The Art of Website Maintenance

Now that you’ve designed and launched your website, you have a powerful marketing tool for your business. But, your website is only as useful as the content is current. The process of keeping the content on your site current is called website maintenance, and it’s important to keep both visitors and search engines supplied with new information. Just like regular maintenance on your car, you have to make changes on your website every few months to make sure that things run smoothly.

If you update the content on your website on a regular basis, potential clients will be drawn back to your site to find out “what’s new”. The search engines pay visits to websites in their queue regularly. The catch is that you’ll stay in the queue only if you update your site regularly. If the search engines visit your site several times in a row, and don’t find anything new, they may decide not to come back-which can be a blow to your search engine rankings.

So, when is it appropriate to update your website? You don’t want to waste time and money nitpicking at your site if you don’t have updates of real value to add. You should update your site if you’ve:

• Grown your skills. Have you gotten a new accreditation? New licensing? Improved your skills? Any change in your skill set is a great reason to update your website-and your potential clients-with your new capabilities.
• Expanded your products or services. Do you have a new offering? Add it to your website and start making new sales in that area.
• Completed a successful project. If you’ve just finished a project, include it on your website. Create an online portfolio, add a case study-build a section on your website to use as a place to show the world your success.
• Gotten more testimonials, or added to your client list. Including more feedback on your offering helps to build your credibility. Be sure to get a testimonial from each of your successful client projects. Updating your testimonials regularly will also show clients who have visited your site a few times that your offerings are “up to snuff”.
• Written an article. Writing articles is a great way to keep your website up-to-date and to put more content on your site. Search engines love content-rich sites, and visitors will love to see the new information. So, if you write articles to educate your clients and promote your business, be sure to place them on your website as well. They’re likely to be full of keywords related to your area of specialty, which will help your ranking in the search engines.
• Press releases. You should post all press releases and other information you publish about your company to your website. You never know who may be visiting, and you may get written up for your accomplishments.
• Changes in your business. Have you hired someone? Changed your business structure, and you’re now required to notify the public of that? If so, you should probably review your website and evaluate how you can add that information.
• Yearly check-ups. You should do a basic check on your site at least once a year, to make sure that the content is current. Some things to check on include:
• Your copyright statements should be updated yearly
• Test and validate your links, to ensure that they still work
• Your time references should be changed. If your “About” page says how many years you’ve been in business, this is the time to change that!
• Your pricing and offerings-do you have new products or services? Have your prices increased over the past year?

Spotlight any major updates on your home page as well, so that people will learn of those updates as soon as they enter your site. The search engines will also discover the new update as soon as they enter your home page if you leave a bit of information, with a link to the full story, on the home page. That will act as a breadcrumb for the engine to follow-the engines will follow your link to learn more about it.

Any of these reasons, and dozens of others, are great reasons to make changes to your site. If you make keeping your website current a priority, it will pay off with better search engine rankings and increased sales and leads through your website.

Once you’ve decided to make your changes, the next choice is how to go about doing that. There are two steps involved in maintaining your site:

1. First, decide whether you prefer to edit your content on paper or online. This can be done in a couple of ways. You can start by printing the pages that have outdated information and then updating that information on paper first. Or, you can copy and paste the outdated content from your website into a word processing program such as Microsoft Word and then edit that file on your computer.
2. After you have updated your text content you can choose either to make the changes yourself or to hire a web designer to make the changes. There are several tools that you can use to make changes to your site yourself. We recommend an easy-to-use tool called Macromedia Contribute. It’s fairly inexpensive, its simple to set up and learn, and it allows you to back up to older versions of your site if you make mistakes.

We suggest that you use this tool to make only simple text changes. More complicated changes-for example, to the overall design or navigation-are more difficult to make, and having a professional make those changes will save you energy and frustration.

If you are comfortable with a more complicated software program, then we recommend a professional-grade tool such as Dreamweaver. With a better software package, you’ll be able to make some of the more complicated changes yourself.

By building more-and more current-information into your website, you will also begin to build trust with your potential clients, since they will have a snapshot of what’s currently happening in your business and available to them. Your website can go a long way towards making sure that your online prospects know, like, and trust you-which can lead to more sales from your website.

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By Erin Ferree

There is no doubt that links from other websites to your website is vital for an ecommerce business. It all filters down to the Google Page Rank. This is the Google tool that is used to determine how important a website is to people surfing the net.

Google will balance the number of links, the PR of the pages exchanging the links, the keyword similarities on the linked pages, how often the site is updated, and the number of hits a site receives. Two PR 4 sites sharing links between pages with ‘small business’ as the main keyword, will benefit more from a small business website with a PR4 and a private blog that discusses ‘wealth building.’

Also, 100 links between a PR6 site and a PR4 site will increase the ranking of the second site faster than 100 000 links from a PR2 site and the same PR4 site.

This can all be a little confusing. Google’s PR algorithm controls everything. The confusion comes from the fact that search engines cannot think. Both the PR4 ‘small business’ site and the PR2 ‘wealth building’ site can be helping small business owners improve their page promotion. However, search engines cannot read. If they don’t see similar keywords, then they do not understand that the sites really do have similar content.

Building Links

The main problem with generating inbound links is the time needed to generate links. Even a strong link building campaign can take months to build a few thousand organic links. This brings up the question, should you buy links from other sites with high ranks?

The benefits are solid, if the link is in the right place. Some link buying services let the business owner pick what sites their links appear on, and which pages they appear on. This is the only type of ‘static page’ service to use.

Another service puts links on blogs. This type of service, like www.payu2blog.com and www.blogsvertise.com or www.payperpost.com let business owners pick the PR ranks, topics, and quality of blog, their links are posted on. Blogs have a benefit that static websites don’t. First, blogs always put the link inside the content, hidden within keywords that the business owner chooses. This guarantees that the keywords at both sites match.

The second benefit is that blogs are pinged to blog search engines, and directories, every time the blogger posts a blog, or a comment is posted. This means that a single blog can be ‘pinged’ to the search engines daily, where a static web page is pinged every few months – if ever.

However, a static page that is linked to a blog will be ‘crawled’ every time the blog post is published and pinged.

Crawling Your Site

Many people buy links from PR4 to PR8 sites for no other reason than to have the search engines come and crawl the site. It doesn’t matter if the link goes down, because the benefits have already been received. This is the best way to have a new website resolved by Google in a matter of hours, instead of weeks, or months.

Cost

Cost can be prohibitive. Some companies have a budget of $1million for blog advertising. However, a small company can get started for $1000. In fact, if the blog owner finds blogs with ads hidden among the posts, they can contact the blog owner and deal with them directly. A PR 2 or 3 blog will cost $5. A PR 4 – 5 will cost $10. A PR6+ can run as high as $100.

However, the traffic driven to your site by Google can easily offset the cost. Buying 10 links from 10 PR5 websites or blogs can result in 100 000 extra hits in a month, which can produce 1000 extra sales.

Link Farms

Whether you buy links on blogs or web sites, avoid link farms. These are sites that are in business to sell links. If the search engines find these sites they will ban them. This can result in your 1000 PR7 links disappearing – forever. It can take Google six months, or more, to apply new links to your website. This drops your page rank, and profits, for a few months.

Outbound linking

It is also important to remember to link from inside your website to similar sites. Google will count these links too. In the end, it is up to each individual business owner to decide whether they should build organic links, or invest in buying links.

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By Mark Walters

13 Tips for Finding a Graphic Designer

Are you ready to hire someone to design your logo, collaterals, or artwork for your website? Well, here’s just the information you need to get the best results from hiring your first (or your first successful) graphic designer.

To assure that we begin on the same page, a graphic designer designs your marketing materials - the print- and web-ready art which are then turned over to a printer or coded for the web for the final outcome. Some of their vocabulary can be foreign to you, and their processes may not be familiar either. We’ll address that and more with these tactics.

This advice gives you the essentials for hiring the right person for this critical project. The more qualified the designer, and the better the match between you and your designer will lead to more appealing final designs. the more professional you and your business will look.

1. Look at their work samples. Many designers offer a portfolio of samples either on their website, by email as a PDF, or in a hard-copy format. When you review these, look for a general design style that you like, not necessarily whether they have lots of experience within your particular industry. In fact, deep experience within an industry isn’t necessarily the best thing when you want a designer to put a fresh visual spin on your business and your issues.

2. Make sure they’ve actually done the work in their portfolio. This is especially true if you’re reviewing design companies or firms. Make sure that the designers who are still on staff created the work that you really admire.

