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2009-06-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

Hi All ,
I will update here very soon .

10 Factors Google and Yahoo Consider For a Top Search Engine Ranking

2008-11-07T13:49:00.000-08:00

Want to get into the top 5 of either Google or Yahoo? Make sure your website contains the top 10 factors for deciding a top search engine ranking.

It does not matter if you have the cure for cancer, if nobody knows about it you are not going to make any money. A top search engine ranking in either Google or Yahoo is the surest way for buyers to find your products so you can become a wealthy marketer. Google and Yahoo are responsible for about 80% of all search engine traffic in the world.

Make sure your online business or website contains these top 10 factors used for determining sites with a top 5 search engine ranking in Google and Yahoo.

Factor #1: Number of Quality Sites that Link to Yours

Google and Yahoo put a lot of significance on how many quality sites link back to yours with a page rank of at least 4 and above. This is probably the most important factor when considering a top search engine ranking.

When search engines see lots of important sites link back to yours it must mean that your site is also pretty important.

Remember the purpose of the internet is to provide information back to the end user. As someone is conducting research on the World Wide Web, sites must also participate and flow and connect to other related sites allowing those searching for your keyword terms various paths to the information being inquired.

Factor #2: Number of Pages Your Website Has

A website with less than 50 pages is really going to struggle to get a top search engine ranking unless it has more quality back links coming into it than their competitors.

Factor #3: Keywords in Your Title Tag

Google and Yahoo look to see if your keywords are contained in your page title and description. Make sure your keywords are also listed within your heading and subheading tags.

Factor #4: Keywords Showing in Links

Keywords that are highlighted within a link are considered more significant than those not at all highlighted within a link.

Factor #5: Keywords in Bold

Likewise words in bold are also considered more important than those not in bold.

Factor #6: Keywords in URL

Websites that are in less competitive markets that contain the keywords within their URL are considered more important than those sites that respectively do not.

Also keywords in the URL that come before unrelated words are considered better than a URL that follows an unrelated word within the URL. For example if your keyword is televisions, a URL with `televisions’ followed by unrelated words such as your name `Mike’ is better than putting your name `Mike’ before `televisions.’

Factor #7: More Significance Given to First 25 Words on Page

The first 25 words of each page are given more weight than all other words on the page. Make sure your keywords are in the first few words of your page. However, if you try and just list the same word or phrase 25 times repeatedly Google and Yahoo will penalize you.

Factor #8: Greater Than 300 Words on Your Homepage

Make sure you have at least 300 or more words on your homepage.

Factor #9: Keyword Density

Keyword density is not as important as it once was in the past but it still is an important factor. In order to get a top 5 search engine ranking look at your competitors sites and compare the density of their sites to yours and try and match their density.

Factor #10: Page Rank

Want to find out the page rank of your website or the page rank of another site? Download the Google toolbar and make sure the page rank indicator is activated. One major factor in determining your page rank is the first factor listed in this article. Quality back links are the most important factor for formulating your page rank.

A top search engine ranking in Google and Yahoo is decided most often by the combination of these 10 factors. If you want to get into the top 5 of the two most important search engines than make sure your website applies these major search engine ranking factors.

Author: Tim McGaffin

How To Get A Pagerank 7 In 200 Days

2008-11-07T00:40:00.000-08:00

With a reported 22.1% of search traffic Yahoo is second only to Google’s 64.4% (src: Hitwise) for search user volume so it is extremely important not to forget that attaining a top ranking in Yahoo can be a big boon to the bottom line. As a result, I decided to write this update on how to attain superior rankings in Yahoo using today’s useful tools and tactics.

OVERVIEW: Optimizing for Yahoo!
Algorithmically Yahoo is Google’s much younger sibling. I say this because many of the requirements for a successful ranking mirror Google’s requirement about 4 years ago and they sum up to one distinct fact; optimize your content boldly on Yahoo and you will be rewarded. When I say “boldly” I do not mean use SPAM; by nature SPAM and optimization do not mix… they are two entirely separate concepts (black and white in fact).

The following are the current generalized specifications for achieving solid rankings in Yahoo.

WEB SITE OPTIMIZATION
SEO tactics have not changed a great deal over the past 10 years I have been an SEO. In general terms the only effect time has had on SEO is to vary the intensity of the optimization for particular page elements. That is the rub of course; some search engines appreciate the optimization of particular page elements over others. In the case of Yahoo, this old property with a relatively young algorithm tends to favour the following elements:

Title Tag: Keep your title tag as short as 5 small-medium sized words and include one complete incidence of your keyphrase. Yahoo! blatantly favours sites that include the keyphrase in the title tag. For an example check out “car sales” or for that matter any phrase. Within the top 10 results you will notice that the majority of sites listed will include at least one incidence of the keyphrase or a crucial portion of it (i.e. “cars”). The ones that do not include the keyphrase tend to be sites that have are extremely popular so even basic title tag optimization is not required to attain a top ranking.

Meta Description Tag: Start this tag with an incidence of your keyphrase and then produce a short 15 – 18 small-medium sized word sentence clearly describing your site. Include one more incidence of your keyphrase in the sentence. Keep in mind that the description tag is often utilized as the description for any rankings you achieve so it is best to make it alluring.

Meta Keyword Tag: Keyword tags have long been considered ineffective and no longer have any importance on Google; however Yahoo does still consider the keyword tag so it cannot hurt to include it. The keyword tag should start with the keyphrase and then all following words or phrases should be ordered according to their relevance to your website; place the most important ones up front. The max size of a keyword tag should be 250 characters – comma-delimited. Do not over repeat words; no more than 3 repetitions of a single word within the tag.

Keywords in URL: Create keyword-based filenames that closely represent the content within the file. Yahoo rewards keyword-based filenames a small amount – perhaps enough to push past your competition.

Headings: Heading 1 and 2 tags should be applied on every page where appropriate to embolden the relevance of the page. In other words, use the page’s keyphrase within a Heading 1 tag to further enhance the visibility of the keyphrase on the page.

Alt text for images: Don’t forget to provide appropriate ALT text for each image on your website. The ALT text must not provide information that is already written on the website. ALT text is supposed to provide a clear and concise description of what the image is. Fortunately this means that adding an incidence of the keyphrase or a portion of the keyphrase is totally appropriate which can add slightly more credibility to your page score when Yahoo’s crawler (Slurp) indexes the page.

Inline Links: In the midst of your page it is beneficial to include links to related pages from related content. These links will apply relevance to the linked page; which is optimized for the same keyphrase you linked from.

Site Structure: Site structure is a vital component to ranking success on Yahoo; especially in competitive marketplaces where every advantage is required to reach the top. One method that would be successful at Yahoo (and happens to work as well on the other major search engines) is a tried and true technique that revolves around the linear progression of related content throughout the website; it is commonly known as Themeing. The following example should shed some light on this subject:

Your site is a car sales site focused on Audi. In order to create a linear site structure you would focus each section of the site on an individual relevancy. Say you pick “Audi A5” as the relevant topic (see Figure 1.0). As you move deeper into the Audi A5 section you only see A5 relevant content. The search engine spider and your users will not be distracted by links to other vehicles – only information on the A5. This progresses as you proceed deeper into this arm of the website and because this section of the site is utterly focused on the subject “Audi A5” the odds of achieving a ranking for that term increase considerably.

LINKS
When building links for Yahoo concentrate on quality not quantity. Quality links would be one way links from sites that specialize in content directly relevant to the content on your own website. Building these links can be done by creating content and syndicating it to your own industry for link love and to build credibility. In addition, if your website is a worthwhile resource it is entirely reasonable to tell the world about your site in order to build links; hopefully they will link to you because they like your site so much.

Finally, there is another tactic that has mixed results; send out press releases once a month using PRWeb or an associated press release agency. A good press release can easily build the links you need in no time at all. Unfortunately the mixed results I noted occur when press releases inevitably become archived, at which point the link relevance will fade. As a result, link building with press releases is only useful as an ongoing practice and should be considered a small facet of a robust link building campaign.

SITE EXPLORER SETTINGS
Yahoo’s Site Explorer is a fantastic tool for monitoring your website(s) and running basic link reports. If you have not already done so you should create an account at Site Explorer and then validate your website (prove you own it) so that you can manage the information Yahoo has for your website. Once you have validated your website I have noted some Site Explorer functionality that may help your website perform on Yahoo:

Make certain to create a sitemap and submit it to Yahoo:
If you haven’t already done so use a XML sitemap generator to create a sitemap for your website and then submit it to Yahoo using the “Add Feed” form within your website’s Site Explorer profile.
Removing unnecessary dynamic content from your URLs with new add-on within Site Explorer:
Does your URLs content session ID’s or other dynamic content that is unnecessary within the URL? If so, this information can be indexed by the search engines and ultimately can cause havoc with your rankings. Thankfully Yahoo has implemented a new tool within the Site Explorer domain management section called “Dynamic URLs Beta”. Here are the instructions to use the Dynamic URLs tool.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
After reviewing our notes from current and previous Yahoo promotions and taking a look at a variety of top 10 results the following points appeared noteworthy:

Ensure open indexing by using Robots.txt wisely
A lot of our client’s older content appears to be sticking to top rankings with little or no monthly tweaking. As a result, I think it is fair to assume that fresh content is not currently gaining much weight in the Yahoo algorithm.
In many cases top ranking sites have pushed the envelope and their sites border on SPAM. Considering the top ranking these sites have it appears Yahoo’s SPAM filters are far less sensitive than Google’s. I expect Yahoo will change this in the near future but then again I have been surprised how long this has been the status quo.
One common claim throughout forums is that achieving a placement in the Yahoo Directory provides an instant boost to Yahoo rankings. Unfortunately we have not seen conclusive evidence that the annual $299 fee will increase rankings dramatically in the short term. That said, I strongly believe that a Yahoo Directory placement is a very reputable incoming link that does pay dividends in the long run at any search engine that weighs incoming links (the ones that count).
Yahoo Search Submit was re-introduced back in February 2007 to significant criticism due to the potential favouritism to those who pay to get into the Yahoo index. Despite the negative feedback there appears to be some potential benefits to paying for submission. For one, in July I noted an interesting story where a website was banned from Yahoo and the webmaster got the site back into Yahoo’s index by paying for inclusion (“Banned from Yahoo?”). A second reason Search Submit may be worthwhile is the guarantee that your site will be indexed. Furthermore, the Yahoo’s Search Submit Pro service allows you to recommend your own title and description tags for each page submitted and to submit pages that may not normally be indexed by Slurp.

by: Ross Dunn, CEO StepForth Web Marketing Inc.

Search Engine Optimization: Ten Golden Rules For Beginners

2008-11-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

The following are the ten simple ways to optimize and increase traffic to your website. The guide is meant for those who intend to or are just starting out in Search Engine Optimization. It shows you all the basic things you need to know and what do to improve your rankings with the search engines and increase traffic to your website. No geek speak. No technical jargons. Just practical, easy to follow tips.

Directory Submission:
Submit your site to online web directories. There are several directories you can list your site with. There are free ones as well as paid services. Directory registration can be a time-consuming elbow grease so the temptation is to go for a paid service whereby you pay a company or any other concern to help submit your site to all relevant directories. However you do not really need to shell out to get listed in the right directories with decent traffic and pagerank. The search engines have their own directory services and is a great place to start. Yahoo has its directory service www.dir.yahoo.com. Visit the site and submit your URL and feed in the category that matches the kind of website you run and / or your kind of business. It might take a while but your site will be listed. Getting listed in a directory like that offers all the exposure and presence a major player like Yahoo has to offer. Another directory to aim for is the Open Directory Project (dmoz). It does take some effort to get listed here but given the fact that this directory is highly valued by most of the big search engines, then it must be worth every effort. It can be found at www.dmoz.org.

Search Engine Registration:
Register with the search engines. Registering with the search engines is introducing your website to them, inviting them to visit the site and help announce your existence to the world wide web. This can be explained simply without getting into geek mode. Forget about algorithms, spiders, crawlers and all that. In plain terms, the search engines on being registered with, will visit your website and index it. Hopefully they like what they see and they keep coming back and once someone searches for the contents they have found on your site, they point that person towards your site. So a sure way of being noticed by the search engines is simply to register with them. Of course Google should be your number one target here. Other prominent search engines you should register with include Alexa, Entireweb, Scrub The Web, Jayde, Info Tiger, Exactseek, Lookseek and Lifetips.

Article Submission:
Submit articles to online article publishing and syndicating websites. When you do this, put a link to your website at the end of the article or any other appropriate place depending on the website you are submitting to. Be aware that this does not correlate to just a blatant plugging of your site. The article should be well written, informative and most preferably relevant to what your line of business or website is about.

Build Links:
Link building is perhaps the most important and influential factor to consider when looking to increase your standing with the search engines and increase traffic to your website. Basically link building can be seen in two broad terms: Viral and Organic. Viral links are from websites who belong to a link building group or association of websites all exchanging links for the basic purpose of having as many links as possible irrespective of any other considerations. In other words people join certain websites where all the members are there for the sole express reason of populating their link list. This is deemed as cheating by the search engines and is frowned upon. Some of the sites could have been blacklisted or penalised by the search engines. Some may have no relevance to your website. So you want to avoid this kind of link building like the plague. If your website gets blacklisted by Google for instance, it takes up to the better part of six months to get back in their good books. Organic link building is the way to go. These are links that that you acquire naturally. Examples are websites that link to your website due to its relevance or quality. Organic link building can be attained by various ways. See below for some of these.

Join online Groups and Forums:
By joining a group or a forum you can network with people with the same interest as you thus it follows that these people will visit your site. Not only that your group members will visit your site, they might mention your websites on their own sites thereby giving you more exposure. Since most of you in the group are members because you share a common interest then this can also serve as a source of quality links for your website thus improving your pagerank. Remember that the relevance of links to your website is considered by the search engines in ranking your site. You increase your exposure by posting on forums that relate to your website. A lot of people read forum postings even without being members and i even know people who use forums as a search method. Yahoo Group is one of the earliest and is my choice. However there are now a plethora of groups and forums that will deliver just as well.

Closely related to these two is Yahoo Answers. Here you can establish yourself as a source of reliable information regarding the subject matter of your website or the business you are in. Put a link to your website when you post an answer to a question. If people find your answers useful and relevant of course the tendency is that they will visit your website.

Advertise:
Paid advertising is a more direct strategy in increasing or improving your web traffic. A very effective strategy it must be said. The best idea is to go for a Pay Per Click deal. Google Adwords is the one to target here. Basically, a banner of your website is displayed on Google search results and if the banner is clicked the person is automatically directed to your website. You can find more information on Google Adwords and how to start at http://adwords.google.com

Use Web 2.0 and Social Media:
Open accounts with sites like MSN Windows Live,Yahoo 360, Blogger and Wordpad. Register with sites like Technorati, Flickr, Stumbleupon, Ryze and Facebook. They all afford you to maintain a presence on the web. You can reach a wide audience or potential customers through these pages. Even big business concerns have realised the power of Social Media and are making use of it to maintain a competitive edge. Also you need to register with pinging websites. These are sites that work for you while you sleep so to speak. All they ask is you let them know once you have new contents on your site and they will bellow it to the whole world wide web. My pick here is pingoat.You can join pingoat at www.pingoat.com.

Content is king:
This fact is a dog eared expression in Search Engine Optimisation these day. So much so it is fast attaining the status of a cliche. I am not one easily caught dropping cliches but if it is a crime to do so then i plead guilty on this instance and will gladly do my time. Your site`s content should be well written. No grammatical errors or spelling howlers. Such errors make a bad impression on visitors to the site. Keep your sentences short and compact. Aim for clarity and try to make the site as easy to understand as possible. Again it is paramount that the content of your website should be relevant to it`s title or your business. This is important for two main reasons: If the site contents and site description do not tally, your standing with the search engines might be adversely affected or worst still they might suspect you of being a spamming or other dubious site. And you do not want that. The other reasons is that visitors might be disappointed and discouraged from re visiting a website they thought was about fishing but found out, on visiting the site that it was about computing. Sure you can have some computing talk on a fishing oriented website but your main focus should be on fishing. As implied in your website`s name or description. Update your website with new contents regularly. The search engines love new contents. The search engines periodically scan the net for new contents. As i mentioned earlier, they send out feelers (robots, spiders or crawlers in geek speak) to see what is there in cyberspace. If time after time your website is visited they have something new to report back then they will always come back. The result of which is that your pages are constantly updated. This improves your standing in their search queries for a keyword related to your website

Use your e-mail as a campaign tool: You can do this by using the url of your website as a signature. So every mail you send carries a clickable link to your site. This is quite easy enough to do. Most e-mail clients have this facility. For example if you use hotmail go to Options> Preference >Signature and insert the full address of your website.

