maximum value from this course by using the full version of Wordtracker.

You can get great offers on one week, one month and one year subscriptions.

There's never been a better time to find out what your customers are really looking for online. Just follow this link today:
http://www.wordtracker.com/offers/keyword-basics.html

And remember, it's entirely risk free - if you're not satisfied for any reason, we'll refund your money in full with no questions asked.

Wishing you every success online,

Andy Mindel & Mike Mindel
Co-founders, Wordtracker

Rivergold Associates Ltd
Unit 11, Apollo Studios
London
NW5 2SB
United Kingdom

P.S. If you missed any of the past lessons, follow these links:

Part 1: How search engines work
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-one.pdf

Part 2: Discovering the keyword matrix
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-two-ak.pdf

Part 3: Choosing your best keywords
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-three-yz.pdf

Keyword Basics Part 3: Choosing Your Best Keywords

2008-02-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

Email from wordtracker

Hi farhan,

Keyword Basics Part 3: Choosing Your Best Keywords

Today, you'll learn how to cherry pick the very best keywords from the thousands you can generate using Wordtracker. Just follow the link:
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-three-yz.pdf (pdf)

Coming up: Keyword Basics Part 4: Using Keywords in Website Copywriting

Now that you've learned how to choose your very best keywords, you'll need to know how to use them in your website copywriting. That's what you'll learn in tomorrow's lesson.

Great January discount!

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And remember, it's entirely risk free - if you're not satisfied for any reason, we'll refund your money in full with no questions asked.

Wishing you every success online,

Andy Mindel & Mike Mindel
Co-founders, Wordtracker

Rivergold Associates Ltd
Unit 11, Apollo Studios
London
NW5 2SB
United Kingdom

P.S. If you missed any of the past lessons, follow these links:

Part 1: How search engines work
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-one.pdf

Part 2: Discovering the keyword matrix
http://www.wordtracker.com/keywordbasics/keyword-basics-lesson-two-ak.pdf

Farhan, Is Adsense Your "Game"?

2008-02-07T19:51:00.000-08:00

Email from maxblogpress

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Farhan, 5 Components of A Money-Making Blog

2008-02-07T19:49:00.001-08:00

Email from maxblogpress

Hi Farhan,

It's Pawan Agarwal from MaxBlogPress.com

A blog that is set-up for making money on the Internet works
differently than blog that are set-up for fun.

One thing for sure is that when profit is the word, you need
to do these 5 things differently:

1- Keyword Research
------------------------------------------------------------

If you just want to blog for fun you can write about anything
you want.

But if you're blogging for profit, you need to research a list
of keywords and build a list of it that you want to target for
the search engines.

You'll be able to use the free keyword research tools here:
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http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

2- On-Site Search Engine Optimization
------------------------------------------------------------

SEO is definitely important for getting more traffic from
Google and other search engines.

The good news is that with Wordpress, all you need to do to
drastically improve your SEO is to download the right plugins
and do minor tweaks with them.

Each post your wirte must focus on getting ranked for the
keywords, while maintaining a good, read-able article.

3- Off-Site Search Engine Optimization
------------------------------------------------------------

You must get as many links as possible to your blog.

But links alone are not enough. The links themselves must
use an "anchor text" based on your list of keywords and
you'll need to get a variety of links:

a) Reciprocal link exchange (least effective)
b) 3-Way Link Exchange (more effective)
c) Pure one-way links (most effective)

Of the three, getting one-way links are the most difficult
but you can do that by submitting articles to this site:
http://www.ezinearticles.com

4- Mini-Blogs Vs Large Blogs
------------------------------------------------------------

You don't need a huge blog like TechCrunch.com to be able
to make profits.

In fact, most people build "mini" Wordpress blogs. What
this means is that instead of blogging continuously for
the rest of their lives, they create a blog that focuses
on a very, very small niche topic.

Then, they determine the number of posts or articles they
need to write. They then write those articles, and convert
their Wordpress blog into a "site" using the "static front
page" option in Wordpress.

Now instead of a blog that you need to stick with daily,
you can move on to a different niche market and create a
blog there.

All that's left with the first blog is to continuously
build more links to it and get more traffic.

Maybe one day you can come back and add more articles
to the first blog, but one thing's for sure this tactic
works.