Where this can come into play with solo designers is if the portfolio isn’t clear about their involvement in the development of all the design elements. For example, if they’re showing a brochure design or a website in their portfolio, but you love the logo; make sure that they created the logo before hiring them.

And, ask what the client’s involvement in the design of that logo is-if the client came to the designer with a sketch of the logo already created, then the logo may not be reproducible by the designer or firm alone.

3. Talk to the designer. Having an actual conversation with them can really help for two reasons:

To make sure you can communicate well with each other. If you each have very similar styles of communication, levels of energy, or enthusiasm about the project, then the project will most likely run very smoothly (or has a great potential for success). Also, make sure that you each understand what the other is saying-having similar definitions for concepts is amazingly helpful. When you don’t understand something, ask questions! To see if the two of you “gel” together. You’ll be working closely, so make sure that you get along! If you don’t like their personalities or vice-versa, then the relationship will most likely become strained and difficult. 4. Review their skills. This becomes especially important if you’re hiring a web designer-make sure the designer is qualified to provide you with all the technical components you’ll need. For example, web coding, forms coding, HTML newsletter integration and Search Engine Optimization are all somewhat technical fields that not all designers can deliver. Make sure you’ll be able to get what you need.

5. Check their references. If you really like a particular project in their portfolio, see if you can get that client’s contact information. But, if the designer can’t release it, that’s not necessarily the worst sign-maybe the client prefers that their contact information be kept private. Or they’ve moved, and haven’t told the designer how to get in touch with them. Be open to reasons why they may not be able to furnish a particular reference.

6. Learn about their processes. Find out how they plan to execute on the work that you’d like to have done. Ask what the designer needs you to do, what you’ll be asked to review and approve, how decisions are made, and how they’re made final. Make sure your designer is able to guide you through the design process, providing all the information you’ll need along the way.

7. Check their turn-around time for replying to emails, sending quotes, and returning calls. Make sure that it’s in line with the turn-around time that you expect throughout the project. Turn-around time here can also indicate the designer’s level of excitement about your project. However, if it’s a bit slow, make sure they weren’t just out of their office at meetings for the day, or tied up in another deadline-understand that they’re a small business as well, and the fact that they’re busy is probably a sign of how effective they are for their clients!

8. Review the rights that they’re selling to you. Make sure that you have the copyright and reproduction rights that you want. Think as far into the future as possible-you want to make sure that you’ll have what you need as your business grows. You don’t want to have to come back to your designer and re-negotiate your rights in a few years!

9. You may be tempted to ask for some sample designs for your specific project. This is known as work on “spec” (speculation) -having a designer do work without a guarantee of getting the project. While designers can understand your fears-what if you don’t like the logo we develop, what if we don’t “get” what you want, what if…

Asking a designer to work on spec isn’t very fair. The first round of designs on any project is the most time-consuming to create-it often consists of researching your company and your competitors, brainstorming on the creative side, and generating first ideas. You wouldn’t ask a doctor to diagnose you before paying for his time, and then offer to pay him if you like the diagnosis-it’s no more fair to do so with a designer.

10. Make sure that you’ll get the deliverables you expect. Some designers don’t plan to include final files in their deliverables to you-if you want to have the original files delivered to you along with printed collateral or the final files uploaded to your web server, make sure the designer knows that up-front. It may change the pricing.

If you want to be able to edit the final files, make sure that the designer can deliver the files to you in a way that you can edit them. Realize that, depending on the software that you have, this may either limit the design or be impossible, but you probably won’t get the files in the specific format you want unless you ask!

And, if you envision having your final files in a particular format-such as having your letterhead in Microsoft Word-be sure to ask for that. Many designers don’t consider Word files to be part of a standard set of deliverables.

11. Have a realistic schedule and check the designer’s turnaround time. Allocate enough time for your project to be completed-rush jobs never turn out to be as good as they could be if enough time were allotted. An average logo project takes weeks, not days!

Also, be sure that they have time available in their schedule to complete your project on your timeline. Check for upcoming vacations, and whether they work evenings and weekends if your timeline calls for that.

12. Make sure that you’re both clear about revisions. Many designers include a set number of revisions in their project packages. Make sure that you understand what constitutes a revision, how many you’ll get and what happens once they’re all used up.

13. Get it in writing. A contract can help to lay out expectations for the project on both your end and the designer’s. Once you have a contract from your designer, make sure to read it carefully-it will often state exactly what you’re going to get out of the project, how you’re expected to pay for designs, what you’re paying for, and how to get out of the contract (in case you have to cancel the project for any reason). And, if it doesn’t make things clear, ask the designer to elaborate for you.

Following these steps gives you all of the background information you need for optimum results when hiring a designer. Use them as a reference when you review designer’s websites, meet with, or interview your potential designer. Understanding the process and expected outcome does wonders for a smooth transition from ideas to reality.

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By Erin Ferree

Copywriting Makeover: It’s What You Say AND How You Say It

The old cliché is wrong. All our lives we’ve heard, “It’s not what you say, but how you say it.” That may occasionally be true, but for the most part it’s what you say AND how you say it. Case in point: Announce It!, a custom candy-bar-wrapper manufacturer, had copy on their home page that was acceptable. It mentioned pretty much all the important things a site visitor would need to know about ordering candy wrappers. Yet the copy wasn’t pulling as well as it should have been.

The Problems

The target audience consists mostly of women. In addition, these women order favors for special occasions. That means (stereotypically speaking) you have people who ask a lot of questions and are especially cautious of buying something they can’t touch, feel or see (in person) for use at a major life event. Communication (what the copy says as well as how it says it) is vital.

The text had to convince women that they could trust “Announce It!” to produce something they would show off in front of all their family and friends for important occasions such as birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, weddings, showers and more. That meant answering the questions these women have as well as instilling confidence that their party favors would be the hit of the event.

Technically, the copy was OK. But it lacked excitement. No, not hype… excitement. It needed to reach out to women and make them feel welcome while also reinforcing that “Announce It!” was the perfect solution for them. You can see the original text here:.

As I’ve always said, you never want to “we” all over your copy. The content needed to speak to the site visitor, not talk about the company. The old text was full of “we” and “our” and hardly even acknowledged the site visitor.

From a search engine standpoint, the site was bouncing around a good bit. According to the site owner, “For a long time, I held the #1 position for many of my keywords. As search engines evolved, my site started bouncing. It was time to hire a professional.”

The Solution

The plan was to make the text more inviting and supportive while providing information that was easy to immediately identify. I wanted to help “Announce It!” differentiate itself from other candy-bar wrapper and favor sites. That meant making important benefits clearly visible. In addition, a glimmer of excitement would be added to the copy to get the women in the mood to buy.

A complete change of focus for the copy would also happen. Rather than “we” and “us” the copy would be directed toward the visitor while still communicating important benefits about buying from the company.

Lastly, correcting an elementary mistake would help the copy read better and assist with SEO. The hope with SEO was to give “Announce It!” some stability, as it had a history of bouncing back and forth between the first and second pages in the SERPs.

The overall goal was to increase conversions for this site. As the site owner herself said, “Without conversion, your rankings don’t mean as much. You really have to convert the visitors once they get to your page.” Oh so true!

First I introduced you to Announce It!, an online candy-bar-wrapper manufacturer that was seeking professional help with their search engine copywriting. Facing an audience that consisted primarily of women who were purchasing favors for special occasions, “Announce It!” copy had to be spot-on with its communication. The primary problems were that the copy did not convey a sense of excitement or answer all the questions customers might have. It also focused too heavily on the company rather than communicating with the site visitor.

Let’s see how the changes were worked into the copy and what the results were.

The Rewrite

You can see the original copy at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/customcandybarwrapper-original.pdf and the revised copy at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/customcandybarwrapper-new.pdf.

Headlines are one of the most important elements of advertising copy and of search engine optimization. The original web page didn’t have any type of headline — a fundamental mistake that needed to be corrected. The introduction of the text now begins with using a key phrase and stating a benefit. The headline reads:

Creative, Custom Candy-bar Wrappers Designed To Make Your Event a Hit!

Since “Announce It! key phrases all deal with candy-bar wrappers, it’s obvious that visitors who find this site are already familiar with the general product. (At least to the point of knowing what a custom candy-bar wrapper is.) The question they still have is, “Why should I buy from “Announce It!” instead of all the other candy-bar-wrapper sites?”

As the visitors read on through the copy, they find reassurance that their idea of using custom-designed candy-bar wrappers is a good one. Visitors are also provided with several benefits available from Announce It! that other companies don’t offer. For the sake of scan-ability, bullet points are used to further highlight differentiating factors about Announce It!. (Low minimum orders, free color proofs, free photo inclusion, etc.) This all helps to clearly explain why this site is the better choice over others the visitor may have gone to previously.)