Create a sitemap:
A sitemap outlines the structure of your website. It arranges your website into sections. This makes the website easy to navigate by search engine robots and spiders. This of course makes the indexing of your site easier. To learn more about sitemaps go to www.xml-sitemaps.com.

by: Leo Jackson

Adding A Regional Component To You Web Site

2008-11-05T22:50:00.000-08:00

What is a regional web site?

A regional web page is one that focuses in on a specific area such as a city, county, state, country or area of the world. You do not have to have a regional web site to add a regional component to your site. There are two types of sites I am going to talk about. First is the regional site itself and then a web site with a regional section in it. If you already have a web site and want to expand the content and the audience then adding the regional section is a great option for you.

Building a regional web site.

Regional web sites are becoming more popular. Five years ago if you built a site about the community you live in there was a good chance you were one of only one or two sites to do so. Obviously if you were only one of two web sites for a community then you were at the top of any search for information about that community. It is not as easy now. This is still the case for many smaller towns and counties. But there is much more competition for larger more populated areas. Don’t just rule out larger areas because if done right then you can still do great in these areas as well.

The first thing to do is decide on the area you want to build a page about. A good place to start is where you live or your favorite vacation spots. This is a good choice because you are already familiar with the area. I will share two things the site will need. The first is more important and the second will bring in more traffic.

Next you need to list the things that make the community you chose unique. It is especially good to find the lesser-known unique things about your community. This can include historical places, unique places and fun places. It can even include the best places to kiss. It can have reviews of local restaurants and business, a history of the community, little know facts about the community and any other things that make your community unique and special.

This is important because most community sites are just a group of links pages about the area. This is part of doing it right. When your page is unique and full of quality content it is easier to get good quality links to your site. Many people forget about this and concentrate on make pages about the key words that people search for. When this happens you end up with a site that nobody wants to link to and nobody wants to spend time looking at the different pages of your web site. Quality is always at the top of the agenda. The goal of any web site should be to be the best web site on the internet about your particular topic. You decide which is better to have 1000 visitors who visit your site a day who average looking at 2 pages or 300 visitors a day who average 10. In the long run when you have hundred of well-ranked sites linked to you then you will get the thousands of visitors who visit many pages on your site.

After you have the above and have a quality site for your community then it is time to start looking at keywords. This is what brings people to your site. A good tool for finding out what people are searching for is Overtures Keyword Selector Tool.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in the name of the community in the search box and click the arrow. It will give you a list of how many times that a term has been searched for in Overture the previous month. I will also list all the phrases that were searched for using that term. This way you know what people are looking for when they search for something in your community. Now you can take the information in this book and apply it to making pages based on these keywords. Remember that with every page you build quality is the key. You want your site to be better than any other site about your community. For an example of how to use this tool try this link.

http://arthritis-symptom.com/adsense/keyword-selector-tool.htm

As an example if people are searching for museums in your community do not just make a link page to the museums web sites. Rather list every museum in the area and add a paragraph or two for each. You can also make a page about every museum and have an index page called museums in your community that link to all the museum pages you have built. If you have 10 museums in your community people will visit most or all of the museum pages. Be sure to add a short description on the museums in your community page.

Adding a regional section to your web site.

This is an idea that has become very popular in the last few years. As the internet continues to grow it is becoming harder to be at the top of the search engines for the most popular terms. So one of the things you can do is to make regional pages for your products or information. I stumbled on this by accident years ago. As I have mentioned I have a very large arthritis web site. As a service to my visitors I decided to add a section to the web site that listed had a page in for every state that listed arthritis resources in that state. It quickly became one of the most popular sections of my site especially in the search engines.

This can be done for any product or service that is not specific to a community. For example I knew a guy who was representative for a Satellite TV system company. He could sell a system anywhere in the country. Once he made the sale the company arranged for the system to be installed. So he built a page for Satellite TV for every city in America. He did this because he found out that many people were searching for Satellite TVs in their communities. He had about pages for over 500 different cities.

This worked well for a while, but he had a problem. Basically every page in his site was the same. The only difference was the name of the city and state. The search engines now frown on this. He tried to fix this by adding unique information about each city. He finally gave up on this and redid the site under a new domain name. Once a search engine punishes you it is hard to get back in their good graces.

So if you are going to do this for a product or service you need to make every page unique. As mentioned above, quality always is important and you can no longer cheat the search engines. So do not take the easy way. Take the time to make every page one that the search engines and your visitors will be proud of.

This can also be done as a service. One of the most popular sites on the internet is topix.net. They have the largest news network that includes news for almost every city and town in America. This can be done for almost any service from adoption to zoos. Some subjects have way too much competition and companies that are spending too much money for you to compete with. Regional travel and legal sites are examples of these. Even though there is a ton of competition for some types of regional sites there are still literally thousands of different topics and services that do not have too much competition.

By Rusty

The Art of Website Maintenance

2008-11-02T08:46:00.000-08:00

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.
By Erin Ferree

The Art of Website Maintenance

2008-10-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

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:

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.
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

2008-10-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-20T23:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-19T00:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-18T23:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-17T23:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-15T23:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-13T23:36:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-10-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-08T05:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

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 ?

2008-10-04T05:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-02T04:58:00.000-07:00

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:

The Top 5 Negative Factors are:

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

Title Tag - 4.57
Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
Accessibility of Document - 4.3
Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
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

2008-10-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

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

PPC vs. Organic SEO

2008-09-30T04:53:00.000-07:00

Why do more netizens and internet newbies utilize Google to search for products, services, images, information, news, or anything else under the proverbial internet superhighway sun? Well, Google’s search technology has been proven smarter (in the minds of the average web surfer) than the rest in regards to returning relevant, valuable, and fast results for any given search query - this would explain the almost 50% market share that Google now commands for online search.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bet the farm on the quality of their search, and it has paid off marvelously in stock options and an almost inconceivable market capitalization (142.58 as of April 1, 2007) for a company that has been in existence for less than a decade. Google’s immense market cap is partially a product of its revenue stream, but where in fact does Google actually generate the bulk of their proceeds from?

Gmail, website analytics, images, web searches, all can be performed for free (provided you are among the over 1 billion humans who have access to an internet connection and a PC). The answer is advertising. And not just any old type of advertising - Google generates up to 95% of its revenue from what is known as Pay Per Click advertising; specifically it is the Google Adwords and Adsense suite of programs.

Google Adwords enables businesses, young and old alike, to infuse their advertising message to the masses. Adwords works like a standard auction. Businesses bid on keywords that are relevant to their industry. The highest bidders, who also maintain a high advertisement Click Through Rate (CTR), appear towards the top of the screen when conducting a search. Lower bidders get the lower valued placement real estate as web surfers’ eyes scroll down the browser window. Google monitors the ads, but it is the business owner who chooses what amount he or she is willing to pay per click. Once your ad is clicked by a user, your business is charged a certain amount relating to your bid price. You, the business owner essentially choose where your advertisement is displayed and for what keyword or keyword phrases to be included.
Who Controls What I See When I Conduct A Google Search?
Now, this brings up my initial, yet critical point. I will say it again. Businesses (and individuals) have the power to place their unique message or advertisement on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS). What is the big deal about that? Well, internet surfers tend to have difficulty discerning between advertisements and actually search engine listing results. Try it for yourself. Go to Google and conduct a search for “AT&T cordless phone.” The first three listings you see are not listings at all- they are Google Adwords results - Google typically shades these “sponsored” results to help differentiate them from the actual organic or natural search engine listings, but they are still shown in similar formats. Even this advertisement shading in the last few weeks however, has slowly been supplanted by a crystal clear background which makes the advertisements and listings almost indistinguishable. Besides the shading and the conspicuously grayed out and small “sponsored results” text the two “listings” and “advertisements” look very similar. In other words, most web surfers could confuse an advertisement for an actual and factual ultra-democratic Google certified search result. The more web surfers that click on Google Adwords advertisements, the more money Google generates, keeping the board of directors and stock holders sleeping soundly tucked in Egyptian cotton.

Isn’t that directly contrary to Google’s mantra that its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?” The answer is yes, but don’t tear down the walls of the kingdom just yet. Most of the businesses that advertise on Google are legitimate - the point is that when you click on a PPC link, the quality of the site cannot be vouched for by Google. When you click on the first organic search engine listing from a Google query, you are implicitly getting Google’s stamp of approval that this site is the best result as per your associated search based on their algorithm or rules. The push vs. pull reasoning that I have read in various search engine forums and articles may be completely off base. If you don’t know that you are clicking on an advertisement then you are not being pushed to take an action. So, what does all this mean?
Educated Web Surfers Or Buyers Know The Difference Between A Pay Per Click Advertising And A Natural Search Engine Listing.
I have found that educated internet users tend to utilize the organic search engine listings more than the pay per click results (both Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture - now Yahoo Search Marketing). They do so because they understand that the sponsored results are all businesses that have chosen to be listed among the SERPS. Organic results are also different because a lower percentage of these are actual businesses selling goods or services. Google and Yahoo organic results give precedent to valuable web pages - pages that give information, tools, or news to web surfers. There is no guarantee that your search for “AT&T cordless phone” would bring up anything more than a website with a schematic of transistors and speed dial features. Educated buyers comprehend that the first few organic results that are in fact businesses providing what they need will most likely be the most reputable companies around. This fact is indeed more consistent with the Google corporate philosophy. As we have just seen, Pay Per Click “PPC” advertisements and natural results do put forth two conflicting messages - click on the listing because it is relevant, or click on the advertisement because Google has to pay its utility bills.
What Does All This Have To Do With My Business?
I’ve looked at hundreds of Overture and Adwords reports; I usually see an average PPC advertisement click through rate of between 1- 4% (although inter-industry numbers vary dramatically). I also study statistics (often from the analytical tool called Google Analytics) that shows me the number of visitors a site gets for both PPC and natural search engine listings. My findings show that organic listings on the average drive more traffic than PPC ads. This isn’t always the case, but it is the trend I have seen when analyzing the data. If educated surfers are more likely to click on natural search engine listings, it also seems logical to think that the website conversion rates would also be higher. My look at the numbers do suggest that this is true more times than not. Does Google publicize the click through rate or conversion rate for typical organic search queries? No way - that may encourage businesses to utilize natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies as opposed to PPC advertising programs. That wouldn’t be so good for Page, Brin, or Dr. Eric Schmidt (Google CEO).
Does That Make Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing Definitively Bad?
Now, I own stocks, bonds, CDs - and an occasional mutual fund - my financial portfolio is diversified. Diversifying your business’s advertising is something that I also advocate. If PPC advertising is reaping a profit for you, then by all means, continue to utilize this valuable service. What I am suggesting is that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If a search engine rule or algorithm changes, your organic search engine rankings may drop, costing you revenue and potential profit. If a new player enters your industry and decides to outbid your PPC advertisements, you will also be pushed down in the search engine shuffle - again affecting your business’s bottom line. I don’t recommend having an undiversified financial portfolio, nor do I recommend obtaining all your search engine traffic from the same source. Experiment with Overture or Adwords, and talk to an ethical search engine optimization firm to find out if organic optimization makes sense for your organization.

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by Brian Ortiz is the CEO of SEOMatrix: Ethical Search Engine Optimization.

The Newbie Guide to Online Marketing Terms

2008-09-29T04:50:00.000-07:00

In all forms of business, and even hobbies, the people who have been involved in a particular activity for awhile will start to use different slang terms. When someone new comes along these slang terms can be very confusing. As all businesses depend on customers, you need to be careful and educate yourself on these terms so you don’t lose any sales.

It recently came to my attention that online marketing has more than its share of slang for the newbie to learn. Since marketing is all about getting and keeping customers, I could see that seasoned online marketers may start have an image problem. Online marketing slang was pointed out to me by an associate who was interested in an Internet business I was marketing. While I was talking to him he asked for an explanation of what the heck I was talking about and said “Speak English Boy!”

That conversation allowed the light to click on for me and I decided to write this short guide to online marketing slang. This should help anyone who is new to the online marketing arena understand some basic terms.

1. Online Marketing - Is the selling of any product or service on the Internet. Marketing is just the act of promoting and selling something. Selling on the Internet costs much less than having a real world, bricks and mortar business. It’s this low cost of entry which is attractive in starting your own online business.

2. Joint Ventures - A joint venture is a partnership. Simply put 2 or more people work together to increase their sales, or to complete a product or service. Sometimes shortened to JV, joint ventures are often very profitable.

3. Subscriber List - This is sometimes known as an email list, or an ezine list (ezine is short for electronic magazine). It’s also a list of people who have given permission for the marketer to send them emails, which may contain advertising. This is also known as an opt-in list, because subscribers opt-in to receive the emails. This prevents people from complaining that an email is Spam as there will be a record of them agreeing to receive the emails. Another snippet of slang is double opt-in, which just means after filling out a form, the potential subscriber will receive an email asking them to verify that they agree to accept future emails before they are actually added to the email list to receive them.

4. Viral Marketing - This little phrase is used to describe a way of increasing your business, or website reach, by using a “viral technique.” In real life a virus spreads out by people contacting one another, and computer viruses are spread by computers contacting other computers. Some clever Internet gurus realized they could use the power of people to send each other information, and then watched that information spread in the same way as a virus. Giving away a free gift, which contains a link to your business, and allowing others to give it away too will work like a virus spreading the word to others as people send it on to their friends. This works long as your freebie was something people would give away anyway in the first place.

5. Niche Marketing - This is the act of selling to a particular group of people. There are lots of untapped niches (small groups interested in a specific subject) who are willing to pay for information. Online, it’s easy to target these small markets by monitoring search engine results and then finding a specific word or phrase which is being searched for but not near the top of the list of popular searches. An example of a niche market is poodle owners, they are dog owners, but will specifically search for information about poodles. These markets can be profitable because they are not targeted directly by many people, so if you have a product tailored to a niche market you may have little or no competition.

6. EBook - Although getting more popular this term still causes some confusion. An ebook is an electronic book, it can be a .pdf file, plain text file or an executable file (one which is actually a self contained program to run on your computer). Ebooks sell well online, as there is no shipping, and delivery is instant.

7. MLM - These are the initials of one of the least understood, and most maligned of business models, Multi Level Marketing. Sometimes known as network marketing or referral marketing, MLM is an ideal business model for online marketers because of the ease of getting out the message about a new business and the low cost of advertising online. The problem with MLM is that it is also easy to mistake MLM for a pyramid scheme (also called a Ponzi). Many unscrupulous people will sell pyramid schemes as an MLM opportunity. What they are selling is basically just a money game. The big difference is that a genuine Multi-Level Marketing program has a worthwhile product that you are selling and money is made by referring other members to sell the same product. Pyramid schemes will usually have a worthless product or no product at all, and pays current members from new members joining. There are many legit MLM companies out there where millions have been made.

If you are new to the world of online marketing, I hope these short explanations will help you understand some of the terms the seasoned online marketer says or writes. If you’re a seasoned marketer, maybe you will try to introduce your business to the newbie with less of the jargon we seasoned marketers take for granted.

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by Chad William Hershey of ManifestYourFortune is founder of his own home based business,

Is Ask.com Deceiving UK Searchers ?

2008-09-28T16:52:00.000-07:00

Ask.com has gotten a lot of press (and backlash) over the guerrilla Information Revolution marketing campaign that’s been running in the United Kingdom lately. It’s a 6-week campaign masked as a grassroots effort to bring awareness to Google’s monopolization of search and encourage searchers to try out other engines. Google currently enjoys 75 percent of UK search market share

It’s gotten quite a bit of coverage, but in case you missed it, over the past few weeks, Ask.com has been employing both guerrilla and traditional media tactics to get their message out and point searchers to InformationRevolution.org to learn about the movement, receive a free T-shirt and leave comments on the site’s message board.

All in all, a campaign to raise awareness about all the other engines out there that are overlooked because of searchers “sleep searching” and blindly using Google is a positive thing, right? Google’s a great engine, but it doesn’t have to be your everything. Unless they’ve given you a three-stone ring, it’s okay to try out other suitors. The site lets users easily experiment with a new engine and search on either Google, Yahoo, Ask.com or Live.

The problem with Ask’s campaign is that they don’t clearly state that they, Ask,com, a Google competitor, is the one behind it. Kinda sketchy. And now they’re taking a lot of slack for it, including today’s very public hand slap from the Wall Street Journal. You can’t blame users for reacting the way they have. It’s natural that when they discovered what they thought was a natural forming, underground campaign based around information is actually a cleverly disguised attempt to promote Ask.com, they’re going to be less than impressed. Ask has made them feel tricked, deceived, and lots of other non-warm-and-fuzzy things, probably not the aftertaste Ask was hoping to leave.