Wordpress is a blog platform, but it can also work like
a normal site if you know how to do it.

5- Having an Exit Strategy
------------------------------------------------------------

Ok so you built your blog, you got 1000 RSS subscribers
but now you're sick of it.

The worst thing you can do is to continue blogging after
you've lost interest in the topic.

So you need an exist strategy. You can either:

a) Convert the blog into a static site and enjoy the
residual income but stop writing new posts

b) Demolish the blog and redirect all traffic to your
other site using a 403 redirect.

c) Sell the blog on popular marketplaces like at:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace
http://marketplace.easywordpress.com
http://market.mashable.com/

Wow...

Is that enough information overload for today?

As much as I try to cover all aspects of blogging for profit
it's near impossible to do it via emails.

What I can do is give you a really good recommendation,
especially if you're interested in building Wordpress blogs
and making money from Google Adsense:

http://www.maxblogpress.com/r/WordPressAdsense.html

The guide, called "Wordpress Adsense System" by my friend
Gobala Krishnan has been one of the best-sellers in it's
category since 2006, and still going strong.

In fact, he even gives you the "before and after" facts of
blogs belonging to his early customers. These are really
powerful testimonials indeed!

This guide covers most of what I just said in this email,
so go here and check it out:

http://www.maxblogpress.com/r/WordPressAdsense.html

Best Regards,

Pawan Agrawal
http://www.MaxBlogPress.com

Farhan, Get Blog Traffic Fast...

2008-02-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

Email from maxblogpress

Hi Farhan,

It's Pawan Agarwal from MaxBlogPress.com

Traffic is the holy grail of blogging - everyonebody wants it
but it's more of a myths sometimes than actualy fact.

Read a couple of blogs on the Internet now and you'll know
what I mean - everyone has their own theory but for the most
part it's just a theory.

So before you go "grail hunting", wouldn't it be better to
start getting traffic NOW instead of waiting?

Here are a few ways to get traffic to your blog FAST:

1 - Join My BlogLog
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

That's right, go to http://www.mybloglog.com and create your
account. List your blog as a "community" for free and you've
already exposed yourself to bloggers from all over the world.

Next, add the MyBlogLog widget to your blog and watch real
people (with pictures) as they discover your blog. Add them
as a friend and grow your MBL profile.

Soon bloggers will be flocking to your new blog.

2 - Update Your Forum Signatures
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

If you've been online for any amount of time, you may have
posted on a handful of online forums that allow you to out
your own signature and link to your website.

In the past you may have put an affiliate link or just your
name in the signature colum - it's time to change that!

Just log in and update it to include a link to your blog.
As you're doing this, checkout the hottest or latest topics
on that forum and leave a reply or comment.

3- Leave a Comment on Other Blogs
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Go to http://blogsearch.google.com and build yourself a list
of blogs tightly related to yours.

Then, participate in the hottest discussions on the blog.
Remember, you have to sincerely contribute to the blog post
itself, not just leave a half-baked spammy comment.

When people read your comment, they will click through to
your blog to check it out. If they like what they see, they
will subscribe to your RSS feeds and come back for more later.

4- Submit Your Posts to Blog Aggregators
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

A "blog aggregator" displays the latest posts from other
blogs, and most of them are free to submit your posts to:

http://www.plugim.com (Internet marketing blogs only)
http://www.bloggingzoom.com

If your posts are interesting enough, others will vote for
them and if you make it to the front page you'll be getting
a lot of traffic.

5- Do A Review Exchange
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Remember the list of sites you comment on?

Approach the owner and ask for a "review exchange" where they
write a post reviewing your blog, and in return you write one
for them.

Well actually if you're just starting out, you may have to write
the review first and let them know about it.

Even if they don't write a full review like you did, they will
find a place to plug-in a link to your blog or your individual
blog posts.

Most bloggers are kind (really!) and they would love the extra
exposure of course.

That's it, the "5 Fastest Ways of Getting Traffic to Your Blog"

I said "fastest", not "best". There are other ways I'm sure, but
hey if you can't even do this then you truly are a "grail hunter".

And guess what, no one has found the grail yet, Farhan :)

Best Regards,

Pawan Agrawal
http://www.MaxBlogPress.com

Farhan, Why Are You Blogging Anyway?