Because the product itself is graphic, it was important to retain the product images used on the original home page. Certainly, customers would expect to see samples of the wrappers. However, to create a greater impact, each image was captioned with a short bit of occasion-specific, persuasive, keyword-rich copy. For instance:

“Custom candy wrappers are a truly creative way to send your retiree off in style.”

The finished product now speaks directly to the site visitor, sounds more professional, outlines important benefits and uses key phrases in an appropriate way so as not to hinder the natural flow of the copy.

The Results

The results showed improvements in both conversions and rankings. According to “Announce It!” their conversion rate quadrupled! They also report, “[The copy] has really made a difference in the way the site is perceived and how the customer reacts. I have gone from a one-person operation to a full-fledged business with five employees. The traffic and orders continue to increase every year!”

You couldn’t ask for much better than that!

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By Karon Thackston

Blogging 101: The Care and Keeping of Your Business Blog

So you’ve got your business blog up and running. Congratulations! But don’t think that your job is done yet. Starting a blog is kind of like keeping a pet. It’s fun and exciting and new at first, but there’s a lot of maintenance that goes into it, and if you don’t take care of it, you’re going to have one heck of a mess on your hands.

Blogs are a major benefit to your business, there’s not doubt about it. But you’ve got to put quite a bit into it in order to really reap the rewards.

Protect your Blog from spam

Many people aware of the power behind blogs will attempt to find programs that allow them to auto post spam to your blog in the form of comments and unless you take the necessary steps may end up with the wrong kind of audience. Most blogs will allow you to require that people create an account on your blog first, which we strongly recommend.

Update frequently

You don’t have to update every day (though it would be nice if you could), but once a month, or even once every two weeks, is not going to cut it. If you let your blog go too long without a post, people will quit reading it. Not only will that hurt your blog, but it will also reflect negatively on your business. People may think that your company is going out of business, or simply old and tired because you don’t put the effort to continue something you started. Pick a schedule, be it daily or twice a week or whatever, and do your best to stick to it.

Don’t talk if there’s not something useful to say

The only thing worse than a blog that never updates, is a blog that updates with posts about nothing. The concept may have worked for “Seinfeld,” but it’s not a good philosophy for your business blog. Posts that don’t say anything are boring, and people aren’t going to read boring posts. Remember your target audience here. Keep a log of topics to write about that they would find interesting, and stay abreast of industry news.

Length isn’t important

No, a post that’s two sentences long is not the way to go, but neither do you have to write a novel of “War and Peace” proportions for every blog post. If you’ve just got a little company blurb that’s 150 words long, don’t worry about stretching it out. What you’re saying is far more important than how many words you use to say it. Interact!

If you’re lucky enough to have people actually responding to your blog posts, rejoice. Now you’ve got to talk back to them. If they ask a question, answer it. If they bring up a good point, mention it and give them your own feedback. If they have something negative to say, give them a polite, professional counterargument. It’s called “social media” for a reason. If you want to take it one step further (and you should), read some of your posters’ blogs and comment on those. You could end up making priceless business relationships.

Track the things that matter

So Google Analytics regularly tells you how many people are looking at your blog. Those metrics are easy to check, but are they really what you want to know? You may assume that the more readers you have, the more customers you’ll get, but that’s not necessarily the case. Don’t focus so much on the analytics numbers. Find out from your readers what works and what doesn’t, and fix your blog accordingly.

Don’t let your blog founder because you weren’t sure how to maintain it. Take care of your blog, and you’ll find that it will benefit your business for a long time to come.

By Tony D. Baker

Advanced SEO - The Characteristics Of A Perfect Incoming Link

What is a quality incoming link? This article describes the key characteristics of a perfect link. For explanation purposes, the sample company is a shoe retailer called Fred’s Sports, and the keyword phrase being optimized for is “blue Nike sneakers

Key word phrase in anchor text

Unless you put your keyword phrase in the anchor text (the text that describes the web site being linked to), you are wasting a lot of link power. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t know this an end up putting their company name in the link text rather than the keyword phrase that they want their company to be found by. Much better that they link anchor says “blue Nike sneakers” than “Fred’s Sports Store”.

The link is from a relevant page

Google and the Google-powered search partners seek relevance in the interconnectedness of web pages. Incoming links should be from pages where the content on that page is related to the content of the page that is being linked to. A fishing related page linking to a casino site is an example of a non-related link. A jogging related page linking to a blue Nike sneakers product page is related and is looked upon favourably by the search engines.

The link goes to a relevant page

Another mistake that people make is always linking to the home page rather than to the most relevant page to the anchor text. If the link anchor text is “blue Nike sneakers” then the link should go to a page about blue Nike sneakers, not the home page. This is by far and away the most common linking mistake.

The link is from an authority site

Links from high Google PageRank sites are worth more, a lot more, than links from other sites. It’s all about trust. A link from a trusted site tells the search engines that the sites linked to are also trusted - it’s a vote of confidence from a credible source. Links from .gov, and .edu sites are also reported as having more weight than standard links. They are also more difficult to get adding to their perceived quality.

The link is at top of the page

Links from the top of a page (except for the header), are said to have more weight than links at the bottom of pages. It’s the same with keyword phrases. A keyword phrase in the heading is worth more than in the body text.

The link is one-way, not reciprocal

Google’s algorithm looks for link exchanges between sites and rates these links lower than straight one-way links. If possible, look for one way links by creating link bait - compelling content that will encourage people to link to your pages.

The link is within the body copy - not an advertising zone

Linking should be a natural part of the body copy. Recent reports suggest that the search engines will derate links from parts of the page that are traditionally sold for advertising. these tend to be the margins, header and footer areas of the page.

The link does not have a nofollow tag

The nofollow tag is a recent innovation that tells the search engines that although I am linking to this other page, I do not vouch for the page’s integrity. In short, the nofollow tag tells the search engines to ignore the link. Obviously you do not want links to your web pages to have nofollow tags. Be careful with link exchanges. Some dishonest people will exchange links with you but use nofollow tags in the links to your pages to preserve their own link power.

There are few links on page (less than 20)

One link to your web site from a page with hundreds of links does little for your SEO results. The page’s SEO power is being distributed over all the other links on the page. Goo;le’s guidelines recommend no more than 100 links per page, but I believe 20 is a reasonable goal. You never know when the Google algorithm may change. The perfect page that links to your pages should have no more than 20 links.

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By John Hacking

Tips On Writing a Good FAQ

Many companies’ help lines are usually crowded with customers trying to find an answer for their questions. Some of these questions are legitimate; others seem to be made just to annoy the help staff. FAQs are supposed to prevent such situations by offering potential help line “customers” the chance to find the information they are looking for on their own, without necessarily picking up the phone or sending e-mail.

What Are FAQs?

FAQ is the abbreviation for Frequently Asked Questions. FAQs are organized “collections” of valuable information that usually comes from questions (and their corresponding answers) for the most common issues raised by users, on various topics. Companies make up such information compilations in order to fulfill their customers’ need for answers.

They are also a means to ease the burden of the customer support group by providing answers in written form to the most commonly asked questions.

FAQs can be available online or offline, burnt on CDs or DVDs. The second choice is more viable for people who don’t have access to the Internet, though this is a highly unlikely situation.

Writing an FAQ

Why should you write an FAQ?

The most common advice when it comes to writing FAQ documentation is that, if you have some experience in a particular field, if you have ever come across issues that you finally managed to solve, it’s good to let other people know it too. FAQs are basically about sharing information in a non-selfish manner.

When you submit your FAQs to the appropriate newsgroups, you stand a good chance of getting good feedback on your work, and thus your efforts will be rewarded.

An FAQ will almost automatically make you an “expert” (more or less) in your field. People will contact you and will help you maintain your FAQ up-to-date either by asking yourself more questions (in this case you’ll have to do some research and update your work), or simply by getting hold of more relevant information, based on their own experience that can be added to your FAQ.

What should you write about?

The possibilities are endless. Practically, any subject will do. There will always be questions, let’s say, regarding the compatibility between a particular piece of hardware and some software, or about configuration errors, etc. If you figure out which could be the most common problems and you have the answers for them, just go ahead and write.

Special considerations

It’s a good idea to include a disclaimer in your FAQ. You should mention there things like the fact that, that as far as you know, the information provided in the FAQ is accurate (or was accurate at the time you posted the respective FAQ on the Web or in a newsgroup), but that you cannot be held liable for any inconvenience caused by following those instructions or using that information.