It’s a shame because the message Ask was trying to get out is an important one. Living in a world where one engine “controls” all the information is a dangerous idea and, frankly, gives Google an enormous amount of power. Unfortunately, that message is now totally lost on an audience who feels like they were duped by a company just trying to promote their own product. Right now, Ask.com has lost its ability to leverage this in a positive light. And it is users who will miss out because Ask really is a great engine. It may never replace Google as your steady, but for some queries, Ask really does provide better, more relevant results.

To be fair, the InformationRevolution.org site does contain an Ask.com logo in the bottom right hand corner, but it’s small and not overly noticeable. And if you don’t immediately recognize the photo of Apostolos Gerasoulis (Team Eli!), you probably miss the affiliation completely. I really think this was an oversight on Ask’s part. Now, instead of being a powerful branding campaign, it came off as a jealous Anti-Google smear campaign, especially when searching on Ask.com for “google” used to bring up a Smart Answer accusing searchers of being puppets. (Fortunately, this has since been taken down.) Not cool.

I also don’t think Ask.com intended to deceive users. I actually think the extent of backlash they’ve received has been somewhat unwarranted. They made a mistake but they weren’t intentionally being malicious. I have to wonder, if Google had launched a similar campaign or launched a movement to take away some of Microsoft’s presence in the office suite world, would we be talking about this right now? Probably not. We just would have laughed. But Ask isn’t Google, and that’s the problem.

The ad agency responsible for Ask’s campaign said they felt Ask.com had “nothing to lose” by running the campaign since Google is so much bigger. I think the fallout has proved that statement to be 100 percent false. By appearing deceptive, they’ve lost a lot of potential users, broken the trust of existing users, and probably tainted their overall impression in the United Kingdom. When you’re struggling for market share, you can’t afford to alienate people. It’s that make new friends, but keep the old lesson we talked about yesterday. Ask.com now has some major reputation management work to do in the UK.

Without a doubt, Ask.com made a mistake by not advertising they were the ones behind the campaign. If they wanted to raise awareness, then they’ve done that. People are talking about it. But if they wanted to promote Ask.com as an alternative to Google, I think they did themselves a great disservice by hiding, or at least not promoting, the fact that they were the so-called Information Revolution. They got a revolution, just not the one they were going for.

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

Advanced Link Building: Hosted Content, The Quest for the Perfect Link

2008-09-27T04:49:00.000-07:00

Ask Google, search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others. For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn’t have as much value to search engines and so, it doesn’t receive the same weíght as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link – the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.
Article Syndication
In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offër these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the “about the author” section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the frëe use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.
Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It’s a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.
The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author’s site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links – somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.
In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author’s site. It’s still more valuable than a plain link exchange, but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what’s a site owner to do?
Hosted Web Content
It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content – all basically the same idea.
The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the “eyes” of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.
Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hostíng site get useful content.
This strategy isn’t new. It’s simply doing what search engines want us to do – produce content that’s useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.
Designing a Hosted Content Page
You’re paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.
Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword savvy title, header

, subheads and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be “spamish” regardless of where the content appears.
Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article’s text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it’s also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hostíng your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offër real value to readers.
It’s Not Quantity, It’s Quality
It’s no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It’s not quantity, it’s the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.
Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more “natural” from a search engine’s perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site’s pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links - the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.
Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today
It’s being done everyday, successfully building small sites into largër sites, providing frëe advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hostíng site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers – exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards – so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.
Start searching for websites that might be interested in hostíng your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that’s unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won’t even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers – exactly how it should be.

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by Frederick Townes in the owner of W3-EDGE.

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

2008-09-26T04:47:00.000-07:00

Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.
The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”
You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.
The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.
Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.
There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.
Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.
Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.
Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.
The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!
Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.
This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.
The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.
It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.
To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.
Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

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by Vern Black is the owner of Pinnacle Publishing,

Retailers Count on Search Driving Sales

2008-09-25T04:46:00.000-07:00

A new study by Internet Retailer shows retail sites will be investing more on organic SEO and paid search. Major findings include:

Search engine marketing drives over 50 percent of sales for 30.2 percent of the survey respondents. This amounts to about 80 retailers out of a total sample of 245. The 50 percent figure coincides with earlier studies.
You won’t see any reductions in paid search advertising as 82.8 percent of respondents said they would not reduce overall PPC spending this year.
57.4 percent of respondents said search engine marketing performs better, or somewhat better, than other marketing media, including email, affiliate marketing and direct mail. Only 12.7 percent said it performs worse.
While more retailers prefer PPC to SEO for driving traffic (39.2 percent), another 34.7 percent indicated a preference for SEO over PPC. A savvy 26.1 percent use both SEO and PPC equally.

Retailers believe SEO delivers better conversions (46.1 percent), while a lesser number (37.3 percent) believe PPC is better, and 16.6 percent think SEO and PPC perform equally well.

Organic SEO
Optimizing their SEO campaigns is a high priority for most retailers. One reason is the rising cost of PPC. Retailers will improve their natural rankings on Google, Yahoo and other search engines as follows:
· 80.9 percent plan to rewrite keyword descriptions on the home page and product pages to achieve higher rankings.
· 67.9 percent will include the actual phrases commonly used in search queries on product pages.
· 58.1 percent will include common product keywords in image file names and in image display captions.
· 61.8 percent plan to improve overall site navigation.
This makes sense since 70 percent of traffic is generated by organic links while the other 30 percent comes from PPC traffic.
Paid Search
Most retailers will spend more rather than less on paid search.
· 58.5 percent will spend more on paid search this year
· 32.8 percent will stick to current budgets.
· 8.7 percent will cut back.
What search engines deliver the best ROI?
· 79 percent said Google produces the best ROI.
· 13 percent prefer Yahoo.
· 4 percent like Microsoft Live Search
· 2 percent count on AOL.
Source: Internet Retailer

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By Paul Bruemmer

Mobile Search Site Creation and Optimization

2008-09-24T04:43:00.000-07:00

The following is coverage of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York presentation called “Mobile Search Optimization” by Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works, Gregory Markel, President of Infuse Creative LLC and Rachel Pasqua, Director of Mobile Marketing at iCrossing.

During this presentation two very different lines of thought were noted regarding the best method for creating a mobile website, one from Cindy Krum and the other from Rachel Pasqua.

> Cindy Krum’s Presentation
Cindy Krum felt strongly that an existing website should pull double-duty as both the wired and the mobile version by using CSS to provide an alternative, mobile friendly version shown only to mobile users.
Cindy provided some great tips on how to create a hybrid mobile/wired website:
1. Ensure your website is 100% W3C XHTML compliant because mobile browsers are completely unforgiving when it comes to improper coding.
2. Follow strict XHTML accessibility guidelines to provide the best quality product for both wired, mobile, and those that require accessibility (i.e. the blind). She also noted that by following accessibility requirements any images that do not show up on the mobile browser will be defined in text format – a nice backup.
3. Avoid unnecessary code to minimize download times.
4. Ensure the site uses CSS to control content – this is critical to ensure the mobile version can have reorganized placement of content. (i.e. the menu might be at the bottom vs. the top)
5. Use external CSS files to provide maximum flexibility such as the ability to specify a different style sheet for each mobile browser.
6. Use the LINK element to attach style sheets because it is a much friendlier format for mobile browsers.
7. Use multiple style sheets. The minimum would be a style sheet called “screen” for regular wired visitors and a second style sheet (provided below the first) called “handheld”.
8. Use “display: none” to hide elements in either rendering. This is useful if you have page elements you do not want to appear to mobile users or vice versa. Using this method of hiding content is part of what makes Cindy’s hybrid approach feasible of using a single website for both viewing technologies (handheld, and wired).
9. These headers will help you identify the mobile device being used to access the content. HTTP User-Agent headers, HTTP Accept Headers, and UAProf.
10. Use the appropriate MIME type: “text/html” or “application/xhtml+xml”.
> Rachel Pasqua’s Presentation
At the opposite spectrum was Rachel Pasqua who firmly stated that offering your current website to users, reformatted or not, would likely provide a less than desirable user experience. She went on to explain that mobile users should see an entirely different, more time efficient version of your website because such users are task oriented. Rachel put her thoughts into excellent perspective when she stated that mobile search is “not surf media, it’s search media”. She also went on to state that iCrossing decided to proceed with the subdomain concept rather than a separate domain such as a .mobi. In this case their mobile site is located at mobile.icrossing.com; a sensible concept that retained the branding of the top level domain name without having to rebrand a new one (i.e. going with the .mobi version)
Rachel had some interesting metrics and tips to share with the group that were researched at iCrossing using focus groups and other research (sorry I don’t know the source but the report is due to be released soon I hear). Here are a few tidbits that I caught on paper:
1. Mobile searchers tend to utilize the same search engine they use when they are on their PC.
2. Only 10% of the estimated 234 million US wireless subscribers are active users of mobile search.
3. Searchers are task oriented, they tend to want to get their information and get out; mobile surfing is extremely uncommon.
My Take on Hybrid Sites Versus A Separate Mobile Website

Of the two beliefs I felt myself more strongly drawn to the concept of a separate mobile site. Why? I think the maintenance of a hybrid website is bound to be far more difficult because design updates will require designers to think in both realms which is likely to make updates laborious for the average business owner.
> Gregory Markel’s Presentation

Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative LLC, dropped a very intriguing bombshell at the beginning of his discussion when he noted that Google’s Voice Local Search just might take the world of mobile search in an entirely different direction. According to Gregory, his friends and network of mobile enthusiasts have been impressed by the results of using 800-GOOG-411 and conducting a free voice search; the results have been extremely relevant and Google immediately connects the user to their preferred result by phone. After this bombshell had sunk in, he went on to discuss many of the points already mentioned by Cindy but he had a few highlights definitely worth mentioning including this valuable tip: get into Google local for your area so that you can be found on Google’s Voice Local Search, it is free and easy to do. (Note, I wrote an article on how to do this a few months back called: Have Your Company Listed Free in Google Maps). Unfortunately, Google Voice Local Search is experimental and only available in the United States.

Highlights from Markel:
1. Mobile search adoption has been slower in the US than expected at only 19%
2. An excellent source of mobile statistics is the self-described authority on mobile metrics, MMetrics.com.
3. When users conduct searches, they are more likely to search using 2 or a maximum of 3 words.
4. Nokia has decided to try to simplify the process of searching by integrating it into its future line of cell phones.
5. Mobile devices require ultimate simplicity to ensure compatibility across the vast number of proprietary mobile browsers available.

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By Ross Dunn

Estimating the Real Click Fraud Rate

2008-09-23T04:42:00.000-07:00

The controversy surrounding click fraud comes up every year, but it reached a fever pitch during December’s Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago when participants voiced concerns over experiencing fraudulent click rates ranging from 20 to 40 percent, threatening the entire paid search industry.

At the time, Google’s Business Product Manager for Trust and Safety Shuman Ghosemajumder tried to calm advertisers’ fears explaining that Google was currently “…examining ways to make its fraud-fighting efforts more transparent without revealing crucial information that might help swindlers elude detection.” Ghosemajumder did, however, express concerns over revealing too much information, fearful it would give away algorithm secrets to competitors.

Paid Search Revenues Continue to Rise

While the major search providers have always insisted the clíck fraud rate is a gross overestimation, a 2005 Outsell survey found that clíck fraud was a $1.3 billion problem for publishers. At the time, many advertiser respondents (27 percent) said they planned to cut back and/or eliminate paid search campaigns in 2006.

Outsell respondents may have intended to cut down on paid search, but they certainly didn’t follow through. SEMPO’s year-end search marketing report showed that North American advertisers spent $8 billion on paid placement programs in 2006, amounting to 86 percent of 2006’s total search spend ($9.4 billion). Seventy-one percent of SEMPO respondents said they used paid search campaigns, illustrating that there were not many defectors.

Despite advertisers’ insistent claims that the search engines don’t do enough to eliminate clíck fraud, paid search revenues continue to fill the coffers of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many second and third tier search engines. Additionally, there is a huge gap in the professed prevalence of clíck fraud between the search providers and the advertisers and clíck fraud advocates.

Google Click Fraud Estimates

The rate of clíck fraud changes depending on whose numbers you believe. Clíck fraud detection agencies put the clíck fraud rate hovering around 14 percent, while others believe at least 20 percent of all clicks are fraudulent.

Late last month, Google issued a statement on the Inside AdWords blog that insisted invalid clicks consistently remain under 10, typically in the single-digits, and that virtually all malicious activity is found by Google’s filter. Ghosemajumder claimed the percentage of clicks found by advertiser-initiated investigations account for just .02 percent of clicks. All other accounts, he said, are grossly overestimated.

Alchemist Media President Jessie Stricchiola takes issue with Google’s assertion that it refunds advertisers promptly for fraudulent clicks, stating that “Google has been the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers”.

Google Click Fraud Filters

In February, Google outlined the three-layer filtration process it uses to combat and eliminate clíck fraud. They described the system which uses both proactive and reactive filters as follows:

1. Proactive Filters: Automated algorithms analyze and filter out invalid clicks in real-time without billing advertisers for these false clicks. This accounts for the vast majority of invalid click detection.

2. Proactive Offline Analysis: Post billing, Google uses automated and manual analysis to identify fraudulent clicks that somehow made it through the first layer of filtration. Special attention is paid to clicks occurring on the AdSense network. This is done pro-actively and without any involvement from advertisers. When false clicks are found, advertisers’ accounts are immediately credited via Clíck Quality Adjustments.

3. Reactive Investigations: Investigations take place when an advertiser approaches Google concerned about suspicious activity on their account. Each complaint is investigated, though Google says refunds are relatively rare. Google claims that the vast majority of fraudulent clicks, more than 99 percent, are found and thrown out within the first two stages of filtration. The third stage only includes the .02 percent of clicks where advertisers are affected by undetected cases of clíck fraud.Click Fraud Detection Agency Estimates

In April 2006, The Click Fraud Index reported an industry-wide average clíck fraud rate of 13.7 percent. The clíck fraud rate was broken down as follows:

Tier 1 search providers — 12.1 percent
Tier 2 search providers — 21.3 percent
Tier 3 search providers — 29.8 percent

Some of the newer click fraud prevention firms like Click Assurance and ClickLab offër algorithm-based programs to limit bad clicks. These programs estimate the statistical likelihood of a clíck being fraudulent based on behavioral variables and IP address.

Gap in Prevalence of Click Fraud

As noted above, Google admits to a less than 10 percent click fraud rate, while advertisers and clíck fraud detection agencies believe it is more like 14 to 20 percent. Ghosemajumder explained this gap saying that many advertisers and clíck fraud detection agencies are looking at the wrong signals, mistakenly classifying valid clicks as fraudulent. Additionally, he believes many advertisers request refunds for clicks already thrown out during the first two layers of the filtration system.

For example, misclassification might occur when counting reloads of an advertiser’s landing page. Say the customer clicks through to the landing page, views a product page, and then hits the back button, returning to the same landing page. Without proper tagging, that one clíck and five page re-loads could be misclassified as 6 clicks from the same visitor. Google argues that there are hundreds of different signals that must be monitored to detect clíck fraud, signals that are a closely guarded company secrët and known only to the Google clíck quality team.

A Solution for Click Fraud

Like other experts, we believe the only solution to clíck fraud is for independent auditors to evaluate the system using accurate data provided by the search engines and advertisers themselves. It is the only way to get a neutral calculation — the current clíck fraud detection agencies may not be entirely neutral, and certainly the search providers are not neutral. We need an independent agency that has no incentive to íncrease or decrease the clíck fraud rate. One solution could be to use a technology firm like Fair Isaac, which is currently conducting clíck fraud research for SEMPO.

One thing is certain, until advertisers are willing to provide campaign info, and the search engines are willing to share clíck fraud data, we’ll nevër know the actual prevalence of clíck fraud or how much advertisers are losing as a result.

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by Nick Guastella, SEM Analyst and PPC expert at Bruce Clay, Inc.

XML Sitemap Submission Made Easier

2008-09-22T04:40:00.000-07:00

Getting Google and other major search engines to spider your XML Sitemap just got a little bit easier. Although submitting through a search engine’s submission interface such as Google Webmaster Tools can offer additional valuable information, if you simply could not be bothered there is now an easier way.

Vanessa Fox posted in the Webmaster Central Blog a few recent announcements regarding sitemaps.org, including a point on XML sitemaps.
Now you can add a simple line to your robots.txt file that will tell the search engines that support XML sitemaps, where your file is. No need to create an account. Simply upload your XML sitemap and add a line including the full path to your robots.txt file
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
It is as simple as that, your sitemap will be spidered and you need not do anything else. That said, using the supplied interface, such as Google Webmaster Tools, will allow you to ensure that your sitemap was spidered correctly and without errors, but it is nice to see an alternative is available.