2008-02-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

Email from maxblogpress

Hi Farhan,

It's Pawan Agarwal from MaxBlogPress.com

There are literally millions of blog out there in all shapes
and sizes.

But everyone only visits a handful of them. Ever wondered why?
Only a handful of them ever become successful. Ever wondered why?

Let me tell you it has nothing to do with these 2 theories:

------------------------------------------------------------
Theory A: Early Birds Win
------------------------------------------------------------

In this so-called theory, many people try to convince you
that unless you're the first to do something, you'll always
live in the shadow of the early birds.

Yet history has revealed that the "early birds" or the
pioneers are the ones lying by the roadside with arrows in
their backs.

Imagine starting a blog before Wordpress existed. Before
you can just download plugins or themes instead of having
to create them yourself. Before people even knew what a
"blog" was..

Could you have been successful if you started back then?
Was Bill Gates the first to invent an operating system?
Was Facebook the first social networking site?
Was YouTube the first online video sharing site?

The answer is a BIG "NO".

No, you don't have to be the first to be successful.

------------------------------------------------------------
Theory B: Saturation
------------------------------------------------------------

In this so-called theory, the naysayers convince you that
you're "too late". "It's over dude, it's too saturated.."

This is the number ONE excuse most people in any industry
give when they fail to measure up to the competition.

It's an easy way out - now you can put the blame on the
market instead of yourself...

But "saturation" goes hand in hand with "profitability"
All profitable markets will have other competitors in
them. The same goes with blogging.

In fact, if I found 600 blogs on the topic of "Outsourcing"
I wouldn't say it's "saturated" - I'd say "Here's where the
money is!"

Of course you can seek out markets with no blogs in them
and try to build one - but that would make you the "early
bird" in that market and the most likely to fail before
the market even takes off.

So what make great blogs great?

Let me tell you the secret - "Purpose"

They all have a specific purpose in mind. A specific goal.
Gone are the days when you can blog about everything and
expect people to be interested.

Today, your blog has to have a specific *niche* purpose.

a) Are you blogging to build awareness on a topic and
not looking for profits?

b) Are you blogging to help improve the image and brand
of your company or product?

c) Are you blogging just to make some money from Adsense
ad not really care about fame and glory?

d) Are you blogging to be recognized as an expert in
a specific topic or market?

It really doesn't matter what your purpose is, as long as
you have one, and don't lose sight of it in your entire
blogging journey.

At MaxBlogPress, we'll help you find that purpose. We'll
then help you get more traffic to your blog, and help you
realize that purpose.

Stay tuned for my next email...

Best Regards,

Pawan Agrawal
http://www.MaxBlogPress.com

Do You Like To Be On Top? A Global Domains International Position

2007-11-29T20:02:00.000-08:00

By: Dmarie Holtz

If you like to be on top then you are just like millions of other web site owners trying to position their web sites as high as possible on the Internet search engines. Unfortunately, not everyone knows what it takes to get to the top. Focusing on three specific methods can help get your Global Domains International web site to the top of the internet and stay there.

The first must-do with your Global Domains International web site is effective keyword research. The reason keyword research is so vital to your web site is because it can ultimately determine rankings of your web site in the search engines. While you can opt to buy your way up the search engines using pay per click, using the right keywords to optimize your web site can be extremely effective.

Either way, keyword optimization will affect where you are in the search engines, which in turn affects how much traffic you bring in. Effective keyword research is vital because there are certain keywords you want to target and others you do not want to target. In a highly competitive market on the internet, it is virtually impossible to target the most common keywords. Therefore, it is best to target keywords in the middle of the pack to give yourself a better chance. Keyword research shows you which long tail keywords are being searched for that relate to the popular keywords you covet. Concentrating your web site promotion on these long tail keywords will help you achieve a top Internet position faster, target market your prospects better and have an overall more effective marketing campaign because it has been shown that the real buyers actually find what they are looking for mostly through long tail keywords.

The second must-do with your Global Domains International web site is search engine optimization. What you have to learn is that search engine optimization is a continuous process that you cannot give up on. Once you make it to the top of the search engines, there is no time to sit back and relax. You must constantly optimize, promote and add new content.