You can also copyright the information in the FAQ that you submit for public use. Specify the terms under which the information can or can’t be used without your specific consent, under penalty of law. It can give you the legal basis just in case.. Yet, experts say that this usually does not work since there are numerous companies that gather loads of FAQs from directories on the Web, burn them on CDs or DVDs, and then sell them.

A Few Tips for Writing FAQs

When you set out to write an FAQ, it is good to follow a few guidelines. Among these, we consider that it’s worth mentioning:

* Put yourself in your audience’s shoes; figure out what questions might be asked and provide the answers that you’d like to hear/read
* Mind your grammar and spelling; always remember to review what you write, or have somebody else do it for you
* Be concise enough to offer the necessary information in the least amount of words and time, but don’t be as concise as to leave the reader under the impression that they have gained nothing by reading what you have written. Check also an article about writing good software documentation
* Remember to use bullets when you have lists

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By Adriana Iordan

The Death Of Email Marketing?

Many internet marketers have deduced that email marketing faces the worst crisis since its discovery. They base this conclusion on the massive increase of unsolicited emails better known as SPAM. Recent research has shown that email campaign clicks have been reduced to their lowest point. In the past years, email campaigns were very productive with click percentages of 15%-25%. Unfortunately the click ratio is now averaged at 2%.

Since every internet user receives a huge amount of spam email messages, the time for distinguishing the legal opt-in subscriptions messages from spam has increased considerably. Therefore, it’s more likely that users will erase the genuine messages with the spam messages.

Although these facts are true, the “Death of email marketing” as some internet marketers call it, will not happen. There is solid proof that many corporations, small businesses, and home business entrepreneurs are running successful and profitable email campaigns.

All these successful email marketing campaigns have something in common, some specific principals that any online business entrepreneurs should incorporate into their marketing plans.

Personalization

Research has proven that when Personalization is used the click through rate of the email increases dramatically. A friendly tone is the key to build rapport with the subscriber. Most of the auto responder services and email software contains this feature. One thing must be specified though. There must be no exaggeration in the personalization otherwise the results will be reversed.

Email marketing schedules

The frequency of the mailings is extremely important. Although it seems tempting to send emails daily, with that strategy many of the subscribers will unsubscribe, especially if the mail contains advertisements most of the time and no useful information. One of the best email marketing tactics is to broadcast one time per week and not exceed two times per week maximum.

Which is the Best Day for campaigns

The answer is simple, Friday. The internet user has the whole weekend to check his email and distinguish the spam with the luxury of time, something not possible on other days of the week.

Use of double opt-in

Subscribers who are double opt-in are extremely targeted, because they verified their interest for the newsletter and are more disposed to buy the products or services the email list owner recommends. Plus, this feature provides maximum safety to the newsletter owner from spam complaints and the associated consequences.

Recommend not sell, plus unique content

The internet user searches for information on the internet. The same happens with the user’s email. The subscription happens for that reason over 95% of the time. Messages must contain a combination of useful information and personal recommendations of tested and proven products or services.

No Co-Registrations

This is the easy way to boost the number of the subscribers of an email list. Co-Registrations offer forms to users with many other email list owners with different fields of interest. The danger of spam accusations relies on that method and the effectiveness is questionable.

Buying leads to send emails

Another hyped email marketing technique. The list owner who bought the leads will not be clearly informed how the “subscriber’s” emails have been acquired. Have they been gathered with ethical opt-in methods or has an email script crawler been used? There is no control on that tactic and herein too lies the danger of spam accusations.

No Red flag words

Words and phrases like free, discount, bonus, make money, opportunity, income, etc. lead the email to spam folders. These phrases should be avoided at all costs. There is software that provides spam check features for that and free services as well. One of them is http://spamcheck.sitesell.com .
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By Christos Varsamis in Featured

Getting Your Press Release to Somebody Who Cares

Newspapers, both online and print, are inundated with hundreds of press releases every day. With that kind of capacity, you’ve really got to make sure that yours stands out from the pack if you want it to catch the eye of the editors and make it in front of their readership.

Don’t start at the top

One of the best ways to increase your chances of getting published is to hunt down the person at the newspaper who cares about what you’re trying to say. The editor-in-chief probably doesn’t have the time to look over every press release that comes in, and if you’ve got a press release about a new pet product, chances are that the business editor won’t care too much.

Whether you’ve got a story that needs to get into the right hands, an unusual topic that needs a special reporter, or you just want better coverage for your piece, finding the right person at the newspaper can make all the difference.

Good things take time

Unfortunately, building a press list is not exactly an instantaneous process. Finding the right person at a newspaper can take quite a bit of time and research, but if it can get your press release wider distribution, it will all be worth it.

In addition, you’ll have the contact information for future releases, and if you’ve treated your newspaper contact right, then you’ll have an established relationship, which could be mutually beneficial in the long run.

Search for similar stories

Initially, try searching Google News and Yahoo News to locate individual reporters who might be interested in your story. If you’re looking on a national level, look for people who have written several articles on subjects similar to yours, without a regional focus.

Don’t just look at titles, and don’t just look at one story. Actually read the stories to get a feel for the writer and the tone they take. That will help you make your decision about who to send your release to.

Broaden your focus

Think outside the box. You may have a press release that hits multiple categories. For instance, a technologically advanced gizmo that vaporizes dog poop would probably be of interest to both a pet writer and a technology reporter.

One exception to that rule is writers who work for the same publication. Tempting as it may be, don’t send your release to more than one writer at a publication. This is a serious faux pas, and will build a very bad foundation for future press relationships. Rather, take the time to figure out whose style best fits your piece, and send it to them.

Make it easy for them to contact you

Above all, make sure that no matter what, your contact information is clearly printed on every press release you submit. Few things are more frustrating to a reporter than having a good press release and no way to contact the company for more information about it.

Searching for the right person is going to take a long time. But finding the right person for your press release will make it a lot easier to promote your business in the long run. Ensuring your release gets into the right hands is an investment that’s well worth the time spent.

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By Jessica Cox

How to Optimize for MSN!

Last week I discussed the best tactics for achieving rankings in Yahoo, the web’s number 2 most popular search engine. Now it is time to pick on the third most used search property – MSN, which has 6.6% of the search market (src: Hitwise) and is currently found at www.live.com. MSN’s ranking algorithm has its own nuances which will be noted in this article but in many cases the rules of optimization may be the same as Yahoo’s in which case I will occasionally duplicate information from my “How to Optimize for Yahoo” article or source it for more information.

WEB SITE OPTIMIZATION

Except for the following elements, optimizing for MSN is identical to optimizing for Yahoo.

Fresh Content is King: I suppose technically this is not an element of ‘optimization’, however, this article would not be worth its salt if I didn’t express how highly MSN regards fresh content. If your site is in a competitive marketplace and you are finding it difficult to get a leg up on your competitors in MSN then write original content in order to build up your site and reputation. MSN appears to elevate websites that regularly update their content and a blog is a great way to post this content for others to read and favour you with links. If you would like some information on how to get a blog up and running from start to finish then I suggest reading Blogs 101.

Themed structure: this topic is identical to that of my Yahoo article, however, it is vital enough to mention it again. Construct your website using a themed structure where core site topics (themes) have their own unique section of the website to themselves. When the search engine spiders index the content within this section they will be given absolute clarity as to what the section is about. For more information see the example within the Yahoo Optimization article.

Basic optimization principles hold true: take out your SEO basics handbook and follow the rules when optimizing for MSN and you have done the best you can. Specifically focus on inline links (links to pages within sentences) and the use of heading tags to fortify rankings at MSN.

Navigation: pages with text navigation which lends itself to simpler and more relevant indexing are performing well.

WEB SITE SUBMISSION

Unlike Google and Yahoo, MSN does not yet have a fully operational Webmaster Central for webmasters to submit sitemaps and to acquire insight into their website profile on MSN; it is currently in private beta so it is not available yet. That said I feel that submitting a website sitemap is extremely important. Fortunately there are two known ways to get your sitemap submitted to MSN:

Option 1) The best method for submitting your sitemap is by adding a sitemap reference in your Robots.txt file using the following format:
Sitemap: http://www.xyzname.com/sitemap.xml

Option 2) A back-door strategy can be used to submit your sitemap to MSN through the news aggregation service called Moreover. To submit your sitemap substitute the bolded text with your own information in the following URL:
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.xyzname.com/sitemap.xml

LINK BUILDING

MSN places a great deal of weight on incoming links and does not appear to apply as many filters to the links that Google or Yahoo do. As a result, ethical or not, many link building strategies such as reciprocal link building and paid links appear to pay dividends.
It is also noteworthy that MSN’s spider is very active so any incoming links that you receive will often be spidered within a week. Furthermore, MSN’s link filtering systems are not as bogged down as the other search engines (less traffic perhaps?) so incoming links appear to affect rankings faster which tends to help when tweaking a campaign and measuring the value of links.