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By Scott Van Achte

SES NY2007 Session Coverage From SERoundtable

2008-09-21T04:38:00.000-07:00

Big thank you to Debra Mastaler, Chris Boggs, Greg Meyers, Ben Pfeiffer, Lisa Barone, Li Evans, Rob Kerry, Carolyn Shelby, Tamar Weinberg for helping me out with this awesome coverage. Here are the sessions we covered, somewhat in order.

Here are the fifty-plus sessions we covered at SES NY 2007.

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by Organized by Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick)

Black Hat SEO Meets Web 2.0

2008-09-20T16:33:00.000-07:00

I’m here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Today (actually yesterday now that it’s after midnight) I sat in on the SEO Workshop being presented by Todd Friesen (”The Oilman”) and Greg Boser (”WebGuerrilla”).

This session turned out to be a lot of fun. It was reminiscent of their “SEO Rock Stars” radio show on Webmaster Radio. I cracked up when Todd plugged their show and explained the name of the show by saying: “Yes, we really are that arrogant.”
Much more of the session than I was expecting turned to “black hat” or “gray hat” SEO tactics — things that are outside the search engine guidelines. Both Todd and Greg believe in being pragmatic about SEO. Greg analogized SEO to speeding: nobody goes the speed limit; just don’t drive recklessly swerving in and out of traffic so you get in a wreck. He “hates the guidelines” and longs for the good ol’ days when the engines didn’t have such idealistic guidelines and if you went too far, you were simply “torched forever and you’re gone.” Greg’s guiding principle: “I don’t want to upset my mother” — i.e. he gauges whether he’s gone too far based on whether she’d be unhappy with the search results because they’re useless. They say the search engine guidelines are simply that: guidelines.
Hmm. I’m not sure I’d take that tack with an audience of webheads from Web 2.0 startups. An audience of SEOs at SES (Search Engine Strategies) is one thing, because they can be discerning about how far to take various bits of advice. But Web 2.0 geeks? That aren’t savvy enough about SEO to know when they are playing with fire.
Greg and Todd made compelling arguments for playing with conditional redirects (serving different destination URLs to Googlebot than to humans). But the 4 major engines had specifically warned against doing that in the session “Search Engine Q&A on Links” last Friday at Search Engine Strategies in NYC. So you’d better REALLY know what you’re doing if you’re going to play with that stuff!
Todd and Greg also testified to the benefits of cloaking. One of their client’s sites was cloaked for 3 years — a new ecommerce platform was purchased and launched by the client, but the old HTML-based site was served up selectively to the bots because it ranked so well. I’m sure that was worth a pile of money to his client. But boy if you get that wrong (like not keeping up to date with all the ever-changing list of IP addresses associated with Googlebot), things could go very badly.
Todd made the point that if you are a big brand or company, you’re not going to get kicked out of Google. Or at worst, maybe it’ll be for a day. He cited eBay and the NY Times as examples of sites that won’t get banned despite operating outside the Google Guidelines by serving millions of “related search” results and/or cloaking. Todd also cited Yahoo’s new spam-reporting feature within Yahoo Site Explorer as evidence that the engines (and Yahoo in particular) aren’t very good at webspam detection: “they’re asking you to report the spam because they can’t find it themselves.” I was ROFLMAO when I heard that one. I doubt Yahoo would find that as funny though.
Speaking of Yahoo… Greg told the audience that he has consulted for Yahoo. Wow! That surprised me; impressed me too. Nice one, Greg!
Speaking of Yahoo again… Todd loves Yahoo’s paid inclusion program (Search Submit Pro). That’s because with it, Yahoo “gives you a complete pass on the off-page factors”. Yahoo tells everyone publicly that Search Submit Pro doesn’t improve your rankings, but it’s not true according to Todd. Although you shouldn’t expect a rankings lift with big money terms like “credit report” or “data recovery,” it will lift your rankings on most non-ultracompetitive search terms. Nonetheless, I’d exercise caution with this one. That’s because, as Todd admits, when you stop paying all your listings in the SERPs “will mysteriously vanish and it’s really hard to get them back in for free.” A bit of evil advice from Todd (I think he was only half-serious! … “Submit your competitor and then turn it off”. I was again rolling on the floor laughing at that one! I’ve heard of “Google bowling” your competitors into “Supplemental hell”, but now I guess you might call this one “Yahoo bowling!”
Attendees got a little dose of conspiracy theory. Todd and Greg don’t trust Google and their “don’t be evil” mantra — and they weren’t afraid to spread a little hysteria into the audience. Google Analytics is one service they are very suspect of. They go far as to advise you don’t use it: “giving your ROI data to the company you’re buying your ads from — that’s just assinine.” Personally, I trust Google. So much so that I’m on their waiting list for the Google Implant (beta).
Greg weighed in about the Open Directory, referring to it as “a dilapidated piece of crap.” And the ODP editors? — “they take bribes all the time.” I’d love to know who the editors are that I can bribe and how much it’ll cost!
Their recommended SEO tools were useful. For example: TouchGraph. They gave a very cool little demo of the tool in action. Todd said: “It’s like Diggswarm, but actually useful. Is Kevin Rose in the room? He’s going to kick my ass.” LOL!
Some of the other free link research tools recommended:
* Yahoo’s Site Explorer

* Netconcepts’ Link Checker

* WeBuildPages’ Neat-o Tool

* SEO for Firefox

* Tattler
Hmm. That’s funny, this list of tools (except for the last one) looked mighty familiar. So did some of the previous slides. I couldn’t resist… I got the microphone during Q&A, and I alluded to the slides, saying “Thanks for the plug for Netconcepts on that Tools slide.” Well you won’t believe what happened next! They admitted it to the audience that they lifted one of my decks from our website and then customized it! OMG!!
They praised me for making such excellent Powerpoints available online. Umm, thanks… I think! Geez!
Actually I’m not mad. Perhaps I should be, but they fessed up and poked fun at themselves for it — in front of 300 people! — so no harm done.
Just don’t do it again, k? Or if you do, at least keep my Netconcepts logo on the slides!
What other nuggets did they share? Todd shared that Endeca can be a secret weapon for SEO when you know how to make it work for you. I concur with that statement, totally. For example, with our (Netconcepts’) client Northern Tool, we were able to blow past previous search traffic records by deploying our GravityStream technology on top of Endeca Guided Navigation. Todd said that one of their (Range’s) biggest SEO successes was with Endeca. Todd gave a word of caution though: “Out of the box, Endeca is just a piece of junk for SEO”. The good news though is that, if you know what to ask for, “they will customize.”
They also recommended Google’s “Domain Park” program if you are a domainer with a bunch of domains you want to monetize.
They also advised folks to stay out of Google’s contextual advertising space so that you don’t get your AdWords campaigns onto the domain parking pages, because it is junk traffic that doesn’t convert.
What was the most interesting revelation of the day? That Todd was a Viagra webspammer before working for Range. I knew he was a reformed black hat SEO, but I never knew what industry. Greg joked that in Todd’s space, “PPC” stood for “Pills, Porn and Casinos” rather than “Pay Per Click.” Todd regaled us with tales of “churn and burn” SEO going after Viagra rankings — he could make $10k in a week, and all it cost him was a day of his time and $7 for a domain name — then the site would get banned and he’d move on to using another domain name. “Viagra” would have to be the most competitive keyword in SEO bar none (well, with the probable exception of “sex”). Todd *must* have been a “rock star” at SEO (but on the Dark Side of the Force of course! to make such a good living from it. So the name of his Webmaster Radio show really IS fitting and merited. I highly recommend downloading some audio recordings of previous SEO Rockstars episodes; even Matt Cutts has been known to listen to their show!
Rock on!

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by Stephan Spencer is the founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts.

Gerrymandering Google Search Results

2008-09-19T04:29:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia.com, “Gerrymandering is a form of redistricting in which electoral district or constituency boundaries are manipulated for an electoral advantage.”

Most states in the US redraw their electoral districts at least every decade. In 36 of the states, the state legislature is responsible for drawing the new districts — in principle to account for shifts in population — and the governor is required to approve those changes.

With nearly every redistricting, the party who is out-of-power generally screams foul. The argument is always that the political party in power adjusted the lines to improve their ability to win elections and control the electoral power structure.

The entire process of redistricting is a good analogy for the Google algorithm changes. The people in power (Google) redraw the lines, and the party out-of-power (the webmasters who dropped in ranking) cry foul, threatening lawsuits and other actions.

Something Right And Something Wrong

Of course, the same webmasters screaming about having dropped in Google’s search results did not have a problem when Google allowed them to climb in the search results previously.

The truly funny thing about it is that when people were on their way up in the Google search results, they told all of their friends that “they” did something right. When they are on their way down, “Google” did something wrong.

Shaky Foundations For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Problem If the website dropped out of Google’s top 1000 results, then I am willing to bet that in nearly every situation of this type, the webmaster had done something wrong in the last few years, and Google has just now caught on to this infraction.

For example, in years past, link farms were utilized by webmasters and accepted by Google. Then Google began to consider link farms to be “bad neighborhoods.”

Link farms are the kind of thing that can be easily recognized by human and search engine alike. So, the link farms were tagged as “bad neighborhoods” and their values were discounted to zero, and the websites linked from link farms got a minus points for their participation in the link farms.

It was a bad practice that the webmaster had participated, and Google finally got around to penalizing the websites whose rankings were supported by these shaky foundations.

SOLUTION: If you try to put yourself into the shoes of the experts at Google, and you wanted to improve the Google search results, what would YOU do? Before you answer this question, remember that you work for Google and not for yourself. What would you do? What would you do different?

“White hat” and “black hat” SEO methods are an analogy of Search Engine Optimization techniques that refers back to the old cowboy classics, where the “good guy” always wore a “white hat” and the ‘bad guy” always wore a “black hat”.

While you are working for Google, take a look at the SEO technique you are thinking about using for your own website. Chances are that if you deem a SEO technique to be “gray hat” (something in between ethical SEO and unethical SEO), then chances are that someday that technique will be deemed “black hat” by the Google engineers. And if the SEO technique is “black hat,” it will likely be targeted for discount by Google at some time in the future.

If you delve into “gray hat” or “black hat” SEO, you may be able to rocket to the top of the Google search results quickly, but you will not be able to hold that position for long. Google will eventually get wise to your gimmick.

If you can “white hat” your website to the top of the search results, your future ranking will likely hold its ground for many years to come.

Your Competition Out-Played You

PROBLEM: If a website dropped a few positions in the Google search results, I am willing to bet that in nearly every situation, one of the website’s major competitors out-performed them in the search results.

There are certain things that you can do correctly, to elevate your own listings in the search engine results. Because you have the capability to do these things, your competitors also have the capability to do these things.

Well guess what? Your competitor did what you should have done. They set up marketing systems to ensure that they could climb in the search results, and they climbed enough to pass you by.

SOLUTION: Do those things that you know you should be doing. And more importantly, do them consistently. Your competitor wants your placement in the search results, and they are going to do what it takes for them to get there.

So, it is imperative for you to keep moving forward in the process of building your ranking in the search engines. When you stand still, resting in the comfort zone of where you reside today, then you are bound to be overtaken by someone who wants to be where you are, a little bit more than you do.

Stir That Pot

PROBLEM: If a website dropped a few pages in the search results, the cause for the drop may have been caused by a combination of the two above-mentioned problems: shaky SEO foundations, and hungry competitors.

SOLUTION: Keep your eye on the big picture. You know what you have done to strengthen your website in the past. Keep learning and keep growing.

If you find that something you had done in the past may affect your website negatively in the future, implement “white hat” SEO techniques to strengthen your position, and make plans to eliminate your reliance on “black hat” SEO systems before Google does it for you.

Don’t Make The Mess And You Won’t Have To Clean It Up

Some may think my approach to housecleaning is an indication of laziness. I consider it to be an indication of good time management. I prefer to reserve my time for things that are more enjoyable.

My theory towards housework — and I try to teach this to my kids often — is that if you don’t want to clean up the mess, don’t make the mess in the first place. If the house is not messy, you don’t have to clean it. So, don’t make the house messy.

I utilize the same approach to my websites. If I do it “white hat” and above-reproach the first time, then I won’t have to go in and fix my rankings everytime Google changes their algorithms.

Stop Standing Still

Do remember that for most every search term you compete to rank for, there are probably another one million web pages competing to rank for the same keyword phrase. Getting to the top of the search engine results is a process, not a destination. You must keep competing to maintain your spot at the top of the search results.

If you want to get to the top of the search results, you will have to take positive steps to get there. And, if you want to maintain your top position in the search engines, you need to keep doing the things that put you in that top spot in the first place.

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by Bill Platt has been involved in article marketing and link building since 1999.

How to Make Boring Businesses Exciting

2008-09-18T16:32:00.000-07:00

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone got as excited about your company as you are?

Unfortunately some businesses just aren’t very sexy; in fact, some businesses are downright boring. As a consequence, companies that sell commodity products and routine services tend to rely on presentations that load-up on features, specifications, and statistics that may be relevant to anal-retentive types, but hardly compelling to the vast majority of your audience.
There is no reason why every company can’t deliver an exciting image to its audience; one that generates the kind of buzz and excitement usually associated with companies like Apple, Victoria’s Secret, Benetton, Absolut Vodka, and Sony.
It may seem impossible to produce a whole lot of steam for things like sand paper, accounting services, and facial tissue, but thanks to the Web and it’s extraordinary ability to deliver multimedia content, even the most mundane offerings can get hearts racing and the blogosphere blogging.
Emotional Experiences Connect
Let’s take facial tissue as an example; it is one of the most common, boring everyday products you can imagine. There is just not much you can do to sell this stuff other than telling people yours is softer and cheaper than the other guys, but then the other guy is saying the same thing; the result, consumers buy whatever is on sale. But wait, the clever fellows at Kimberly-Clark instituted a brilliant website campaign for their facial tissue, called “Kleenex - let it out.”
The campaign zeros in on the emotional experience associated with why people use facial tissue: to wipe away tears of joy or sadness or maybe to clean-up cute little runny noses - in each case the result of some moving event.
Tapping into this emotional association is key to the Kleenex campaign and key to your new thinking on how to make your boring stuff, exciting.
Video - The Best Way To Tell A Story
The Kleenex campaign features prominent videos of articulate people telling their personal stories, all resulting in the need to use a facial tissue.
A pregnant woman discusses the emotional impact of having a child and as her eyes begin to tear, the interviewer hands her a Kleenex. A second video features another well-spoken woman talking about her return to New Orleans after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Again as the woman becomes emotional and begins to cry, the interviewer hands her a tissue. Nothing more needs to be said, this is very powerful story telling that connects to the audience and delivers an image of the brand as caring and sensitive; the exact kind of impression the company wants to portray.