Content tends to be the key to search engine optimization. It is crucial that you have quality content for your site that is fresh and enticing and above all unique. But do not look solely at the content you have on your site. You will also want to pay close attention to the design of your site, where things are placed, and anything between the lines.

Lastly, promoting your Global Domains International web site is a must. Without constant promotions, people will not know that you exist. You can never have too much traffic coming in which means your promotions should never stop.

Article distributions are one of the most highly effective promotion methods on the internet right now for a number of reasons. Article distributions allow you to display fresh ideas in an organized and efficient manner online. After doing this, you can prove to people that you know what you are talking about and entice them to visit your site. On the bottom of your articles you can place a resource box, which is where you place your web site link to direct readers to your web site.

There are a number of things you need to do to get your Global Domains International web site to the top of the internet. But the three must-dos in this article are absolutely necessary. If you follow these steps and work hard, you will give your site a chance to move to the top and stay there.

Google removes thousands of malware sites

2007-11-29T19:58:00.000-08:00

by Christina Warren
On Monday, Sunbelt Software's security blog revealed that thousands of malware redirects were showing up in search engine results. Network bots designed to post relevant keywords and spam links in various online forms (think forum posts or blog comments) helped attackers claim high-ranking search engine positions for various obscure and seemingly innocuous search terms. According to Sunbelt, two of the thousands of terms were "infinity" and "hospice." Yeah, that's cool. Search for hospice information for a sick friend or family member, potentially get your system infected with nasty malware.

On Tuesday, Sunbelt revealed more information about the ill-effects clicking on these fake links could have on a vulnerable system (as a reminder - ALWAYS keep your browser and Internet security tools up to date). Best case scenario - you might end up with one of those annoying toolbars and pop-up ads for fake security software. Worst case? Your computer could be used to generate false-clicks for the attacker's pay-per click programs (so they infect your system so that you can make them money), or worse still, that bot could load other malware/worms/trojans onto the unprotected system. Further investigation also revealed that these SEO-poisoning attacks were targeted at Google, although other search engines may have also been victim to the attacks.

Google has cleansed more than 40,000 of these hosting sites from their index, so for now - it looks like the biggest source of this sort of attack has been taken offline.OK - you might be thinking, spam search results show up everyday - why is this a big deal? It's a big deal because the techniques used for these attacks was more clever and thought out than the typical SEO-poisoning. It's also a big deal just based on the sheer scale of sites and domains dedicated to hosting these links and because of the malware involved.

It's great the Google stepped up and cleansed the index so quickly after being made aware of the problem, but this should be a big (or continuing) wake-up call to users who don't stay up to date with security updates or don't have some sort of Internet security solution. And while Windows users are obviously the users who are most directly affected by these types of attacks, having these kinds of search results show up as relevant, even if the link can't harm your system, is bad for the Internet community as a whole.

There's lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it's GOOD for bloggers and doesn't negatively affect readers/searchers/regular users. This is a lie. Instead of Search Engine Optimization, SEO should really stand for Search Engine Opportunism, because that's what it really is. Look, we certainly don't object to gaining revenue from ads or page-views on a web site, that's why we are able to do what we do; we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes to insert web sites into search queries that really have nothing to do with the content. Techniques to make sure your relevant content shows up in corresponding searches is one thing -- inserting back-door code that is aimed at getting higher page ranks and more page views, regardless if the targets are actually correct, is another. To us, the type of SEO attacks revealed this week are only a few steps away from what tons of bloggers/websites do every day: purposely try to game search engines just so they can get more hits to their site, and by extension, maybe make a few extra dollars. Unless you are running a straight-up scam link-farm or very, very lucky -- the highest search engine rank in the world is not going to have lasting benefits if the content is nonexistent.

What is Traffic Rank?

2007-11-28T17:10:00.001-08:00

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

Advertising on Your Site - Google Onsite Advertiser

2007-11-20T21:32:00.000-08:00

By: Martin Lemieux

Google Adsense has just become more powerful overnight. As if it wasn't enough that Google now gives you $100 for every successful referral to their Adsense program but, advertisers can now battle for placements within your own websites as well.

That's right, with every Adsense box you add to your site, you can now sign up for "Onsite Advertiser" which ads a button to all your Adsense boxes on your site that states:

"Advertise On This Site"... This new link takes advertisers to a unique landing page (which will include your logo if you upload one) which allows advertisers to advertise specifically within your own Adsense boxes located on your site.