CONCLUSION

As you can see there is little to report on the intricacies of optimizing for MSN because, quite frankly, MSN is fairly predictable and by the book; write good original content, optimize it well using the techniques outlined in the Yahoo optimization tutorial and ensure to submit your sitemap to MSN. If you combine those elements with a solid link building campaign then you are sure to move into a ranking where you can continue to tweak your optimization until you reach the top.

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By Ross Dunn

The Central Problem in Web Marketing… and Its Solution

The Web is supposed to be a wonderful, powerful, exciting new marketing medium. But many businesses simply do not get the return from their websites that they want. What’s going on?

From every size of company, from downtown corporations to home-based businesses, we hear the questions, “Why don’t we get more visitors to our site?” and “Why don’t more of them buy?” There are many problems, challenges and concerns in web marketing, but there is ONE thread that runs through them all — not enough sales.
A signpost to the cause, and, therefore, to the solution, is indicated by what people say to each other about their websites; “Who designed your site?”, “Do you know a good web designer?”, “I like this design.” and (maybe), “Do you use an open-source CMS?” In other words, most companies, most of the time, are focusing on design and technology.
You rarely hear people say, “Who wrote your site copy?”, “Who helped you decide what information to include?”, or “Who helped you market your site?”
Attractive, professional design and appropriate technology are certainly critical for a successful business site. But not to the extent of investing 95-100 percent of the thought, time and money in only these two aspects of the website’s construction and use!
The potential of a well-developed website is enormous. Indeed, building an effective website may be regarded as much more than simply important; it may very well be essential to the future viability of your business. At the very least, it can be a major marketing channel, bringing you new clients and reinforcing your relationships with current clients.
So what can you do to make your site more effective? The fix is not in design. Nor does it lie in technology. Doing more of the same is not the answer.
To find a more useful direction, consider the critical tasks your site needs to accomplish — bring people to the site, make the sale, and develop relationships with prospective and current clients. When thought of in these terms, it is clear that design and technology do not actually do any of these things. Yes, absolutely they can enhance, but they don’t actually DO.
The solution to lower-than-desired sales is to remember what a business website actually is — a marketing tool. What needs to be improved is marketing. A business website must, therefore, be based upon, permeated by and used according to the most profound and powerful marketing principles. Does that sound like your current site? For the business strength and profitability you want, you may need to improve three areas:

1. Strategic Planning to make every component of the site, and tactic for its use, as powerful as possible, and to integrate the use of the site most effectively within your current business and marketing plan.

2. Content development: Crafting the site as a marketing and service/product delivery tool.

3. Effective promotion to bring high-quality prospects.
So in summary, we have FIVE key components for an effective website: Strategic Planning, Content Development, Design, Technology, and Promotion. Strategic planning is arguably the most “supercharging” component, and is frequently the most neglected. But “strategic” is a word often misused. It is not just a big tactic, or a collection of tactics, or the latest “cool and sexy” tactic. Truly strategic planning can make a difference to the power of everything you do that is like the difference between a handful of flashlights and a laser.
Something I like to remind clients of: You are not WEB marketing; you are MARKETING on the Web. In other words, the key word is not “web”, it’s “marketing”. The effectiveness of almost ANY website will be enormously improved by the inclusion and ongoing implementation of proven, powerful marketing principles. The potential return, in terms of business building and profitability, is staggering.

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by Michael Linehan is the founder of Marketing Alchemy.

First Full Edition Resolutions

This is the first, full edition of the new look for SiteProNews.com. We have spent the last two months building this site as a daily magazine, news source and information resource for webmasters, online marketers and Internet analysts. Back in January when I was first told I would be made Executive Editor for Jayde-Online, I wrote a number of resolutions that have become personal rules about how we would bring out take on the news to the public. Today is a good time to revisit and reprint those resolutions.Today, April 2 is the first day of the second quarter of 2007. The first three months of this year have been fast paced and exciting. One of the most crucial changes in our industry is the expansion of the number of news gathering organizations examining search and online marketing. As the world of online business becomes more complicated, the business of providing honest expert news and opinion becomes more important.

The remainder of the decade is going to be a great era in technology and hopefully in most of our lives. We in the search and Internet marketing sectors are among the most fortunate people on Earth at this time. In that spirit, I would like to outline a number of New Look Resolutions for SiteProNews. These resolutions are to be thought of as foundation principles for our editors, writers and contributors.

1/ We will consistently and faithfully report the news as we see and understand it regardless of consequence or controversy.

We are journalists. Reporting on a multi-billion dollar industry can be a daunting and challenging experience. Where there is smoke there is often fire. Similarly, money and power often attract corruption. It is the role of the news media to ferret out corruption and report on it. That role is integral to the functioning of a free and democratic society and is one our forbearers fought and died for. We will never dishonor their sacrifice by shying away from what we believe to be the truth.

2/ We will continue to speak truth to power.

Even if those in power have the ability to use their strengths against us, we have the responsibility to speak truth to them. This takes guts, determination and the absolute certainty that one has researched and triple checked their facts first but, we deeply and passionately believe in the role of the media as a watchdog.

3/ We will NOT sensationalize our stories or aggrandize our sources.

We report on the facts as we see, hear or interpret them. This includes the use of headlines written as link-bait. There is nothing to be gained by sensationalism, at least not in the long-run. As the history of SiteProNews demonstrates, we are devoted to being here for long-term.

4/ We believe in using the media as a force for social improvement and economic equity.

If we can use our publications to explain techniques and expand on the talents of our audience, we will be helping to create and foster stronger, better informed webmasters and online businesses. In turn, those webmasters and businesses create jobs, wealth and, in the long-run, greater social equity. The best way we can help improve the lives of those living in difficult economic circumstances is to offer accurate information and to motivate through inspiration. Strong, open economies are the cornerstones of strong, open societies. The media has a direct role in fostering openness and therefore can be used as a force for social improvement and economic equity.

5/ We believe in a diversity of opinion and will focus a good deal of energy in the cultivation and support of new voices in the search and webmaster media.

There are a lot of emerging voices in the search and Internet marketing sectors. We will endeavor to foster and support the best of them in order to bring the widest array of information to our audience.

6/ We will only use verifiable statistics.

In the immortal words of the mid-nineteenth century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” While there is no way to avoid their use, we will attempt to temper our use of statistics by also providing as much information on how those stats were obtained as possible. We understand that readers prefer knowing how stats were gathered at least nine times out of ten.

7/ We will make every attempt to avoid the use of anonymous sources. That often requires us to work harder to cultivate sources willing to go on the record.

One of the most difficult decisions an editor can make is the allowance of quotes from anonymous sources. The media consistently owes its audience a full explanation of how news has been gathered, including the names of those who provided the “proof” behind claims made in public.

8/ At the same time, we will make every attempt to protect those who provide us information under the condition of anonymity.

We recognize that some honest people are afraid of the repercussions of telling their truths in a public space.

9/ We will not drink the Kool Aid regardless of who is serving it.

A famous poster of a UFO reads, “I want to believe”. We too want to believe it when we are told about the wonders and integrity of any technology or institution however that would defeat the goal of quasi-objective observation and explanation. We will not drink the Kool Aid, no matter how hot the day might be.

10/ will be adventurous, exploratory and expansive.

Heaven knows our audience is.

11/ We recognize that there is a good and bad side to every story, every entity and every institution. We will not allow individual pieces of bad news to bias our opinions against any entity or institution.

There are always at least two sides to every story just like there are always two sides to any coin. We will always try to present both sides of a story. When we are unable to present both sides of a story from the perspective of those involved, we will endeavor to explain how our audience can find information for themselves.

12/ We will strive for informed objectivity.

The ideal of objectivity is one of the oldest and most important in journalism. It is also one of the most difficult to practice as we all have our biases. In our reporting of the news or presentation of techniques, the editors and writers at SiteProNews will strive for informed objectivity by following these principles as closely as possible.

13/ We will be relentless in our pursuit of any given story.

We believe there is a sense of urgency surrounding what we do everyday. We will strive to follow a story to the ends of the Earth and beyond if necessary.

14/ We will work as hard or harder than our colleagues.