Even companies that aren’t exactly dead-from-the-neck-up boring can benefit from this approach. The Home Depot ran a series of advertisements with a husband showing his wife a series of power tools that he wanted. Rather than try to convince his wife, and by association all the wives in the audience, that he needs another expensive toy, the husband points to each tool and states, “this is your new shelving unit” and “this one is your new kitchen” - a far more dramatic and effective way to make the case for a new purchase.
You can deliver the same kind of powerful marketing messages for your own company by presenting Web-based videos that follow a few very simple guidelines.
Six Steps To Turn Boring Into Exciting
1. Use People to Sell People
There is no substitute for people. Human beings are capable of communicating with an enormous degree of nuance and subtlety, using voice, expression, body language, and gesture; no animation, avatar, or artificial substitute can take the place of a real person for communicating meaningful, memorable marketing messages.
With relatively easy-to-use production tools anyone can create a video, but not necessarily one that delivers the message or image that your company wants to present. We have seen far too many poor quality efforts both on the Web and even on local television, where company presidents with bad haircuts and ill-fitting suits, uttering nonsense-riddled scripts in zombie-like performances expose themselves to audiences expecting more, much more.
Skilled performers communicate in very subtle ways to an audience, and only the well-practiced professional has the experience and capability to deliver the intended experience. The cost of saving monëy by doing-it-yourself or with amateurs can result in delivering an unintended message that may undermine the impression and image you are trying to create.
2. Perception Is Reality - Use Scripted Professionals
You will notice that I described the women in the facial tissue videos as articulate. Now I cannot tell you if these women were actors or not, or that their powerful presentations were scripted, but if I had to guess, I would say these very effective videos were about as carefully produced and constructed as the latest episode of ‘Survivor’ that by no means makes them any less effective.
The point here is that perception is reality, and the professional filmmaker knows how to tell a story and communicate a message; and that is not the same thing as being able to turn on a video camera.
3. Tell A Memorable Story
When we talk about companies telling their story, it is important to distinguish between the company’s history and the emotional experiences generated by the product or service.
Company histories can make for interesting videos and can produce a sense of trust associated with being in business for a considerable length of time, but that sort of presentation does not speak to the underlying emotional and psychological factors that actually trigger a sale.
It is difficult but imperative that businesses understand that marketing is not about you, or even the product or service, it’s about the audience.
Like the Kleenex videos and the Home Depot commercials, every product and service that is purchased from your company represents an experience, a story that relates to your audience’s aspirations and needs. It is the audience’s story that demonstrates credibility, clarifies purpose, penetrates memory, and makes the message compelling.
4. Create An Emotional Experience
The vast majority of decisions we make are colored by the emotional relevance associated with those decisions. No doubt rational factors figure into our decision-making process, but the pivotal factors that attract the use of one product over another are emotional.
If you’re not connecting to your audience on an emotional level, then you are left with a commodity that can only be sold on price and features, and unless you’re a monopoly, there will always be some competitor willing to offër your customers more for less.
When presenting your product or service it is important to tap into an emotional element that your audience can relate to as its key purchasing decision factor. When people purchase boring accounting services and software, what they’re really buying is an improved life style for their families. It really doesn’t matter what you sell, if you look hard enough, you can find the emotional benefit that should be the central element of your marketing message.
5. Create a Believable Relevant Personality
Part of the process of connecting with your audience is creating an appropriate personality for your company. Many corporations today believe in the cult of management personality but this is a dangerous game. Your company needs a personality of it’s own, one that is distinctive and that will stand alone and not be dependent on senior management’s ego and self-promotion.
Web-video marketing campaigns provide a vehicle that allows companies to create appropriate personalities that engage, inform and entertain your audience in ways that establish your identity and create the basis for a prosperous business relationship.
Clever marketing can create a corporate personality but it is imperative that you follow through and deliver that personality in all aspects of your relationship with your audience. Producing a campaign that promises one thing and a website, staff, and product that delivers another is one of the easiest ways to alienate customers.
6. Deliver A Critical Hot Button Moment
Web-video presentations need to focus on single issues that are driven home by the addition of a hot button moment or punch line. Remember you are telling your audience a story that needs a beginning, middle and end. That story should build to climax and deliver the point in a single memorable moment.
The era of point förm slide presentations is dead, along with the laundry líst of benefits approach.
Creativity, personality, and the ability to communication and develop an emotional connection to your audience through the use of Web-video campaigns has the potential to turn even the most lackluster company into a vibrant and exciting marketing business.

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by Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia,

Web Promotion via Social Bookmarking

2008-09-17T04:25:00.000-07:00

Social bookmarking, (along with other types of free web promotion techniques), is a very popular practice among bloggers and affiliate marketers. Adding social bookmark links to your blog or web site makes it easy for readers to save and share your content.In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly.
You must have seen “share this” or “bookmark this”after an article or a blog post. This is a common way to encourage users to social bookmark your articles. It greatly helps any website to acquire good positions in search engines for relevant keywords. Social bookmarking has more recently inspired the more successful social news movement which includes websites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg and the famous Netscape portal.
These days, social bookmarking has become an indicator of any website’s popularity. There are many ways to learn how many people have bookmarked your blog or website on these social bookmarking websites. SocialMeter.com is one of them.
SocialMeter helps you measure the popularity of your website, blog or articles on various social bookmarking websites and blog search engines. Social meter scans the major social websites to analyze a webpage’s social popularity. Currently it scans Bloglines Links, Del.icio.us, Google Links, Rojo Links, Shadows Links, Technorati Links, and Yahoo! Links. The process is very simple, you just have to type your blog URL and socialmeter will fetch the details of all stories on social websites that link to your blog. So I hope you will definitely bookmark this article.

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by Daniel Russo is a successful affiliate marketer .

Don’t Risk Your Rankings With Unethical SEO

2008-09-16T04:22:00.000-07:00

The worst kept secret in Internet Marketing is the advantages of a well-wrought search engine optimization campaign. Companies are quickly adopting SEO into their marketing plan and looking for someone they can trust to optimize their Web sites in order to achieve top rankings. However, not all SEO practitioners are created equal so be sure you know what you’re getting before you sign a contract.

With over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever to achieve high rankings for visibility. While reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques. These techniques are known as spam and can get you penalized or banned from the search engines.
Many times, an SEO provider will promise quick, first-page rankings and fail to notify the client that they use spam techniques to achieve those rankings. To avoid falling into this trap, you must be aware of unethical SEO techniques and guard against the companies who use them.

Consequences of Spam

While search engines may have different rules for detecting spam, in the end, the results are the same - you lose your rankings and can be taken out of the index. It is not easy to recover from a ban, so it is important to know the techniques that must be avoided.
Many sites may be unwitting victims of spamming techniques used by aggressive SEO vendors. Whether it happens inadvertently or not, the search engines will penalize and ban, temporarily or permanently. If a significant part of your online business model depends on search engine traffic, you could be in trouble. When infractions are serious, it can take many months to convince the search engine that you corrected the problem and deserve a second chance.

SEO Techniques to Avoid
Search engine optimization practitioners are often divided into two camps: the so-called Black Hats, who use questionable techniques to trick the search engines into ranking them highly, and White Hats, who prefer to work with the search engines guidelines in order to achieve lasting success. A number of Black Hat vendors have turned to White Hat techniques over the past year; however, there are still many unethical vendors claiming to practice SEO soliciting business.
Below are some basic spam techniques to avoid. Obviously this list isn’t exhaustive but it will give you a good idea of the types of things that the search engines find to be unacceptable. Familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and make sure you know if what is being done to your Web site is in agreement with those rules.
Keyword Stuffing: This practice involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your Meta tags, Comment tags, ALT tags or in the copy on your pages. When determining the appropriate keyword density for your page content, plan to repeat your targeted keywords no more than six or seven times within 200 words of text on one page. You can use the keyword density analyzer available on our free SEO tools page in order to determine if you or your SEO is using a particularly keyword too often.
Hidden Text or Links: This practice involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by your site’s human visitors. This can be accomplished several way, the easiest of which is by using a white link or white text containing relevant keywords on a Web page with a white background. Your site visitors won’t be able to see this text and will not know it is there, but the search engines will. All search engines consider hidden links or hidden text to be spam and will penalize the page, if not the entire site, for it.
Cloaking: This involves using a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages specifically created to trick the spider and re-direct the user to a different set of pages. The user does not see the group of spam pages and is simultaneously re-directed to the real site. Cloaking can have proper uses–some sites use it to redirect based on location. For example, if they sell a product that is illegal to market in a particular area, they can direct those users to a different page where the illegal products are not mentioned. However, by and large, cloaking is used to deceive the search engines and must be considered a spam technique.
Doorway Pages: Also known as Gateway or Bridge pages, these are low-quality Web pages that exist only to pass visitors to the main Web site without providing value of their own. Doorway pages are used to achieve high rankings for a particular key phrase while leading the user to a different page irrelevant to the search query. These pages frequently auto refresh to a second Web site. Be sure that every page on your site that you want indexed can be accessed by at least two internal links and that the page provides value to the user.
Mirror Sites and Duplicate Content: This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content. Search engines suppress duplicate content because it holds no value for their users. An optimization company who suggests that you interlink all the Web sites that you own is doing you a great disservice. These types of incestuous link rings are a clear violation of the search engine’s spam guidelines.
Link Farms: Google’s quality guidelines suggest that pages contain no more than 99 links. Link farms typically consist of one page with hundreds of links to sites within different categories that are unrelated to your site content. Such pages contain poor quality content that is useless to visitors. Reciprocal links from these pages hold no value for you at all and could potentially associate you with poor neighborhoods. Avoid these inbound links at all costs because they will result in serious penalties and banning.
Ask any prospective search engine optimization company about their best practices and be sure you know what they’re doing to your pages. Beware of spammers who claim to be legitimate search engine optimization experts. Realize that no company can guarantee results and if a company claims a special relationship with Google or any other search engine, run the other way.
Unethical SEO techniques can bring you high rankings; however, visibility is short lived. When you use spamming techniques, your site may benefit briefly from high rankings that last for days, weeks or months. Once the search engines discover the use of spamming techniques, they will penalize or ban your site from their indexes. If you are removed from a search engine index, it can be difficult and time consuming to be reinstated. You might even have to start over with a new domain name. So beware of unethical SEO techniques and ask any prospective vendors if they adhere to a Code of Ethics and/or a Code of Conduct. Once achieved legitimately, organic links can last indefinitely. That’s why it’s important to acquire your search engine rankings fairly and maintain them ethically.

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by Susan Esparza is a writer with Bruce Clay Inc

Use Robots.txt, Save the World

2008-09-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

Robots.txt help the search engines learn all about your website

There is a growing interest in the little known file that every website should have in the root directory: robots.txt
It’s a very simple text file you can find all about at the robotstxt.org website
Why should you use it ? Here are some good reasons for you to consider.
Controlled access to your content

With a robots.txt file you can “ask” the search engines to “keep out” of certain areas of your website. A typical area you might like to exclude is your images folder: If you aren’t a photographer, painter and your images are for your website use only, there are good chances you don’t want them to be indexed and showing up on image search engines, for people to download, or hotlink.
Unfortunately grabbers and similar software (such as Email harvesting applications) will not read your robots.txt file disregarding any indication you may provide in this respect. But that’s life isn’t it, always someone being disrespectful to say the least …
You can keep search engines away from content you wish to keep out of sight, but remember your robots file is also subject to attention of hackers seeking sensitive objectives you might inadvertently list: keeping out the robots while inviting the hackers – keep this in mind.

(cont. from front…)

The growing importance of robots.txt

At SES New York a robots.txt summit was held where major search engines (Ask, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) participated, sharing interesting information on this file. Here are some numbers.
According to Keith Hogan from Ask:

i) Less than 35% of websites have a robots.txt file
ii) The majority of robots.txt files are copied from others found online
iii) On many occasions robots.txt files are provided by your web hosting service

It looks like the majority of webmasters aren’t familiar with this file. This is going to play a major role as the size of the web continues to grow: Spidering is a costly effort that search engines tend to optimize. Those web sites demonstrating optimal command (which in turn determines efficiency) will be rewarded.

During the summit, all search engines announced they will identify (or autodiscover) sitemaps via the robots.txt file. In essence search engines are now able to discover your sitemap via a link in the following format:

Sitemap: , where is the complete URL of your Sitemap Index File (or your sitemap file, if you don’t have an index file).
Being compliant to Google Terms of Service

Robots.txt can help prevent you getting banned or being penalized by Google. In a move to eliminate search results pages because “web search results don’t add value to users” Google has recently added the following sentence to their terms of service:

- Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

How to implement a robots.txt file

If your website doesn’t support a sitemap and you do not have any areas to exclude, include an empty robots.txt file in your root directory. By doing so you are acknowledging full spidering of your entire site.
Carefully review the robots exclusion protocol available at robotstxt.org. If you must exclude numerous areas of your website, build your file in a step by step manner and monitor spider behaviour with a log analyser tool.
Test your robots.txt file with a few online tools and keep in mind that every spider has a different behaviour and spidering criteria.

Avoid useless spidering traffic

When your website grows to a significant size and achieves optimal visibility, spidering significantly increases to hundreds (if not thousands) of hits per day and will put your server and bandwidth to the test.
Recently I was called on to examine a blog burdened by a very unusual and extremely heavy spidering activity: the log file I examined reported an excess of 8 Gbyte of invisibile (spider) traffic over a 1 month period. Given the reduced amount of daily visitors (less than 200) and the reduced size of the blog (less than 100 posts), there was something wrong in the architecture.
It took just a few minutes to identify the problem: There was no robots.txt file.
At each request for a robots.txt there was a redirect to the home page of the blog triggering a complete download of the blog home page. Each download of the home page was approximately 250 K. There were thousands of unnecessary hits on the home page. This was causing a spidering frenzy that ceased when an empty robots.txt file was created and uploaded to the server. Traffic is now down from 8 Gbyte to 500 Mbyte.

Keep the spiders informed, help save the world

The web is growing by leaps and bounds, the use of a robots.txt file helps the search engines effectively allocate their resources and is a tangible sign of respect and courtesy. If you don’t have a robots.txt file on your website set one up now. Use it to inform the crawlers on how your site is organized, and how often it is changing. I think we should all do our part to avoid waste of resources, saving energy and helping to save the world.

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By Sante J. Achille

Let Google’s Algorithm Show You the Traffic

2008-09-14T04:19:00.000-07:00

Recently Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org brought together 37 of the world’s Top SEO experts to tackle Google’s Algorithm, the complex formula and methods Google uses to rank web pages. This ranking formula is extremely important to webmasters because finding which factors Google uses to rank their index is often considered the Holy Grail of site optimization.

Google’s ranking factors affect how and where you are listed in their search engine results or SERPs. Since obtaining top positions for your targeted keywords often spells success for your site, knowing Google’s ranking factors can be very beneficial.
Every experienced webmaster will know Google is the main supplier of search engine traffíc on the web, getting listed on the first page or anywhere in the top 10 positions for popular keywords will result in plenty of free quality targeted traffíc.
Briefly listed below are some of the main ranking factors you should be optimizing your web pages for in your marketing. The majority of these ranking factors will be very familiar to most webmasters who take full advantage of any and every SEO tactic which will give their site an edge over their competition.
Here are some of the main ranking factors to consider:
1. Keywords In Your Title And On Your Page
Place your keyword or keyword phrase in the title of your page and also in your copy. Many webmasters use variations of their keywords on this page and also include it in the H1 headline.
2. Keywords In Your URL
Keep your page on topic and place your keyword in the URL. Use your keyword in the H2, H3… headlines. Place it in the description and meta tags, place it in bold/strong tags, but keep your content readable and useful. Be aware of the text surrounding your keywords, search engines will become more semantic in the coming years so context is important.
3. Create High Quality Relevant Content
Have high quality relevant content on your pages. Your content should be related to the topic of your site and updated regularly depending on the nature of your site.
4. Internal Onsite Linking
Internal linking is important to your overall ranking. Make sure your linking structure is easy for the spiders to crawl. Most suggest a simple hierarchy with links no more than three clicks away from your home/index page.
Creating traffíc modes or clusters of related links within a section on your site has proven very effective for many webmasters, including this one. For example, creating a simple online guide on a subject related to your site’s topic can prove very beneficial. Keep all the links connected and closely related in subject matter and don’t forget to have occasional external ‘anchor keyworded’ links coming to these internal links on your site instead of to your homepage. Deep build your links.
5. Only Linking To High Quality Related Sites
Don’t forget to link to high quality PR related sites. Linking to high quality sites shows the search engines your site is very useful to your visitors. Build relationships within communities on the topic of your site. Be extremely careful not to link to bad neighborhoods, link farms and sp@m sites… when in doubt, don’t link out!
Unless your site has been around for years and is well established and trusted by Google, this factor will have an adverse effect on your site’s overall ranking. Linking only to high quality content sites will give your site an edge over your competition.
6. Global Linking Popularity
One of the major ranking factors is the Global Linking Popularity of your site. You should try to build plenty of inbound links from quality sites. One simple and effective way to do this is through writing articles and submitting them to the online article directories. Only related sites will pick up and display your articles with your anchor text links back to your site. These are often ONE-WAY-LINKS.
But don’t just write articles to get links, write quality content that will help the reader first and the links will come naturally. Also remember an article is an extremely good way of pre-selling your products and gaining trust with your potential customers.
7. Anchor Text Is Very Important
Anchor text is an important factor your must not forget to use. Perhaps more importantly these inbound links should be related or relevant to your site’s topic, which will play an important role in your rankings. Don’t ignore the text surrounding your links and use different anchor text links to avoid keyword sp@mming.
Keep in mind, as search engines become more semantic, the whole text of your article will probably be considered your anchor text, thus making articles even more important to your rankings.
8. Number And Quality Of Your Inbound Links
Your inbound links should also come from related high Global Link Popular sites. The more links your have from these popular related sites the higher rankings you will get. Many SEO experts suggest you should have a steady stream of new sites (inbound links) added each month to keep your rankings growing. These links will age and íncrease your rankings after 4 or 5 months. Both quality and quantity is important.
9. Reliable Server And Service
Like any business, Google is only serving up a product (SERPs) to its customers, this service must be continuous and available at all times. Make sure you have a good reliable server because any extended downtime when your site is inaccessible to the Bots may be detrimental to your rankings. If it is down for over 48 hours, you could be dropped from the index. Ouch!
10. Duplicate Content Is A NO NO!
Make certain you don’t place duplicate content on your site. This may affect your rankings and get your pages thrown into the supplemental index. Be careful not to use duplicate title or mega tags on your pages as this will lower and disburse your internal page rankings, resulting in poor optimization.
Your overall SEO strategy should be to provide valuable relevant content and links for your visitors and the search engines. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, be extremely careful who you link out to from your site. Avoid sp@m sites, link farms or selling links. Although it is a bit outdated, using the Google Toolbar will still give you a general overview of a site’s PR or Page Rank.
These are some of the most common and important ranking factors Google uses to rank and display their search engine results. Optimizing your site or keywords for these factors can prove very beneficial and rewarding.
There are many more factors so you should use the link in the resource box below to get all the gory details. For any novice or experienced webmaster it makes for a fascinating read and is extremely helpful in tackling Google’s complex ranking system or algorithm. Conquer it and an endless supply of free organic traffíc is yours for the taking.