For Some, This Could Be Very Powerful!

Let me break it down for you if you still don't understand the implication of this. If someone wants to target your site through their Adwords program, they can now have a bidding war with other advertisers! Your Adsense account that would typically make anywhere around $100.00 a month could potential make $1,000.00 a month! If you get the right advertiser that is willing to pay to have their ads displayed on your site, the sky is the limit. If you get multiple advertisers that want to display their Adwords on your site, your site could turn into a gold mine!

For Some Website Owners, This Could Be Devastating!

The harsh reality of this newly found fortune through your Adsense program could mean the demise of your website advertising packages that aren't part of Google. If you run advertising on your site, your sales could potential drop from the sheer amount of times visitors will be subject to Google's Onsite Advertiser program.

At least the choice is yours whether or not to have Google Onsite Advertiser installed within your Adsense boxes. There's no cost to you, all you have to do is log into your Adsense account. Under "My Account" at the top, go to the bottom of the page and fill in your Google Onsite Advertiser profile. That's it, Google does the rest.

I am curious to see the results of this new program and would definitely like to here some success stories come out of this program.

What Does This Mean For Advertisers???

Finally, you have all the control of your Adwords campaign. You can now not only target specific websites to advertise in, you can physically bid specifically for one specific website whenever you want.

This also means that PPC just got more homework. Not that you already have enough research, bidding, key word analyzing to do, you now have to study every website you visit for potential advertising.

Another Implication No One Might Think About!!!

SEO Companies are probably loving this new feature. Google has now given SEO companies a new service to offer their clients and visitors. Internet marketing companies can now increase the amount of work they do for their PPC client’s campaigns!

In Conclusion:

There are ups and downs of this new Onsite Advertiser program anyway you look at it. For me though, I would love nothing more than to see advertisers fight for ad placements on my websites.

Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies for All Bloggers

2007-11-20T21:27:00.000-08:00

By: Denise Palmer
These basic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for all bloggers can help to increase your blog rankings on major search engines. Follow them routinely, and you will achieve consistently higher volumes of traffic to your blog.

Profitable bloggers know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an important element of optimizing their blog and how effectively they implement it determines whether they succeed in making money online or not.

SEO helps your blog rank high on search engine results pages, such that you get more visitors, or traffic, directed to your blog by the search engines. The process of SEO involves the effective use of keywords and keyphrases in your blog content.

Search Engine Optimization

Below are basic SEO strategies that will optimize your blog content and help you appear higher in the search engine results which means more visitors to your blog.

- Know all your keywords and keyphrases and use them effectively on your blog. The more optimized your use of keywords and keyphrases, the higher your blog will appear in the search engine results. When your blog can be found on search engines, (the higher in the results the better) it means that you will get a lot of traffic to your blog.

- When designing and building your blog, make sure that your keywords and keyphrases are included in your blog headings and sub-headings.

- Use only high quality, unique and fresh content on your blog. Duplicate content can result in your blog being penalized by search engines. Using only fresh and unique blog content will get you noticed by the search engines and they will list you quicker and higher in the results.

- Submit your blog to blog directories both in your niche and in general directories as well. This gives your blog even more creditability with the search engines and will only help to increase your exposure and traffic.

- Create links with other related blogs. If your blog is linked to other blogs where you would expect your target market to visit, the popularity of your blog increases. Create one way links by submitting articles and participating in relevant forums and make sure that you include your blog URL.

- Blog regularly using fresh, unique content and the keywords and keyphrases for your niche. Blogging regularly activates the search engine spiders to visit your site each time you post new blog content. The more regularly you post, the more often the search engines visit, the higher you rank for your niche.

It's important to realize that the search engines want and need to satisfy their customers - and they do that by providing high quality results in response to their visitors search requests. If your blog delivers consistent, unique content, that is indexed effectively by good keyword and keyphrase usage, EVERYBODY WINS!

These basic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for all bloggers can help to increase your blog rankings on major search engines. Follow them routinely, and you will achieve consistently higher volumes of traffic to your blog.