The editorial staff of Jayde-Online works hard. Our friends and family call us crazy and, given the schedules we keep, it is hard to argue with them. It is not unusual for us to put in sixteen hour, six out of seven days of the week. With the coming expansion of SiteProNews to a daily format, a weekly radio show sponsored by Jayde-Online and the ISEDN.org, and our plans to mix video and social network-media into Jayde-Online publications, we expect the work-load to get even heavier in 2007.

15/ We will have fun.

Hard work can be fun when we know that work helps others. We believe we are a beneficial component in the overall information spectrum.

We believe that these resolutions are more than good intentions. It is our intention to treat these resolutions as the principles under which publications I am responsible for are created, published and distributed.

Moving forward, we at Jayde-Online expect you, our audience, to hold us to responsible for maintaining these principles. On behalf of Jayde-Online, I would like to thank you for reading this. Watch for some interesting changes in this space in the coming weeks.

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by Search marketing expert Jim Hedger

Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research

There’s no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can’t afford to do that.

The keyword research process can be broken down into the following phases:

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
Phase 1 - Creating the list and checking it twice
Phase 2 - Befriending the keyword research tool
Phase 3 - Finalizing your list
Phase 4 - Plan your Attack
Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions

Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide array of wonderful clients. And as different and diverse as their sites and the individuals running them may have been, many had one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword research mavens right out of the gate.

Or so they thought.

One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don’t. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it’s difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.

This is due to site owners evaluating their site through too narrow of a lens, causing them to come up with words that read like industry jargon, not viable keywords. Remember, your customer probably doesn’t work in the same industry that you do. If they did, they wouldn’t need you. When describing your site or product, break away from industry speak. Your customers aren’t searching that way and if you center your site on these terms, they’ll never find you.

Another misconception is that generic or “big dollar” terms are the most important for rankings, even if the term you’re going after has nothing to do with your site. Imagine a women’s clothing store trying to rank for the term “google”. Sure, thousands of searchers probably type that word into their search bar daily, but they’re not doing it looking for you. They’re looking for Google. Being ranked number one for a term no one would associate with your site is a waste of time and money (and it may get you in trouble!). Your site may see a lot of traffic, but customers won’t stick around.

Phase 1 - Creating the list and checking it twice

The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, rev up your conversion rate and allow the engines to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension headache.

The trick is to start slowly.

The first step in this process is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. This includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won’t drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.

If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also, don’t be afraid to take a peek at your competitor’s Meta Keyword tag. What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their keyword list to make yours better? It’s okay to get a little sneaky here. All’s fair in love and search engine rankings.

Phase 2 - Befriend the keyword research tool

Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.

In the early days of SEO, measuring the “popularity” of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changes and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.

By inputting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren’t aware of.

There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here’s a few of our personal favorites:

Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture’s Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms you may have forgotten about. Our only complaint with Overture is that they lump singular and plural word forms into one phrase. For example, “boots” and “boot” would appear under one category of “boot”. This can sometimes cause problems.

Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a paid-use tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term. It may also highlight hidden gems that have low competition-rates, but high relevancy.

Trellian Keyword Discovery tool: This is a fee-based tool where users can ascertain the market share value for a given search term, see how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and discover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends (mostly useful for PPC).

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google’s keyword PPC tool doesn’t provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful.

Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may help you expand your original list.

Thesaurus.com: Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten.

If those don’t tickle your fancy, we’d also suggest Bruce Clay’s Check Traffic tool, which estimates the number of queries per day for that search term across the major search engines.

Keep in mind that you’re not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you’re also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings.

Understanding the competition tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term. There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how strong are those sites’ rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to them, how many pages do they have indexed)? Basically, is that word or phrase even worth your time? If it’s not, move on.

While you’re testing your new terms, you may want to do a little housekeeping and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and drop the losers.

Phase 3 - Finalizing your list

Now that you have your initial list of words and have tested their activity, it’s time to narrow down the field and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.

We recommend creating a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and will be a great aid as you try and narrow down your focus.

The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your web site. These are the terms you want to hold on to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that you don’t have sufficient content to support (unless you’re willing to write some). You can’t optimize for words that you don’t have content for.

Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You’ll need both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your web site does; however, they won’t increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.

For example, say you are a company that specializes in cowboy boots. It may be natural for your site to focus on the broad search terms “boots” and “cowboy boots”. These words are important because they tell the search engines what you do and may increase your visitors, but the traffic you receive will be largely unqualified. Customers will arrive on your site still unsure of what kind of boots you sell. Do you offer traditional cowboy boots, stiletto cowboy boots, toddler cowboy boots, suede cowboy boots or women’s cowboy boots? By only targeting broad terms, customers won’t know what you offer until they land on your site.

Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to the search engines, since the targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases. Sticking with our example, targeted terms for your cowboy boots site may be “men’s cowboy boots”, “blue suede cowboy boots”, “extra-wide women’s cowboy boots”, etc. Broad search terms may bring you the higher levels of traffic, but it’s targeted, buying-oriented terms like these that will maximize conversions.

Phase 4 - Plan your attack

So you made your list of about 10-20 highly focused keywords, now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch!

Chances are, if you did your keyword research right, at least some of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but some of them may not. Start thinking about how many pages you’ll need to create to support these new words, and how and where your keyword phrases will be used.

We typically recommend only going after three or four related keywords per page (five if you can balance them properly). Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming. Your content should never sound forced.

Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:

• Title Tag
• Meta Description Tags
• Meta Keywords Tag
• Headings
• Alt text
• Anchor Text/ Navigational Links

You’ve spent a lot of time molding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit.

Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat.

Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind you. You’ve created your list, checked it twice, made friends with the keyword research tools and are now off to go plan your attack. You’re done, right?

Unfortunately, no. As your customer’s and your site’s needs change over time, so will your keywords. It’s important to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward.

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by : Lisa Barone is a Sr. Writer at Bruce Clay Inc.

Cascade Style Sheet Basics

There are only three parts to Cascade Style Sheets (CSS), and once we understand what they are and how to use them, CSS becomes very easy and exciting to use. One of the best parts of CSS is that you can create an external Cascade Style Sheet which you can use for all web pages on your website. You can also have one CSS for all of your articles and a different one for all of your press releases. Making one change in your CSS, you are able to effect changes to a few web pages or to hundreds of web pages without ever touching any of the different web pages themselves.

Below I am going to break out each one of the parts of CSS and explain them in non-techie terms:

1. Selector 2. Property 3. Value

This is what these three parts will look like when they are all put to together:

selector { property: value }

The first part is the selector. In techie terms, a selector is the (x)HTML element that you want to style. Now what does this really mean to the person who doesn’t know about (x)html code and really doesn’t want to learn it, but does want to make changes to their own websites. Absolutely nothing, right? It just went over your head and now you are at a loss (oh how well I know that feeling!). Well, let me show you what some of the most common selectors are, and I know that you will begin to feel more comfortable with selectors.

The first selector that you come across in all web pages is the body, next might be h1, or the p. In (x)html the code is going to look like this:

<> your web page content goes here< /body>: or, <> Your headline text goes here< /h1> ; or, <> your paragraph text goes here< /p> .

For the first example, let’s start with the body. Here is the main thing that you will likely do with this simple but important piece of code. Let’s say you want the main background color of your website to blue or #0000ff (which is the hex code for blue). It will look like this:

body {background-color: #0000ff}

OK, what does all that mean? It is saying that the “background-color”, which is the property, is going to be blue, which is the value of that property. In simple terms, it means the main background color of your website is going to blue. It is easy to change the background color of your website now just by changing the hex code (#0000ff) to a different color, say red, which would look like this: #ff0000.

Now let’s look at the selector h1:

h1 { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 22pt; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; }

Here we are defining what h1, or the text inside of our header 1 tags, is going to look like. The first line in the property is the font-family, and the value is Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, and sans-serif. So, in plain English, what we are saying is the font that we want to use for all of our h1 headers is going to be Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, or sans-serif.

You might be asking if we want the main font to be Verdana, why are we also using Arial, Helvetica, and sans-serif as fonts? The reason for this is not all computers are going to have Verdana font loaded on them. If they don’t, then the default font becomes Arial. The same thing holds true for the Arial font, which then defaults to Helvetica and, finally, to what is called a system font or screen font that all computers have on them, which is sans-serif.

Now for the next line, which is font-size: 22pt. The property is font-size and the value of that is 22pt. 22pt is the easiest to use because we all know about 10 pitch, 12 pitch, 14 pitch fonts when we are using our word processors. There are several other different ways to express the size of the font, one of which is small, medium, and large, and is much more complex than just entering the pitch size.