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By Titus Hoskins

The Three Worst Marketing Mistakes You Can Make

2008-09-13T04:17:00.000-07:00

Marketing is what we do that puts us in a position to make a sale. Good marketing makes selling easier. Bad marketing may make selling impossible.

We market to strangers so some of them will raise their hand with at least potential interest in what we have on offer.
We market to our clients and customers in order to move them up to the next level of products or services.

(continued from front…)

Most of us put a lot of time, money, and effort into marketing. For must of us it is the key activity we use to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.
But when we don’t deliver on the promises we make in our marketing we unleash the deadly 3/33 viruses on ourselves.
The 3/33 virus will destroy the marketing we have done in the past and it will make it very difficult to successfully market - at least to some prospects - in the future. And for the most part the 3/33 virus is a do-it-to-yourself process.
The 3/33 virus is word of mouth marketing on steroids - in reverse. Here’s how it works.
When you fulfill a promise, deliver excellent service, come in under budget, and save your customer more money than you said you would - they might tell 3 people. And that usually is because you asked them for referrals.
But if you screw up, don’t do what you said you would do, or fail to deliver in any way - in your customer’s mind - they will tell at least 33 people. This can be disaster.
You know I am speaking the truth. Remember the last time you got poor service in a restaurant and how many people you went out of your way to tell about it?
Here are three ways to guarantee that all the marketing you’ve done will backfire on you.
Don’t Do What You Said You’d Do In 2006 I met the author of a marketing book at the Search Engine Strategies event in New York City. I had been receiving his email newsletter and had heard a few things about the book. A table where he could autograph books had been set up for him at the Search Engine Strategies meeting. When there was no one around I approached him and found him to be a very insightful person, someone whose book would probably be of value to our readers.
He offered to send me a review copy and I thanked him. After the event I emailed him a note with my mailing address. I never received the book. I received several emails to the address I had given him, but they were solicitations sent to everyone he’d come across at the search engine event.
I don’t know if he never intended to follow up with his promise, or if he turner it over to someone else, or what. The bottom line is that I will never have anything positive to say about him, his organization, or his book. That can’t be what this marketer had in mind when he went to the time, trouble, and energy to come to New York.
Disappear With Your Customer’s Money The Internet makes it possible to hire people you will never see to do something you can not do and really have no way of knowing it will work until it’s too late, and pay them via your PayPal account before they’ve even begun to do the work.
I have done this several times without incident. Recently however I hired someone, on the strength of another person’s recommendation, who kept my money and disappeared. He had promised to do the work within 48 hours of receiving my payment. But instead I heard nothing from him for six weeks, at which point he contacted me to see if there was some way to make up for his failure to follow through.
I was astounded, but since I’d already paid him I asked him to do something that was worth less than half of what he’d already been paid. Hey, we all deserve a second chance. What happened? Nothing, I never heard from him again.
It’s hard to say if I would have ever needed his services in the future anyway - so it was just a tedious time consuming event for me, getting someone else to do the job and so forth. But what did it do to the relationship I had had with the person who recommended him?
This was someone I trusted. Now I have to think twice about anything he has to sell me. And I am not going to tell my friends to do business with him in the future. Why would I take the chance he will recommend something or someone whose lack of performance comes back to bite me?
Embarrass Your Boss Everybody’s got to serve somebody was a line in one of Bob Dylan’s songs. So no matter who you are or the position you have in your outfit - you do have a boss, maybe many of them.
Prior to events where I am registered as part of the media horde, I receive a stream of emails from companies that are making presentations or have exhibits there. A week before the 2007 Search Engine Strategies meeting in New York I received an interview request from the PR firm representing an organization I wanted to learn more about.
Actually I received three emails from them, each with open time slots, so I could chose one of the remaining times for the interview.
This is the way it’s always done. By the time I get to the site I have several one on one interviews set up with people whose message, I think, will be of value to our readers. So I emailed my choice of day and time, from one of the remaining time slots.
In this case however, the PR person never go back to me. How was that possible, that was his job?
I was curious about the lack of follow up, from a PR person no less, so I printed out the email I’d sent and took it along with me to the meeting.
On the second day of the search engine conference I scoured the exhibit halls and eventually found the person I had wanted to interview. I still wanted to talk with him if we could work out the time.
You can imagine his response to my story and the copy of my email when I presented it to him.
You can also guess the fate of the PR firm who had mishandled their account. It seems I was not the only person affected by this - one of whom was an industry leader the boss really wanted to meet.
So, who’s your boss? Whose opinions are important to you? Who do you serve? Are you doing everything you can and more to make sure you aren’t disappointing or embarrassing them?
How can you be sure to avoid the three worst marketing mistakes? Only make promises you can keep, and keep the ones you make. It’s as simple as that.

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By Wayne Messick

Stuntdubl’s SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice

2008-09-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

SEO is about more than meta tags, title tags, and targeted anchor text. Call it “competitive webmastering”, “SEO”, or any one of a slew of other titles - it is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined that matters most. It is a line of thinking that necessitates doing what is optimal: when to balance user experience with “bot experience” to create a site that will harvest any legitimate traffic without detriment to conversions, or without venturing into areas beyond the given risk threshhold for the project.

Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between. In my mind, the reason SEO goes well beyond just search marketing into most areas of business is because search engine marketing IMPACTS many of the decisions that are made in a business. Marketing, infrastructure, customer relations, analytics, accounting, human resources can all directly impact search marketing and vice versa. SEO has become more and more of a strategic vision as top rankings become more competitive, and more valuable. SEO is in large part the communication gap between marketing and IT, combined with top level executive strategy (The only good SEO’s that leave the field at this point, do so to become CEO’s - visual illustration).

This is intended to be an “advanced beginner’s guide” - which is a bit of a paradox, but the idea is that even the most proficient of SEO’s often revisit the basics, and that execution on simple solutions can be very elegant and effective. It will also help to cover many of the things that all too often get overlooked. Executing on basics is the most advanced play in the search engine marketing game. A little secret I’ll let you in on - Even the “SEO Pros” go back to basics - content and links. They’re only pros because these two critical elements have become second nature, and nearly every waking thought is based around how to create mo’ betta content, or get some new links in creative ways.

cont. from front page –>

Even if you understand every single technique available - no matter what play you call - you still have to block and tackle to reach the endzone and score your top rankings. The most proficient SEO’s realize that search ranking, branding, marketing strategy, conversions, and postive conversations consist of two major elements - CONTENT and LINKS.

Content

User Experience and content organization

The user experience should be concise, and simple. Simple is elegant. You can have multitudes of functionality locked within a extremely simple streamlined interface. Read Don’t make me think, and the Big Red Fez.

Key tips with site architecture:

1. User architecture and bot architecture don’t need to be identical. A bot will determine the heirarchy of a site through it’s link structure. A user will determine the heirarchy of a site through the placement of the main navigational elements.

2. Search engines are becoming extremely proficient at incorporating semantics into link structure. Keeping a site sectioned into themes is extremely important. The importance of internal anchor text to this factor is rarely over-rated.

3. Internal search is incredible for gathering data on your site.

Resources for understanding information architecture, and balancing the user experience with the bot experience:

Content Creation

Keyword based content

Creating content specifically to rank for keywords. This is a borderline practice, depending on the intelligence level of the content. A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters could lookup and change content based on a set of words.

User generated content

The beauty of web 2.0 - people decide to connect together to do something. Whether it’s worthwhile or otherwise, two heads are very often better than one, and conversation is the backbone of the web.

How to content

Everyone loves to know how to do something. I really wish I could download things like “how to do your own plumbing”, and be able to figure it out. Someday, perhaps a well optimized and informative video will be able to do that.

Blog content

Write what you know. Talk about a relevant, cohesive topic.

Linkbait content

Make a GREAT idea even better. Be remarkable.

Commodity content

Sometimes cheap content is better than no content. Don’t be lazy.

Content Resources:

63 Questions to Ask Prior to Building a Content Site
Content creation What do you know about writing for the web
Providing Decent Content vs Providing Crap Content

Content Structure:

Duplicate content thinking

LINKS

The “Bot Experience”

“Create a site with your users in mind” has become an oft-quoted mantra of search engine representives when asked about how to rank better in search engines. While the logic is sound, it is also somewhat incomplete. The “experience” that a bot has when visiting your site will often determine the initial experience that a user has with your site as well. Controlling where the bot enters the site, and how the bot “sees” the site is of paramount importance to determining how users will find and navigate through your site.

Information architecture is one of the most overlooked areas of good search marketing. Mainly because it is one of the most difficult areas to retrofit on a site, and it’s extremely difficult for consultants to demonstrate the value to justify the workload needed to overhaul a site.

Link Development

Old is good - Old sites are trusted. Trustrank is a part of the game, and if you don’t believe it you’ve been sleeping. There is no sandbox, there is only the trustbox, and the trustbox emphasizes old, aged links that are on trusted domains that are relevant to your targeted query.

Link equity is the new brand building. Perhaps I’m a bit wrong - link equity, strategy, and development is the new brand building. Brand building and link building should coexist peacefully. Those folks out there that you’re paying $10 - $20 per hour for link building, are building your brand for the future. Why? because a brand is only a google search away these days. If I want to know how strong McDonald’s brand is - I do a google search. Perhaps I’m ahead of the curve, but even Joe sixpack isn’t that far behind me. He knows that google is a verb, and he’ll soon figure out how to change his default search application from windows live to yahoo or google. New brands don’t underestimate the intelligence of their consumers. Default search doens’t “WOW” anyone. Relevance, and information quality does.

Types of links and how to get them. Learn what they are, and how they apply to you. 12 types of links and how to get them.

Article link development

Write articles - submit to various sites based on automation for quantity or personal contacts for quality.

Press link development

Write articles - see above.

Partner link development

Network at conferences, through IM, or email, and make nice with friends.

Affiliate link development

Start an affiliate program with a service that is in the know. Redirect appropriate pages.

Paid link development

Buy text links on relevant sites

Viral link development

This one is probably among the toughest because it is becoming increasingly difficult to do something remarkable that people talk about.

Try learning what linkbaiting means.

Directory link development

Proceed with caution - you don’t need many.

Reciprocal link development

See above.

Link Development Resources:

Linkbaiting

Webmasterworld Link Development Threads

Supporter’s Forum (worth every penny of membership)

Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice - Resources for those figuring out what SEO really is.

You can take the blue pill or the red pill. The blue pill will take you back to your cozy desk job coding for the man, and the red pill might lead you to insomnia induced by ideas of how to turn your startup into a real company using only your laptop combined with some technical and marketing skills, and a realistic gameplan to pull it off. Or you might end up going from self employed to unemployed real quickly.

The first converstation I have with folks generally consists of them asking some questions about what SEO is. If they are REALLY interested, and get beyond thinking about the fact that I tell them meta tags generally don’t matter much, I would guess it feels a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I am still overwhelmed with information overload on a daily basis, and this is after over about 6 years of studying and experimenting with SEO techniques on a daily basis. I think the information overload stems from having so many opportunities to apply the information, as well as trying to keep up and evolve process with emerging opportunities.

Here’s where to start with your SEO Training if you’d prefer the red pill:

SEO Glossary
SEO Beginner’s Guide
Google hot topics (Tedster is truly amazing)
Search Engine Ranking Factors V.2
SEO Tools
SEO Tools 2
SEO Manifesto
Jim Boykin’s best posts

If that’s not enough, check out Lee’s list of SEO/SEM blogs, or Search through them.

More resources on site strategy: 18 questions your CEO forgot to ask when building your website

Practice your blocking and tackling every day. Read these long enough, focus on refining tactics, and experimentation, and you’ll always have a team to play for; your clients, vendors, employer, or partners will be dumping the gatorade all over you for being the one that “made it rain”.

What resources do you use for your SEO Playbook or your SEO blocking and tackling?

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by Todd Malicoat is an internet marketing consultant specializing in internet advertising

How I Assess a Website for SEO

2008-09-12T04:12:00.000-07:00

Very often website owners wonder what exactly is wrong with their websites in terms of SEO. They could have easily fixed the errors all by themselves, but the lack of specific SEO knowledge makes it impossible. Reading SEO forums and blogs full of conflicting advice doesn’t help; all that people get as a result is a headache and a list of 100 or more factors supposedly important for SEO. Too often, things like Google PageRank or Alexa rank will be among the first on the list, when in fact they shouldn’t have been there at all.This article is meant to help both webmasters who would like to make an assessment of their websites for SEO factors and SEO practitioners who consider adding an SEO review to the list of their services. Sure, the following is just my personal point of view, but it’s derived from my previous SEO experience and the knowledge accumulated over the years.

The on-site factors

It’s essential to check the following on-site factors (in no particular order).

Content. Does the site have a lot of textual content for visitors to read and for the search engines to index? Is it done in plain text, graphics or Flash (because the last two options make it invisible for the engines)? Is it unique?

Use Copyscape along with Google and search for a long sentence copied at random from the site (with and without quotation marks); this will help you identify any copies of the content you are reviewing on the web. There are three possibilities: the site you are reviewing steals the content from another site, the other site steals the content from the site you are reviewing, or a legitimate republishing (with credit and a link) has taken place. In the third case there are no reasons to worry, but if content stealing is going on, the owner should be informed about it in either case to take the necessary measures.

If the site is built upon graphic images for the most part of it (like an online photo album), alt and title attributes along with page titles can help a little, but not in a competitive niche. In this case, if the owner of the site is still interested in the search engine traffic, the only way to go is to describe the pictures, at least briefly (human visitors will be grateful too).

On the other hand, if the site is built as a single Flash movie, it has no chance in the search engines, unless an alternative HTML version of the site is provided in one way or another. It’s possible to use a cache:http://www.domainname.com/ Google command to see what Google sees on the home page of the website.

I sometimes retrieve the keywords from the title tag, insert them into the Google toolbar and click on the highlighter to see how often these keywords are used in the visible content of the page, but I never calculate the keyword density. Nobody ever knows the optimal number that will work in every case, so calculating it is a waste of time.

Title tags and other meta information. The importance of the unique title tags on every page of a website is widely known to everyone who has ever studied SEO basics. Apparently, not so many people have, because I constantly see websites that have the same title tag throughout the whole website (typical for template-based sites, as some templates allow website creators to add only one so-called “website title” while configuring the website). The same applies (even more often) to “keywords” and “description” meta tags. Granted, these tags are less important than the title tags for rankings, but a properly optimised website still should have unique meta tags on each page.

I would like to mention two other meta tags I’m seeing all the time:
(or , , , sometimes all four at once) and
.

I always recommend eliminating them, as they are nothing but useless code bloat. The only meta tags that would make sense - in some special cases - are , , or .
(The examples are given for the HTML 4.01 doctype; in XHTML they would look different.)

Navigation means. Usually, websites have a navigation menu bar on the left or at the top and an alternative “mini sitemap” at the bottom. Some websites use only one or two navigation means mentioned above, some use all three, and sometimes the right column is used for navigation as well. Certain pages can be interlinked from within the content (a good thing as long as the new page doesn’t open in a new window), and last but not least a good site always has a sitemap.

When I review websites, I always pay attention to the spiderability of the links in the main navigation menus. Top and left-side menus (especially those that have dynamic drop-down parts) are often powered with JavaScript. If the code still contains the plain href HTML links with URLs in them, the menu will be spiderable, but if you see JavaScript variables instead of the URLs, or if the location.href command is used, the menu is useless in terms of search engine friendliness and SEO.

Actually, a simple menu with the rollover effect as well as a dynamic menu with drop-down submenus can be implemented using CSS rather than JavaScript. This change of the technology will certainly make the website better for the search engines, but apart from this it will reduce the download time (JavaScript-powered rollover menus are usually built upon graphic images, and the CSS-powered alternatives use text) and improve usability. I always add this recommendation to my SEO reviews.