Blogging For Fun And Cash

2007-11-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

By: Sean Milea

Today's generation is fascinated with blogging. There are many different reasons to keep a blog. Some blogs may even have the chance to make you some money. They can serve as a marketing items for both individual people and companies. If you blog, the primary goal is probably to have people read what you have written. Here are a few suggestions to keep blogging your way to achieving your goal:

In order to increase the number of people visiting your site, the choice of the topic should be interesting enough and its presentation should be creative and unique. You should also make sure that the content of your blog entries is of high quality. Informative and useful blog entries will definitely draw more readers to your site. Well written blog entries may also end up being bookmarked by your readers. However, the selection of topics for your blogs should relate to your website contents or any other products or services you represent for.

You need to know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Most web users try to find what they want using search engines. To get these people to your blog, you need to write your content with the strategies used by search engines in mind. In your blogging, use keywords which you know people will be searching on, and you help people to find your blog. The better you are at this, the better your traffic figures will be and the more productive your blog will be.

Frequently updating your blog is very important, especially if you want your site to come up higher on search engine lists. Also, once people find your site they probably will not come back very often or at all if there is nothing new to read or look at. So update your blog and add to it as much as you can to keep people interested and your site popular.

Top 5 SEO Terms Any Beginner Should Be Familiar With

2007-11-20T21:16:00.001-08:00

By: Vanessa Doctor
SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and is generally used to refer to the industry or process of optimizing websites to be well interpreted by the search engines. A SEO is a SEO expert or anyone practicing search engine optimization. But those were the basics.

Years ago, SEO was used to make sure the site ranks well in the search engines by placing the keywords in strategic locations on the page, and it was natural to understand SEO as 'optimizing for the search engines'.A lot of years have gone by and the search engines became more sophisticated, the people began to realize that search engine traffic alone is not equal to online business success and SEOs started paying attention to other things, influencing online people behavior.

A Wholistic Approach To Website promotion

The art of search engine optimization, in essence, has grown to become a more holistic approach to optimizing and promoting websites, taking into account not only website crawlability and search engine rankings and traffic, but also conversion rates, social marketing and customer retention rate.

Get More Targeted Search Engine Traffic

One unique thing about the approach of SEO is that every aspect of it aids the old art of website optimization. If you research your customers, you learn the words they use, when referring to your product, and you use the words on your site. Thus, you get more targeted search engine traffic.

By knowing how people view websites and what motivates them to buy, you will be able to reconfigure your pages and remove the useless clutter, thus increasing your sales from the same amount of visitors. In the end, you will not only be serving a larger amount of people, but they will be able to make quicker decisions, enjoy buying online and being your customers. Happy customers are more likely to become your loyal clients and could also refer others to your online business.

Top Five SEO Terms A Beginner Should Take Note

- Keywords and keyphrases. Keywords and keyphrases are the words you want your Web site to rank well for in a search engine results page, which are also called SERPs. Depending on your audience, yours can be one word, a combination of words, or an entire phrase. To reduce word-bloat, let's use the term keywords to encompass the two types.

- PageRank.

A PageRank is a measurement that the those obsessed with Google use to test their rankings in Google. SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) professionals also use the term to describe your ranking in the SERPs and the ranking algorithm points given to your site by Google. PageRank is an important part of your SEO success.

- Spamming.

Spamming is a method of SEO that attempts to trick a spider and dupe loopholes in the ranking algorithm to influence rankings for targeted keywords. Spamming can take many forms, but the most simple definition for spam is any technique a Web site uses to misrepresent itself and influence ranking. The two methods of SEO are based on whether you want to spam or not.

- Black hat SEO.

Spamming the search engines. Black hat SEO is lying, cheating, and stealing your way to the top of the SERPs.

- White hat SEO.

Optimizing your site so it serves the user, as well as attracts spiders. In white hat SEO, anything that leads to a good user experience is considered also good for SEO.

10 tips to help you improve your website in search engine rankings

2007-11-20T18:50:00.000-08:00

By: Ivonson Kwee
Here are 10 tips to help you improve your website in search engine rankings. You should give priority on the home page of your website and once you apply the techniques to improve search engine rankings, you will be able to apply them to the other pages of your site that will have multiple high ranking pages.

1. Look for keywords (or key phrases) relevant to your website. Use one of the keyword tools available online and check the popularity of the keywords you want to use. Avoid highly competitive keywords (for now). Highly popular keywords are very competitive and the least popular keywords are search engine traffic starved.