Next we come to the font-weight which is a real easy way to bold all of the text in your header without using any other code to do it. Following along with what we already know, font-weight is going to be the property and bold is going to be the value of the font weight. If you choose not to bold all the text, all you need to do is change the word “bold” to “normal” and you are all done.

The text-align is just that: by changing the word “center” to “left”, you can align your text to the left margin instead of centering it all. I am sure that you are beginning to get the hang of this by now, but just follow through, “text-align” is the property and “center” is the value.

The color of your font or text is going to be the hex code color #000000, or black. If you want to change the color of the font, find the hex code for the color that you want it to be and replace #000000 with it.

The last one here is the background color, which is behind the header text. This background color is different from the body background color in that this color is going to be directly related just to the text in between the header tags or the h1 tags. In our example, “background-color” is the property and “#ffffff” is the value. You can change the background color to any color you like just by replacing the hex code #ffffff, which is white, with the hex color code of your choosing.

In our next article we begin with the paragraph tags and show just how easy it is to get rid of a ton out dated code.

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by Copyright 2006, Larry Lang

Are You Confusing Search Engine Bots ?

There are two primary factors to getting a page ranked - discovery and relevancy. By and large, search engines are clever creatures, but the very best webmasters will always send out the right signals to gently guide the search engines, and in return receive great rankings for their content.

Search engines discover content using their bots (or ‘crawlers’), and determine relevancy (and by extension ranking) using advanced algorithms.
Discovery

The golden rule of SEO is that search engines cant rank a page they don’t know about. This is what makes discovery is so important. The most natural way for a search engine to discover a new resource is by crawling a link pointing at that content. So to get any new resource crawled quickly you should get a few links from other sites that are crawled regularly. (The major search engines have a sitemap initiative, but remember that without a solitary link Google will not index your content regardless of sitemap).
Relevancy

Getting your page crawled is less than half the battle. Now comes the hard part - ranking well. The second factor that determines whether your page ranks well is relevancy. Relevancy is determined by search engine algorithms which decide the order to display results to searchers. A number of on-site and off-site factors are incorporated into the relevancy determination which I’ll look at in a moment. (Trust could be also be dropped into the mix here, but I’m assuming that away for the moment).

How can you guide the search engines?
Webmasters actually have the greatest say in signalling for both discovery and relevancy. I use the term signalling because that’s really what SEO is all about - sending the right signal to the search engines.
To explain more about signals I’m going to have a look at another of the Irish Blog Award nominee sites which availed of the free site review offer.

First Partners
I met Paul Browne at the Irish Blog Awards a few weeks back. Paul writes regularly on his technology-themed First Partners blog:

Back to relevancy
The page title is probably one of the most important on-page elements used by search engines to determine the relevancy of your web pages. By and large you should target 1-3 keyword phrases, and bear in mind that most searches are around 3 words in length.
In the case of Paul’s blog homepage I notice that he is using dynamic titles which include the title of the most recent post. This in my view is a mistake - the homepage page title is about as sacred as it gets, and you don’t want it changing every day or so. I think Paul should concentrate on the main focus of his blog, whatever niche that might be, and use that in his blog homepage title.

The canonical URL problem (again)
I’m probably beginning to sound like a broken record. The canonical URL problem is a condition where your site or page is accessible by typing either of the following into your browser:
www.mysite.com or mysite.com : (notice this second case drops the www)
If you can reach your page via either URL AND the URL in the address bar does not change your site is suffering from the canonical URL problem.
In Paul’s case his site is accessible via both the www and non-www URLs. To fix this problem you need to redirect one URL to the other with a 301 redirect.

Don’t use 302 redirects for your homepage
When checking Paul’s blog I noticed that the FirstPartners.net homepage had a Toolbar PR0. This is odd given that the blog has PageRank 5. Then I noticed that the root page is redirecting to firstpartners.ie/rp/:

http://www.firstpartners.net/

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: www.firstpartners.net

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,[... ]png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en,en-us;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

Connection: keep-alive

Cookie: __utma=67859462.28111[... ]__utmc=67859462

HTTP/1.x 302 Found

Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:35:35 GMT

Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

Location: http://www.firstpartners.net/rp/

Content-Length: 304

Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100

Connection: Keep-Alive

Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

X-Pad: avoid browser bug

If the homepage is going to stay there then I suggest changing that to a 301 redirect. The most probable reason why the temporary homepage is currently PageRank 0 is that it has few if any backlinks. The backlinks Paul has accumulated point at www.firstpartners.net rather than www.firstpartners.net/rp/, and Google doesn’t realise that /rp/ is now the homepage. No 301 = No transferral of links and trust

And some advice for the blog?
I had a few ideas when I looked at Paul’s blog. I found that the page weight was a little too beefy, with the blog homepage weighing in at 800KB+ on one occasion last week. I also thought that Paul could cut the number of posts published per page to a more manageable number. And I even considered whether NOFOLLOWing some of the internal links (e.g. the cloud) might help.
But I can safely scrap all that advice for one simple suggestion: give each and every blog post a unique META description.
When I looked at all the pages in the supplemental index it was instantly apparent that Paul wasn’t using META descriptions:

You can see that Google is picking up boilerplate content for every snippet. I’d be willing to bet that at least some of the 265 pages in supplemental will pop out if they have a unique description META.
I did spend a short amount of time looking at the backlink profile for the blog and the majority of links use the anchor “Paul Browne - Technology in plain English”. I reckon Paul probably ranks well for his name (he had a thread about his on-line doppleganger but I couldn’t find it). I think some diversification of the link anchor could pay off - non-diverse backlink anchors may actually raise a flag that could damage your site.
So find that niche and push it in your titles and anchors. In Paul’s case that niche should be highly relevant to his company’s products and services. I’ll leave the idea generation to Paul.

So to recap my advice
1. Fix the blog homepage title

2. Sort the canonical URL

3. Change the root page 302 redirect

4. Assign unique META descriptions to each blog post

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by Richard Hearne is the founder of Red Cardinal,

Top 5 Benefits of SES NY

The eighth SES New York conference is coming up pretty quickly and as one of the last “Danny” programmed events, it should be a great one. I’ve been blogging SES shows for several years now and have advanced both knowledge and industry contacts tremendously by doing so. Barry, Chris and Ben have also done a bang up job in the past with triple and sometimes quadruple coverage of the event.

Whether you are an old hand SEO and online marketer or a noob, large conferences like Search Engine Strategies offer a number of excellent benefits. Here are my top five:

1. Mix of content. With a big show, there’s pretty much something for everyone whether your a PPC marketer, an in house SEO or work for an interactive marketing agency. SES conferences bring in a variety of speakers and topics. The New York show in particular has an agency slant that should appeal to all the East coast interactive, ad agency, pr firms, web dev shops as well as the abundance of in-house marketers. In fact, here is a list of the four star rated topics for SES that will be a part of the SES NYC programming:

• Video Search Optimization
• Mobile Search Optimization
• Benchmarking An SEM Campaign
• Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
• SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
• Social Search Overview
• SMO: Social Media Optimization
• Wikipedia & SEO
• Retailer Forum
• Search and Regulated Industries

2. Interest specific tracks. Along with a variety of content to pick from, SES provides tracks to give you a sort of iterative sequence of sessions, that can build upon each other. The tracks offered at SES New York include:

• Fundamentals
• Multimedia & Mobile
• Advanced Advertising
• In House
• Click Z Network

3. Networking. There are tons of networking opportunities at SES conferences. Networking with peers, competition (keep your friends close but your enemies closer) as well as prospects. Connecting with 2-3 or 20-30 new people at a single event like SES can help you create any number of new business relationships for recruiting new staff, outsourcing work, referring work and finding new prospects.

On top of all that, networking with other like-minded professionals can help you build that mastermind group to bounce ideas off of and share tactics, insights and what becomes the “real” learning opportunity. Search marketers produce an overwhelming amount of content with a significant signal to noise ratio. Befriending other smart marketers can go a long way towards zeroing in on the signal that comes out of sessions, after hours networking and after conference communications.

4. Sourcing content. If you’re a search marketing blogger, attending a conference presents a goldmine of content opportunities. Take notes from the sessions and write up articles. Take your camera and do some informal video interviews. Make Rebecca style comics or use cool tools like VoiceThread to present your photos. Here are a few tips for really milking the value out of content gained from search marketing conferences like SES;

• Take notes from sessions and use them to create 200-300 word blog posts
• Expand those notes into articles and submit the articles to one or some of the following: WebProNews.com, ISEDB.com, SearchEngineGuide.com
• Use the content outline from articles to create a PowerPoint presentation for: internal company training, client training or for use when speaking at an event. This can work the other way around too. Write an article, break it up into smaller blog posts. Or take your PowerPoint presentation and break it up into blog posts and/or articles.