If the website has breadcrumbs, it should be pointed out as an additional SEO/usability benefit.

Redirects and other HTTP responses. I always check if the website has a 301 redirect from the non-www version of the URL to the www one. If there is no such redirect, I always recommend one.

It’s also important to check what kind of an HTTP response non-existent pages return. It should always be a 404 (with a custom 404 page shown in the browser; it’s permitted to use the site map or the home page as the custom 404 page). This server header checker is very good for checking HTTP responses: user-friendly and reliable.

The code. I always check the code for validity using the W3C validator (I don’t trust browser plugins). If the code is not valid, I recommend fixing all the errors. Other code-related issues are these: table-free layouts are better than table-based; for table-based layouts the number of nested tables should be as small as possible; JavaScript functions (where they can’t be eliminated) and CSS styles should be moved to separate .js and .css files to avoid bloating the HTML page itself. XHTML 1.0 Transitional is better than HTML 4.01 Transitional, but XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1 are better still.

And of course, no frames!

More on internal linking. All internal links pointing to the home page should be linked to the root (http://www.domainname.com/ rather than http://www.domainname.com/index.html). The same rule applies to subfolders (link to http://www.domainname.com/folder/ rather than http://www.domainname.com/folder/index.php). Unfortunately, I have yet to review the first site that follows this rule; even some well known SEO practitioners are guilty of breaking it.

URLs. If the site is built upon dynamic URLs, I always recommend at least considering switching to static URLs or reduce the number of parameters, if possible. Granted, dynamic URLs can get crawled, but they show Google Supplemental Results more often than do static URLs, are more difficult to control via the robots.txt file and blur the hierarchy of the website. Static URLs with subfolders (or pseudo-subfolders) allow us to make the hierarchy of our websites more obvious, besides, we can from time to time name a page after an important keyword or two (separated by a hyphen). All these factors help with SEO to some extent.

Last but not least, I look at the overall number of indexed pages in Google, Yahoo! and MSN (Live) and compare these numbers with the size of the site.

The off-site factors

This usually means links. I do look briefly into links, and use the Yahoo! search engine for this purpose, because Google shows only a tiny part of all links, and MSN has disabled this functionality altogether. The linkdomain:http://www.domainname.com/ command gives us some ideas of the backlinks of the website. The overall number is usually highly exaggerated, but the correlation of this number with the age of the site gives me ideas on the history of the site. The quality of the backlinks is important too. If I see that all links come from a bunch of forum threads, I know at once that they don’t add much to the site’s authority. One link from the Yahoo! Directory could do more for this purpose than two hundred links from forum signatures.

I look at the age of the site (not in the whois records, because the date of the domain registration and the date of the first upload of the website can be far apart). I look at the copyright notice, and if there is none, just ask the website owner when the site was uploaded.

We know that Google looks at historical data (and even has registered a patent for it). Should we assume that they use this data to calculate the average amount of links acquired by the site every year? Or every month? It does make sense. My own experience tells me that old websites that have accumulated a decent number of links (mostly, natural links) do quite well, but old domains with too few links perform in Google even worse than relatively new websites. The same applies to websites that haven’t added new content pages in years. Even a quick and aggressive link building campaign won’t improve the situation at once; it will take months before Google realises that the site in question has been revived.

Anyway, quick and aggressive link campaigns are a thing of the past. The engines now look for naturally developed great resources. That’s why the main purpose of a good SEO review is to help the website owner to turn the website into a resource as close to “great” as possible.

It’s important to look into the backlink patterns of the website. If most backlinks come from websites belonging to the same owner and heavily cross-linked with each other, the site is asking for a severe ranking penalty. Such things should be pointed out to the owner - urgently.

What else?

Of course, I briefly review the websites for the most obvious kinds of SEO spam. The procedure is described in detail in this article; the only thing that has changed since 2005 is the Supplemental Results. These days, if a website is showing a lot of Supplemental Results in Google, it doesn’t mean an approaching penalty for spam anymore. It often happens to innocent sites.

Often, in order to discover doorway pages on a site you are reviewing, you will need to ask for an FTP access to it.

Things I don’t include

There are certain things I don’t include in the SEO review. One of them is Google PageRank, which has become so weird and deceptive that there is almost no point in looking at it, except in some special cases. It is still somehow correlated with the overall link authority of the site, but the correlation is very weak, and the PR itself has no direct affect on rankings.

Alexa Rank. It is supposed to show which sites have more visitors. Actually, it shows which sites have more visitors with the Alexa Toolbar installed on their computers. Alexa is capable of collecting the data about visitors only when the visitors already have their toolbar. How many people know that this toolbar exists, let alone install it? Not many. This alone makes Alexa Rank a worthless parameter.

Current rankings. No, I’m not saying that the rankings are unimportant. I never include them in the SEO report because they can change tomorrow and also because the client can be on a different datacentre and see a completely different picture. The rankings are affected by many other factors, like, for example, the TLD of the search engine (compare what you see on Google.com with what you will find on Google.co.uk), or the language of the interface. Besides, the choice of keywords used at the time of the primary SEO review can be faulty, because the thorough and deep keyword research is a separate task and is often done after the review. And finally, most of the tools that check rankings violate the TOS of the search engines; those that use legitimate APIs often supply very wrong information if you compare their data with the results you actually see in the SERPs.

The review is done to discover (and hopefully, fix) the fundamental problems of every particular website and for this purpose the ranking report does nothing.

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by Irina Ponomareva joined Magic Web Solutions ltd.

Interview: Josh Stylman of Reprise Media

2008-09-11T04:10:00.000-07:00

When I was preparing up the various interviews lately, Josh Stylman was one of the individuals who I knew would make an interesting contribution. I’d known of Josh for quite a while; lots of friends hold him in very high regard, but we’d only actually met within the year, in relation to Enquisite. Ten days ago or so, it was announced that his firm Reprise Media, had been sold to InterPublic. Over this past weekend, Josh was kind enough to send me his answers to the interview questions. They are extremely interesting, and a lot of what he writes is both common sense as well as wise.

Q. Josh, how long have you been working with Internet Marketing ?

13 years.

Q. What’s been your favorite organic technique that you can no longer use due to algorithmic changes at Google?

None. Any good white hat SEO will tell you that by subscribing to methods that are totally above board, and approved by the search engines, you are never subject to algorithm chasing. The SEO’s that are always looking for the latest edge (i.e.: trick) will need to redeploy a new SEO strategy every time the engines update their algorithms. I’m exhausted just thinking about that.

Q. Has Google (or any other engine) ever made an algorithm change which made you very happy?

I don’t know if this is an algorithm change, but it’s nice to see that Google now explicitly recommends excluding website search results from search engines – this is a recommendation that we’ve been making to our customers for years.

Q. If you could get each of the search engines to each answer just one question about their algorithms, what would it be?

I’m not a mathematician, so this question is probably wasted on me. There are some other folks in my firm that would love to pick their brains for hours.

Q. Why analytics are important to you?

Web analytics are the underpinning of everything we do, in both organic – and paid – search. They help us determine testing strategies and are the ultimate measure of success. If you’re not measuring, then you’re just guessing.

a. how often do you look at them?

Our analysts “look” at the stats every day, but that doesn’t mean we’re reacting to them quite as often. Testing strategies are for the longterm. It is important to keep your eye on the data regularly though.

b. how do you suggest your clients use them?

We impose that our customers use analytics to develop KPI’s so that internally and externally, their business goals are clear. Far too many people spend time obsessing about ranking reports, when the absolute rank isn’t what’s critical – what is important, is moving the needle on business goals.

Q. What do you see as being the biggest change coming to the search industry over the next 18 months?

The biggest changes are dynamic reply pages that are starting to be deployed around personalization and vertical search. Search engine optimization will become increasingly complex, as pages are different for individual people based upon their history, preferences, etc. Again, it’s about delivering value, so the core model won’t change. Some of the tactics will though.

Q. What’s one tip you give to all new clients about Internet Marketing?

Deliver good content, don’t try to outsmart anyone and realize it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Oh yeah, measure everything.

Thanks Josh,

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By Richard Zwicky is the CEO of Enquisite Search Metrics.

Web Hit Or Miss - Online Advertising in the UK

2008-09-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

David Gent queries the hype surrounding the advance of online advertising in the UK

Advertising spend on the internet has now overtaken that on radio, we are told, and it won’t be long before it leaves behind national press, then television as the nation’s favourite marketing medium. If we are to believe the hype, and hype there certainly is, we’ll soon be spending more time online than watching TV, ‘silver surfers’ are eschewing traditional retirement activities like gardening for the web, and the only media predicted to grow their audiences in the near future are the internet and, somewhat unaccountably, radio.
When you realise that last finding comes from an online poll amongst heavy internet users and radio listeners by advertising bodies with vested interests, that the Office of National Statistics reports this month that there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm amongst the over 65’s for internet usage (just 15%), and that reliable sources such as the Government, BARB, the BBC and the IPA all report that TV is still our most popular leisure pursuit, watching an average 4 hours per day, then you might conclude these flattering online figures are somewhat skewed. As one American pundit observes ‘People don’t believe all the hype, they just go home and watch television, as always’.
Nevertheless, the national press, busily polishing up their online versions, and the broadcast news seem willing to accept such statistics without applying normal journalistic standards, reporting excitedly on the next advance of the internet and recording that ‘millions of people’ are watching a webcam of cheeses ripening online (as if). Frightened of missing out on ‘the next big thing’ and searching as always for a marketing magic bullet, many board directors are investing heavily in their internet presence, transferring budgets from offline to online without necessarily applying the same rigorous ROI measures and neglecting proven media channels in favour of sexy new technology.
Then when the web doesn’t prove as self-sustaining and business-building as hoped, they blame this on their own lack of technical knowledge, feeling that if everyone else makes it work, why can’t they? They overlook, perhaps, the fact that there are already more than 110 million websites in the UK alone, with a further 10 million going online annually, and that the average well-travelled web page looks like a racing driver’s overalls, with its confusing mix of pop-ups, banner ads and video streams. So you have to accept this is an extremely competitive channel of communication, where you cannot simply ‘set out your stall’, pay for some click-through advertising and wait for the world to beat a path to your electronic doorway. You need to throw something else into the media mix to make your online investment work. Why else, despite their ubiquitous web presence, would Google and eBay choose to advertise on TV, if not to drive traffic that they cannot generate solely online?
A central shortcoming of online marketing is the lack of agreed, universal and independently- audited web traffic measures. With direct mail you have postcode data and CPR metrics, with press and radio there are regularly-updated circulation and listenership figures, whilst the independent BARB TV panel not only provides reliable ratings for programming, it also measures viewers for every single advertising spot, a unique capability. On the other hand, take website ‘hits’, the term universally used by the popular press and web amateurs everywhere. For years, I suspect web designers, engineers and masters have been sniggering behind our backs, because they know a web ‘hit’ simply describes a single request for a server to send a file and that every element on a web page (text, graphics, images, sound) generates yet another hit. Which means that your newly redeveloped home page, with its extra content and features, will instantly trigger ten or twenty times more hits, without necessarily attracting a single extra visitor (although your web designer probably won’t reveal that).
The number of unique site visitors and page impressions are more useful measures, although these can be exaggerated by search engine robots checking out your site (there are hundreds apparently), users who land on a page then leave immediately, as well as people and computers that generate fraudulent and invalid clicks for various nefarious reasons. In fact, ‘click fraud’ is already such a concern in the States, reportedly costing online advertisers up to $800 million annually, that almost a third have already decreased their online spend, with a further ten per cent planning to do so unless search-ad publishers can arrive at a proper solution. Moreover, at a recent search engine strategy conference, participants reported experiencing fraudulent click rates of 20-40%, threatening the entire paid search industry, although Google insists invalid clicks remain below 10 per cent. The obvious solution is for independent auditors, with no motif for under or over valuing click fraud rates, to provide an audience measurement system, just like BARB, RAJAR and ABC in fact.

That aside, the £2 billion online adspend attributed to the UK market seems, to an old marketing man like me, to be predominantly below-the-line, much like direct mail and sales promotions, with search advertising accounting for a massive 58%, three quarters of that on Google. Nielsen research suggests the top 100 online advertisers actually spent some £260 million on display ads only, excluding search and affiliate marketing and website building costs, although the IAB puts this higher at £450 million. Whatever, it is salutary to note that the internet’s biggest presence, YouTube, which attracts 133.5 million visitors worldwide, only sold around $15 million of advertising last year, putting ITV’s UK-only ad revenue of £1.3 billion into some context.

Then there is the question of whether the internet is a marketing medium at all, but an enabling technology, like printing, broadcasting or telephony. Just as you wouldn’t attribute every telephone call your business receives to the Yellow Pages, it’s shortsighted to allocate every website hit to your online marketing strategy. Every marketing tool you use, be it sales leaflets, PR, e-shots, press ads or TV commercials, will undoubtedly feature your corporate web address for channelling further enquiries and it’s vital to set up systems for identifying the source of online traffic, to determine whether it’s click-through activity, brand name searching, online magazines and directories, or just keying in your url. Otherwise, the online cost-per-response metrics are going to be unduly favourable, just like bus backs are often disproportionately mentioned in customer surveys, simply because they were the last ads seen on the journey to the shops. Using coded ‘landing page’ domains like .com/tv or .co.uk/radio is one solution, although human nature being what it is, most people will just enter the standard web address and not the all-important suffix; there are, however, tracking systems that provide more sophisticated web visitor data than your standard server log, which means the tools are available for more rigorous ROI analysis, should you choose.
If all this suggests that I am something of a techno-luddite, trying to hold back the inevitable online tide, then I’m not. We have had a web presence since the earliest days, when newcomers to the net used to wave to each other, and since then have invested, with a greater or lesser degree of success, in trickier graphics, new websites, search engine optimisation, online directories (don’t ask), paid search, a blog site, e-shots, even banner ads, but not yet pop-ups or video streaming (perhaps a bit too much for B2B). It’s just that I find the unremitting hype and hoopla surrounding the online advertising industry a little too self-serving; if you don’t believe me, search for ‘online adspend’ (Did you mean online ad spend?) on Google and you’ll find pages and pages of the stuff.

There’s no doubt, the internet is a valuable marketing channel, among its many other attributes, but building a brand, even an online-only brand, on the web alone is a costly and I suspect frustrating experience, because so often it doesn’t work. The golden rule is to ensure consumers or trade customers will recognise your brand name from the offline world, so that you have standout from the competition, which means paying equal attention to less glamorous, yet well-honed marketing techniques, be they trade PR and press ads, direct marketing, radio and TV advertising, even good old exhibitions. Get the offline and online marketing mix right and you’re talking! (Postscript: Google has just announced a deal in the US, designed to encourage its online clients to advertise on radio as well. Great minds eh?)

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by David Gent

Mobile Search Site Creation and Optimization

2008-09-09T04:07:00.000-07:00

This presentation provided a fascinating glimpse into the young realm of mobile site creation, compliance and optimization. I have a lot of information to work with here so to make this article a little more digestible I have broken it into two parts; one is the site creation and the second is the site optimization.
Mobile Website Design & Creation
During this presentation two very different lines of thought were noted regarding the best method for creating a mobile website, one from Cindy Krum and the other from Rachel Pasqua.

> Cindy Krum’s Presentation
Cindy Krum felt strongly that an existing website should pull double-duty as both the wired and the mobile version by using CSS to provide an alternative, mobile friendly version shown only to mobile users.
Cindy provided some great tips on how to create a hybrid mobile/wired website:

Ensure your website is 100% W3C XHTML compliant because mobile browsers are completely unforgiving when it comes to improper coding.
Follow strict XHTML accessibility guidelines to provide the best quality product for both wired, mobile, and those that require accessibility (i.e. the blind). She also noted that by following accessibility requirements any images that do not show up on the mobile browser will be defined in text format – a nice backup.
Avoid unnecessary code to minimize download times.
Ensure the site uses CSS to control content – this is critical to ensure the mobile version can have reorganized placement of content. (i.e. the menu might be at the bottom vs. the top)
Use external CSS files to provide maximum flexibility such as the ability to specify a different style sheet for each mobile browser.
Use the LINK element to attach style sheets because it is a much friendlier format for mobile browsers.
Use multiple style sheets. The minimum would be a style sheet called “screen” for regular wired visitors and a second style sheet (provided below the first) called “handheld”.
Use “display: none” to hide elements in either rendering. This is useful if you have page elements you do not want to appear to mobile users or vice versa. Using this method of hiding content is part of what makes Cindy’s hybrid approach feasible of using a single website for both viewing technologies (handheld, and wired).
These headers will help you identify the mobile device being used to access the content. HTTP User-Agent headers, HTTP Accept Headers, and UAProf.
Use the appropriate MIME type: “text/html” or “application/xhtml+xml”.