Select a dozen keywords and key phrases from the middle of the list and start focusing on improving the search engine rankings of your website for them. This is a very important steps and you should spend at least a couple of hours, if not more, analysing different keywords. While you are analysing your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search in a couple of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc., using those keywords. Keep a record of your competitors' urls and other information because you don't want to waste your time doing the same search again in the near future.

2. Put the keywords you selected into the meta tags of your home page. Meta tags are situated in the head section of a web page. Go to one of your competitor's website and select View and then Source from your web browser's menu to view the html source of the web page. You will see the meta elements.

The two important meta tags are keywords and description meta tags. Don't leave them blank. You can list your keywords, separated by comma, in the keywords meta tag. Construct a catchy description using your keywords for the description meta tag.

3. Use the keywords in your title tag. This will vastly help improve your website search engine rankings. The text you use in the title tag appears in the title bar of the web browser. The title tag should be not more than 64 characters long. Again, the key is to use a meaningful title using the keywords. Don't just make a laundry list of your keywords for the title tag.

The title tag and your meta description may show up in many search engine listings. So, spend sometime to make these two changes interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.

4. Use the keywords in top heading (h1) tags of your page. Put one keyword (or a key phrase) for each h1 tag. Use these h1 tags for the headings of your contents. Again, this is important to boost your website in the search engine rankings.

5. In the home page content, use bold, using the strong html element, to highlight some of your keywords.

6. Italicize some of the keywords in your page.

7. Use the keywords in alt tags of images. It is recommended to always use the alt tag for all images. Just don't try to stuff multiple keywords into your ALT tags as this could be considered search engine spam.
8. Encourage others to use the keywords for text anchors when they link back to your site. Better yet, publish your own short link text with keyword anchors, bold and italicized key phrases and give it away for link exchanges. Getting backlinks are one of the best ways to improve search engine rankings.

9. If possible, use the keywords in your domain name. Try different arrangements of the keywords to come up with an available domain name that you can register.

10. If you are using php or asp or any other web programming language for your dynamic website, make your url search engine friendly using url rewrite techniques. Search the phrase url rewrite in Google to know more about url rewrite.

Keep in mind these simple rules every time you want to launch a website to instantly improve your search engine rankings before you even launch your site. Spending a few days upfront in the preparation of your site will pay off in the long run with better search engine rankings.

Search Engine Visibility: Be Seen Through SEO Bookmarking

2007-11-20T18:47:00.000-08:00

By: Darren Dunner
Everyday we browse various websites looking for either news or some information related to our work and can't obviously remember all the names. Today's world is moving towards the internet and there are many networking sites that have come up. This helps people connect with like minded people in other parts of the world and leverage on these to promote their business or skills. And in order for a website to be popular, it needs higher level of search engine visibility. This way, it will pop up when we enter the key words on Google, or Yahoo or other search engines. Maximizing the reach and utilizing the facilities available on the internet is what search engine visibility does to one's website.
Off late the number of networking websites has become a platform for business and personal connections to be made and people sharing information across the globe. Facebook is one such site that has grown phenomenally in the past year since its inception. It has millions of members from all over the world, who are in touch with a select group of people and seek new friends' everyday. If they are looking for work, or projects, they use this site as a platform to search for the same. The application available called shared items enables members to put in their blog URL or other sites they find useful. Again this helps in getting people to notice your website before they browse through others.

Propeller by Netscape is another such site that is yet to be launched but looking at bringing the world closer. This site can also be used to increase the traffic to your website by putting in key words that connect it with your site. The aim of this site is uniting people and help them exchange information; provide services and business opportunities to each other. This way, search engine visibility is assured every time a member uses the key word.

Apart from this, for a person to keep track of all the websites they surf or go to on a routine basis, a new tool is in the market. Created by Google, the Google reader allows users to add various sites and access them easily without wondering what they are everyday. You don't have to remember the exact URL, but if you type the keyword it throws up all results related to your search criteria and you can choose the site from there. Today this service is available to people on their mobile phones, since most of them carry a blackberry or a PDA with them. With Google reader, search engine visibility becomes easy, as the site reads RSS and blog data as well and the number of people using this is bound to increase. And Google is ofcourse the first search engine that people turn towards to search for something on the net. All one needs is a membership with these sites to give them access to the rest of the world waiting to be explored.