• Interview other SEO/PPC attendees at the conference. Try a different angle than just the “popular” SEO/PPC rockstars. Possibly a series of subject specific interviews. Or interviews with uber talented, but not self-promotional SEO and PPC experts.
• Use photos and videos for your own social media promotion of your blog and company’s services
• There’s a lot more, but people pay us for that.

5. C’mon it’s New York! I don’t know about you, but whatever excuse I can get to visit New York again, I’m going to take advantage of. The problem is, it can be a bit difficult rationalizing the time away and expense to your manager or business owner using that reason, so stick with suggestions 1-4 above and you should be fine.

The early bird discount ends Friday March 23rd, so you’d better get more information on SES New York here or get registered ASAP.

For even more great insight, read Jim and Todd’s excellent advice on how to make the most out of search marketing conferences.

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by Lee Odden is President of TopRank Online Marketing

Search Ranking Influencers - SEOMoz Study Released

Rand Fishkin and Jeff Pollard from SEOMoz.org have released a 2007 Search Engine Ranking Factors Guide. Built on the collaborative wisdom of 36 search marketing experts, the guide references various elements or techniques found within five general areas of SEO knowledge.

The guide lists the 10 most positive and 10 most controversial ranking factors, adding a shorter list of the Top 5 negative factors. Contributors were asked to rate positive and negative SEO factor on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 being strongest). An added feature measures the level of agreement between all respondents. Comments from contributors can be found beside each factor.

According to the 36 experts, the Top 10 Positive SEO Factors are:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Communities
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

The Top 5 Negative Factors are:

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

SEOMoz did a similar (though smaller) study in 2005. Back then, the Top 10 Positive Factors were:

1. Title Tag - 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document - 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

At the end of the guide is a bonus section where respondents were asked four questions specifically about Google. While there was very little disagreement between the experts in the main part of the survey, there was quite a bit more when it came to questions about Google.

When asked an opinion on the controversial Google Sandbox effect, 38% said it was more prevalent than it was 6 – 12 months ago while 32% said the Sandbox Effect has never existed. A further 21% said it does exist but is less prevalent than it was 6 – 12 months ago while 9% said there was little change in the past 6 – 12 months.

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By Jim Hedger

SEO Companies are Like Sextuplets

10+ tips to help with RFPs and picking the right search partner.

Hiring an SEO company these days is like being a judge in a beauty pageant where the final participants are sextuplets. Everything on the surface looks the exact same. Same goes with SEOs - you won’t know if one company can get you a top 10 for a competitive term until you get to work with them for a while.

I have received NUMEROUS RFPs lately and as I read them I can tell that the people writing them spend some MAJOR time assembling them. I almost feel bad for them, as you can just tell that they really spent time trying to ask just the right questions, only to get back responses that must sound so similar.

These are some typical questions we see in RFPs:

• How many people are in your firm?
• Give examples of terms you have optimized for.
• Provide references of previous clients.
• What is your process?
• How do you bill for services?
• Do you offer guarantees?

While most of these questions don’t matter much, let’s break down a few.

How many people? The SEO firms that I think are the best are smaller. If I couldn’t do SEO anymore and I had to ask someone to do it for me, I could name three or four smaller shops, each with under 10 people on staff (I think). I would at least ask these firms for a reference. I wouldn’t go to iProspect, iCrossing, 360i, or any of the other big I’s. It’s nothing against them, but I think I would get better service and more passion from the smaller shops.

Terms, Rankings and References
These questions can be a big farce. Any SEO can get a good ranking for SOME term. The questions should revolve around what the RIGHT terms are. The right ones lead to ROI.

There are other factors to think about as well. If a term is TOO competitive for an entry level or mid level SEO, are they going to target it for you, knowing that they may only get in the 40’s or 50’s? How much patience do you have while they keep trying to get you up there? Are you willing to wait 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 months? Or will they not include overly competitive terms just so they can point to the success of only getting rankings for really easy terms?
References – We’ve all got some. Most of them will say good things about us. It is worth calling references to do your due diligence, but we all have a few good ones. It might be wise to ask for several.
Guarantees – Oh the Catch 22! We sometimes offer certain guarantees only because we don’t want people’s money if we can’t produce tangible ROI. But sometimes the ROI is out of our hands.
What if your product stinks, your prices are too high, or your site doesn’t connect with customers?
Many guarantees are about rankings (i.e. Guaranteed to have a top 10 in 2 months) Does that guarantee cover terms that are going to drive traffic, sales and leads? When looking at SEO firms, make sure a guarantee connects with how you will be judged by your managers, and it may not just be rankings.
At the end of the day, when hiring an SEO company you have a group of people all saying basically the same things, all of which probably sound like the adults in Charlie Brown’s life… Wah, Wah, Wah!!!
So what are you to do? You need a SEO now you are having a hard time picking!
Most companies are behind square one when it comes to differentiating between SEO vendors. They all look the same and say the same things. What SEO Company is going to answer an RFP without positive references and some rankings to show? What about those guarantees?
So you need to be pretty savvy to pick the right company to employ. Don’t fall glitz and glamour alone. Here are 5 quick tips:
1) If they have rankings for web sites where the keyword is in the domain, then don’t be so impressed with rankings. Domain names can be powerful SEO tools so a Top10 under the same keywords as found in the domain might not be indicative of a well earned placement.

2) Use Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Google AdWords Sandbox, and the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (when it is working) to see if the keywords associated with rankings they tout for themselves or previous clients actually get good search volume. You can check the competitiveness of keywords using the keyword difficulty tool at SEOmoz.

3) Look at the web site they optimized, is it butchered to achieve those high rankings or does it still read well and connect with users? Getting a first place ranking for a term, but butchering a site to do it is the desired result for the SEO, and certainly not your desired outcome.

4) Get an idea if they know how much traffic, leads and/or sales result from their rankings.

5) Talk to representatives from each SEO firm on the phone or in person to get a better sense of who they are as people and what their firm’s ethical stances might be.

6) GO WITH YOUR GUT! If your stomach gauge says something is wrong, it probably is. There are plenty of other SEO firms working the Internet.
Where does this leave you, the person needing to select a SEO company?
To be honest, most people don’t have the background knowledge to properly judge a search marketing firm. There are too many factors and usually a wide information gap. Ultimately it comes down to gut…while we don’t mean the sappy “You complete me” gut feeling, there must be a “Vibe” with the SEO. They have to have a good sense about what kind of business you operate, your business model, and your revenue model. The SEO firm you select should consider itself your representative.
Here are a few things to consider while talking with a SEO firms.
• Do they seem to be fair people who won’t hold you to contracts if things don’t work out well?

• Do they have a passion for the job?

• Do they analyze impact down to page views, leads, sales, etc?

• Are they so big that getting anything done is going to be painful and require a contract review every time by layers of management?

• Will delays on their end affect your business?

• Are they so small that you can’t get things done if certain people aren’t in the office to take a call?
None of these questions are standard RFP questions, and most of them you’ll only find out after working with a company for a while.
6 Ways to protect yourself from a bad SEO:

The tough part is that you won’t know who’s good and who’s not until after 6 months or so. 6 months is a long time to wait just to find out that you’ve made the wrong decision. Here are some tips:

• Google them, see what others are saying about them

• Check other sources as well such as Technorati, Digg, or any of the search engine forums

• Do they make some buzz in the industry? The SEO industry is a fairly tight group. Most good SEOs are known by others. Does the firm in question make a LOT of buzz, very little buzz, or none at all?

• Put some kind of mutually agreed upon milestones in place so that you have recourse if things aren’t working as planned to re-evaluate the relationship. A good SEO won’t hold you hostage if things aren’t working as planned. Six months is a good basic milestone.

• See if they are willing to put a little flesh in the game, putting their money where their mouth is. Some SEOs will work solely on commission, getting paid only for top placements. (please note, these SEOs tend to charge a great deal for their services)

• Give an SEO an uncompetitive term that gets little search volume (use one of the tools above), and see if they are honest enough to come back and say, “There just isn’t enough search volume to warrant a full scale SEO campaign.” If someone comes back with a quote for a poorly performing keyword or term, be wary.

• SEO is definitely a diminishing returns kind of business so many jobs won’t need an ongoing retainer or maintenance after the initial contract term has expired. If it does make sure you have critical key metrics in place to ensure ROI for you is still there.

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By Wil Reynolds