Copyright (c) 2007 Darren Dunner

Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Management Nightmare

2007-10-31T23:38:00.000-07:00

--Andy Beal--

Google is no longer just a search engine. With your potential customers, future employers, and members of the media turning to Google for information about your business, Google has become a reputation engine.

In helping clients with their online reputation, I’m consistently asked how they can push out negative content that appears on the first page of Google for a search for their name. Whether they were fined by the SEC, ridiculed by an ex-employee, or investigated by their local newspaper, they share one common goal: get that negative result off of the first page!

Of course, it’s near on impossible to make a negative Google result simply disappear—although there are some black-hat SEOs that claim to have that gift. Instead, your best approach is to provide Googlebot with a healthier diet of web content that shows your reputation in a positive light.

On that note, here are my recommendations for the best web content to fill up the first page of Google results.

1. Get your own web site.

It sounds simply enough, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, you’d be surprised at the number of individuals and companies that haven’t registered their own branded domain name and thrown up a web site. Registering yourcompanyname.com or yourpersonalname.com and adding a basic web site is a sure-fire way to occupy one of the top ten Google listings for your name.

2. Start a blog.

If you love and nurture a blog, it will likely become a great asset in your reputation management arsenal. But the great thing about a blog is that it tends to rank well, even when left un-watered. Blogs are the cactus of online content. Wordpress.com and Blogger.com both provide free blogs and free hosting. Add just a few posts, keep it targeted to your name—that means use it in the blog title, posts etc—add a few links and bake for a few days. It will be on the first page of Google in no time.

3. Add a sub-domain.

If you’ve put a lot of effort into growing your main web site, chances are there’s an opportunity to add a sub-domain. Sub-domains are great. Google considers them as separate from your main site, but they still include your main brand. There are a lot of great reasons to add a sub-domain: careers, corporate info, and product info. Take a look at jobs.marketingpilgrim.com as an example.

4. Create a social networking profile.

MySpace.com profiles can rank well for your personal or company name. When you sign-up, be sure to use your real name—using a nickname won’t help with your Google reputation—and enable the option that lets you pick the URL of your profile. myspace.com/companyname works a whole lot better than myspace.com/12345678.

5. Create your own social network.

If a social networking profile ranks well in Google, how much more so your own social network? Ning.com will let you create your own customized social network. Better yet, you can pay just $5 a month and point your own domain name at it. Take a look at www.marketingpilgrim.tv for an example.

6. Create a business profile.

You should join LinkedIn.com because it’s a great tool for networking with your peers. You should also join LinkedIn as it allows you to talk about yourself, link to your other Google-friendly web content, and customize your profile URL. Wouldn’t you rather your potential employer find your LinkedIn profile on Google, than that run-in you had with your last boss?

7. Share your photos.

Flickr.com is very Google friendly. Upload photos of you, your company logo, your products, etc, and label them using your name. Add some comments to each photo (including your name) and Voila! You’ve just added a dozen pages of content, each labeled with your company name! Be sure to do the same when selecting your profile name for Flickr too.

8. Claim your identity.

Naymz.com is a blessing for those looking to control their Google reputation. It effectively lets you create a profile and then link out to all of your other profiles. Whereas LinkedIn is heavy on the networking-side, Naymz is more of a holding-tank for your brand. Best of all, Google seems to love it!

9. Create your own Wiki.

If you’re facing a Google reputation nightmare, you may be tempted to create a Wikipedia profile for yourself. After all, Wikipedia ranks all over Google, right? Bad move. Not only is it hard to get one approved, but they’re totally unbiased. That DUI incident, you’re trying to cover-up, will likely make its way on to your profile. Not good. Instead create your own wiki and build your profile that way. Wetpaint.com is perfect for this. You can focus it on your personal name, or your company name. The best part is that you get to decide who contributes to it.

10. Get a free page from Google.

I’ve saved the best until last. Ok, I lied. While a free page from Google Page Creator (googlepages.com) isn’t the best web content for managing your Google reputation, there’s something satisfying about having Google help mend your reputation.

So, there you have it. While these shouldn’t be used as a “get out of jail free card”—you should avoid a reputation nightmare to begin with—they’ll at least help you re-build your Google reputation.