> Rachel Pasqua’s Presentation
At the opposite spectrum was Rachel Pasqua who firmly stated that offering your current website to users, reformatted or not, would likely provide a less than desirable user experience. She went on to explain that mobile users should see an entirely different, more time efficient version of your website because such users are task oriented. Rachel put her thoughts into excellent perspective when she stated that mobile search is “not surf media, it’s search media”. She also went on to state that iCrossing decided to proceed with the subdomain concept rather than a separate domain such as a .mobi. In this case their mobile site is located at mobile.icrossing.com; a sensible concept that retained the branding of the top level domain name without having to rebrand a new one (i.e. going with the .mobi version)

Rachel had some interesting metrics and tips to share with the group that were researched at iCrossing using focus groups and other research (sorry I don’t know the source but the report is due to be released soon I hear). Here are a few tidbits that I caught on paper:

Mobile searchers tend to utilize the same search engine they use when they are on their PC.
Only 10% of the estimated 234 million US wireless subscribers are active users of mobile search.
Searchers are task oriented, they tend to want to get their information and get out; mobile surfing is extremely uncommon.

My Take on Hybrid Sites Versus A Separate Mobile Website
Of the two beliefs I felt myself more strongly drawn to the concept of a separate mobile site. Why? I think the maintenance of a hybrid website is bound to be far more difficult because design updates will require designers to think in both realms which is likely to make updates laborious for the average business owner.

> Gregory Markel’s Presentation
Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative LLC, dropped a very intriguing bombshell at the beginning of his discussion when he noted that Google’s Voice Local Search just might take the world of mobile search in an entirely different direction. According to Gregory, his friends and network of mobile enthusiasts have been impressed by the results of using 800-GOOG-411 and conducting a free voice search; the results have been extremely relevant and Google immediately connects the user to their preferred result by phone. After this bombshell had sunk in, he went on to discuss many of the points already mentioned by Cindy but he had a few highlights definitely worth mentioning including this valuable tip: get into Google local for your area so that you can be found on Google’s Voice Local Search, it is free and easy to do. (Note, I wrote an article on how to do this a few months back called: Have Your Company Listed Free in Google Maps). Unfortunately, Google Voice Local Search is experimental and only available in the United States.

Highlights from Markel:

Mobile search adoption has been slower in the US than expected at only 19%
An excellent source of mobile statistics is the self-described authority on mobile metrics, MMetrics.com.
When users conduct searches, they are more likely to search using 2 or a maximum of 3 words.
Nokia has decided to try to simplify the process of searching by integrating it into its future line of cell phones.
Mobile devices require ultimate simplicity to ensure compatibility across the vast number of proprietary mobile browsers available.

Part 2: Mobile Site Optimization

The question remains; how should you optimize a mobile web page? All of the presenters provided tips, but Cindy Krum’s presentation provided the majority of information. I listed a blend of the tips from all presenters below:
1. Make certain that no information is located more than 3 clicks from the home page
2. Organize the page so the main content appears first on the page followed by the navigation. For most this will seem counter intuitive, but by laying out the mobile page in this manner mobile users will see the content they want faster and thus know they are on a different page; versus seeing the same navigation listing again if the navigation was at the top – which would look the same across all pages. In addition, mobile users want to avoid scrolling as much as possible so having the content first will offer better visitor retention.
3. Organize your navigation in the most logical fashion. In other words, place what is likely to be the most popular buttons first using text links, followed by the others in order. In addition, make certain to word the buttons clearly and succinctly to use as little screen real estate as possible while applying good call to action principles.
4. Offer a sitemap so that spiders and users alike can quickly navigate the mobile site if need be.
5. Keep the filenames for the mobile pages short and keyword rich.
6. Do not use pop-ups, frames or Flash because these are likely to block mobile browsers, not just search engine spiders.
7. Optimize mobile pages for short keyword phrases since mobile users tend search using up to three words in a single phrase.
8. Rely only on the textual content, not on images, objects or scripts because they may not appear on handheld browsers.
9. Minimize file size for faster content loading.
10. Use optimized heading tags wherever appropriate. Just like standard web pages, properly optimized Heading Tags play a significant role in search engine algorithms.
11. Test and validate your mobile website to ensure maximum effectiveness for both users and spiders alike. Here are some options that Cindy Klum provided in her presentation:

Simulators: Skweezer, Google,

Validators: .Mobi Validator, W3C Mobile Web Validator
12. Conduct a traditional link building campaign specifically for your mobile website. Do this by submitting to local and mobile directories and getting links from other mobile websites. Also, purchase text links from other mobile and traditional websites.
13. Announce to the world that your mobile website now exists through press releases. This will add bonus backlinks to your website.
14. Offer social book marking and tagging functionality to your mobile website.
15. When a user clicks on one of these phone numbers their mobile phone will immediately connect them to the number.Include your main website address in the footer of the mobile page and make your phone numbers clickable using the following sample syntax:

< href="”tel:2503851190″">250-385-1190< /a >
Note: eliminate spacing immediately beside brackets for the code to work.
Other Tips from the Mobile Optimization PanelAmidst discussion and the question and answer period there were a few great points that I felt were worth adding to this summary:
- If you choose not to use a .mobi domain as your primary address for the mobile website then you should still purchase the domain and forward traffic to the alternate address. In this way, you will at least protect your brand. As an added note, I would strongly recommend using a 301 redirect from the .mobi to the main address if you decide to follow this path.
- Google offers a transcoding system that will attempt to change any website into a mobile website automatically. It was universally agreed on the panel that depending on transcoding to provide your mobile users with a mobile-friendly website is a very bad idea.
- According to Gregory Markel, approximately 17% of mobile traffic comes from users navigating directly to a URL. As a result, it is strongly recommended that your mobile URL is very simple to remember and easily typed in (no too long or difficult to spell).
- The current best source for mobile user statistics is http://www.mmetrics.com/
- Google produced a (PDF) Mobile Search Behavior study that Gregory Markel mentioned was an excellent source of information.

I will end this synopsis with an apt quote that Rachel Pasqua began her presentation with:
“… it’s really not a matter IF the mobile phone will become the dominant internet platform any more but WHEN…” - Yahoo! analyst Russell Beattie

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by Ross Dunn is founder and CEO of StepForth Search Engine Placement.

Your Competition Now Works for Google

2008-09-08T04:05:00.000-07:00

Still think you can fool Google with your unnatural links? I’m talking about link exchanges, link farms, hidden links, and now even paid links. Google’s Matt Cutts recently wrote about Google’s plan to catch you. You and I know it as vigilantism.

Prior to the Google era search engines were mediocre at best, looking at on page factors only which could easily be manipulated and spammed. These factors included metadata (especially the keyphrase tag) and the number of times a search term appeared on a page.
Those days are long gone. With the advent of Google, the concept of link popularity became tantamount to the determination of the relevance of a page to a specific search query. But what is Google looking for when it comes to links?
The answer is natural, one way, inbound links from trusted sites to unique, original, useful, informative, or educational content, with the anchor text of the link containing keyphrases relevant to your site.. The answer may also be found in what they do not want: link farms, link exchanges, hidden links and paid links. And guess who they have watching you? Your enemy.
Cutts wrote in his blog this week the following:
“I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:
- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight. - Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.
As far as the details, it can be pretty short. Something like “Example.com is selling links; here’s a page on example.com that demonstrates that” or “www.shadyseo.com is buying links. You can see the paid links on www.example.com/path/page.html” is all you need to mention. That will be enough for Google to start testing out some new techniques we’ve got — thanks!”
Whoa! Google is now asking your competition to report you if you buy or sell links. Interesting, isn’t it, when Google’s massively popular AdWords program is all about paid links. Conspiracy theorists will tell you that Google is trying to take over and control all paid advertising on the Internet, worldwide. But I digress. The point is that Google is asking your competition to report you if you buy or sell links. Period.
So what to do? Create the kind of links that Google wants. There is only one way to do this, and that is through the regular creation of unique content. Here is what you do:
1) Set up a blog (blogger.com is owned by Google and a great one to use as they crawl all of their blogs regularly)

2) Post content in the form of articles

3) Syndicate those articles through article distribution sites (do a search for “article distribution” to find these sites), use your keyphrases within anchor text links back to your site (these links are usually included in an about the author section, but can be in the article body as well)

4) Get active in social bookmarking and social media optimization, sites such as digg, furl, and del.icio.us to name a few.
Those four simple steps are all it takes to conduct an effective link building campaign that won’t get you into trouble.

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by Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks SEO

Freeware SEO Tools for the DIY Webmaster

2008-09-07T04:03:00.000-07:00

One of the fun things about publishing a newsletter like SiteProNews is the research that goes into each issue. For more than 6 years, we have been finding and highlighting freeware tools and applications that can make the DIY (do-it-yourself) webmaster’s job a little easier. If you’ve been fixated on the articles in SPN and missed our App of the Day selections, you can find the 900+, mostly freeware programs, filed in 12 major categories at our WebMaster Tools Directory.

The focus of this article, however, will be on some of the freeware tools that are available to you to use for SEO purposes. There are a fairly large number of these type of tools out there so Part 1 of this article will líst keyword, sitemap and ranking tools and Part 2 will look at meta tag generators, link popularity apps, link checkers and general SEO tools.

Keyword Tools

1. Good Keywords v2.01 (595 KB) finds the best keywords for your web pages. Features include Keyword Suggestions, Phrase Builder, Keyword Organizer, Misspelled Words, and Site and Link Popularity Finder. For Windows 95/ 98/ 2000/ NT/ XP.

2. Golden Phrases 1.0.3 (391 KB) is a analyzing utility that scans specified log files to retrieve all search phrases used by your visitors to find your website through search engines. It gathers search phrase statistics and determines the position of your site on search engines for every phrase. Its unique “Perspectivity rating” technology also allows you to find which keyphrases were not used. For Windows Windows 95/ 98/ Me/ NT/ 2000/ XP/ 2003.

3. PPC Keyword Generator (1.1 MB) is a powerful keyphrase permutator/generator. Generate 100s of keyphrases in seconds, remove duplicate keyphrases automatically, define per-keyphrase custom CPC/URLs and import/export. For Windows 98 and above.

4. Hixus Keyword Inventor 1.0 (679 KB) is a SEO and keyword popularity analysis front-end for the the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Speeds up the process of finding popular keywords. For Windows 98/ ME/ NT4.x/ XP/ 2000.

5. e3KWDCheck 2.5b (920 KB) is a lightweight and fast SEO tool for analyzing keyword density within text documents. It can also retrieve and analyze online web documents using the built-in address bar. For Windows 95/ 98/ 2000/ NT/ ME/ XP.

6. Get Keywords 1.0 (289 KB) is a small program that finds keywords in files and then creates an optimized web page using selected keywords. Features include automatic words search, add/remove keywords options, web page creation and preview, etc. For Windows 98 and above.

7. Keyword Digger 1.0 (50 KB) is a simple tool designed to search Overture for all keywords people entered during the previous month. Provides the number of times a keyword was searched and up to 100 different variations for that term. For Windows 9x/ Me/ NT/ 2000/ XP.

8. AnalogX Keyword Extractor v1.03 (214 KB) extracts keywords from a webpage, and then sorts and indexes them based on their usage and position. Once indexed, you can adjust search-engine specific weighting factors and keyword criteria to get the best possible view of how a search engine sees your site. An older program but still useful. For Windows 95/ 98/ 2000/ NT/ XP.

SiteMap Generators

1. eXactMapper Lite 1.2 (1.1 MB) automates the process of creating professional site maps. It offers three different customizable html/dhtml site map styles, including a UL líst, static tree and an index page. For Windows 95/ 98/ ME/ NT/ 2000.

2. SiteMapBuilder.NET 1.5 (1.4 MB) allows you to create a Google XML SiteMap or text based sitemap. It also checks for URL errors. For Windows XP/ 2000/ 2003. Also requires .NET Framework.

3. Sitemap Creator (783 KB) is a sitemap creator that exports a directory structure to an html file. Does not read websites online. For all Windows versions.

4. Sitemap 4 traffíc (360 KB) can build a Google or html sitemap. It also checks for broken links and backs up website files. For Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. Requires .Net Framework 1.1 or higher and Internet Explorer 6+. Nice program but might have some bugs.

Ranking Tools

1. Rank Tracker 1.4.2 (5.0 MB) is a useful tool for checking the keyword rank of websites, using search engine results from Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can create multiple projects with unlimited keywords and track changes and progress over time. Supports Google and Yahoo API login, if needed. For Windows 98/ Me/ NT/ 2000/ XP/ Mac/ Linux. Java Runtime Environment (JRE) Version 1.4.

2. WebCEO 6.5 (22 MB) is a comprehensive SEO program that provides much more than search engine rankings. This is the freeware edition. Requires a learning curve but is worth the effort. For Windows NT4/ 2000/ XP.

3. PaRaMeter 1.2 (1.0 MB) is a bulk Google PageRank™ checking and monitoring tool. Easily find the page rank of many pages with one clíck. For Windows 9X/ 2000/ XP.

4. M6.net PageRank Checker (515 KB) is another simple, bulk Google PageRank™ checker. For Windows 98/ ME/ NT/ XP/ 2000.

The various freeware tools listed above are the best that we have come across in the last 6 years. If you are aware of similar tools that are as good or better, let us know and we’ll do a follow-up article with your recommendations.

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by Mel Strocen is CEO of the Jayde Online Network of websites and founder of the Independent Search Engine & Directory Network.

Google’s Intentions for Apps and Future Acquisitions

2008-09-06T04:02:00.000-07:00

Since Google began ruling the realm of Internet search it has become a major figure in my professional life. As a result, whenever an interview with a key figure of Google is posted I try not to miss it. To that end, John Battelle recently interviewed Google CEO, Eric Schmidt at the Web 2.0 Expo and posed some questions that have been tugging at my imagination lately. I watched the video over at WebProNews and jotted down some of my favorite points in the interview - I did the work, I might as well share it!

Please note that unlike the answers from Eric, the questions are not quotations but are similar to the question asked by John Battelle.

QUESTION A: With the latest introduction of a free online presentation tool Google has rounded off a nice office-like set of applications. Is this meant to compete with Microsoft Office?

Eric Schmidt:
“We don’t think so and the reason is it does not have all of the functionality nor is it intended to have all of the functionality of products like Microsoft Office. This is really a different way of managing information. It’s casual, it’s sharing. It seems to be a better fit to how people use the web and we think it is an example of one of the application categories on a web 2.0 framework
that we think will be very very successful. And my guess is that there are many companies represented in the room that are building products like this or other variants of this that are using this emergent architecture. You know, this whole story about Web 2.0, which I view is a
marketing term, is really an architectural transition from an older architecture to this new web based architecture and that transition which I think is what everyone in the room is a part of, is a fundamental computer architectural transition. Google is one of the companies that is benefiting from it, there are many others.”

John Battelle then responds incredulously by stating that Google’s toolset is bound to be “exceedingly threatening to Microsoft”.

Eric Schmidt:
“Well I am sure Microsoft will have a response. They actually have a set of web-based products which they can talk about. The important point here is that for people who are using products that are on the web who need presentation access and sharing”… “they are going to use this or something like this. And I think this is a testament to the strength of web 2.0.”

QUESTION B: What areas of technology is Google interested in focusing on into the future? Note: John essentially asked Eric what areas Google might be pursuing acquisitions in. Eric, with caution required rewording and responded with the following.

The 1st noted area of acquisition interest for Google
Eric Schmidt:
“The biggest growth areas are clearly going to be the mobile space; mobile, mobile, mobile. It is the easiest way to understand it. And the reason is that people treat their mobile phones as an extension of their persons and those mobile phones are very personal, very portable, and having GPS information in them now and this next generation of wireless networks, the 3G and eventually the 4G networks will have tremendous power. So if you look at the mobile space it is probably the biggest wide open space that quite a few interesting companies that we could partner with, and I won’t say beyond that, which are building either applications or advertising services that use the targeting that is capable in mobile.”

The 2nd noted area of acquisition interest for Google
Eric Schmidt:
“Another area is in the local space, most of the transactions we do in advertising are really good for local products. Go down a street to buy a car, go down a street to go shopping… that kind of thing. And most search engines”…”don’t fully take advantage of the local information that is inherent in the web. That is another big opportunity. There are quite a few companies that have figured out how to mine, target, or advertise in a local context.”

Wrapping Up
Other questions were certainly asked and I highly recommend watching the interview. That said, I was mostly intrigued by the quotes I placed because they show some indication of Google’s future intentions. Nothing was earth shattering. After all, it is no secret that Google Apps is thinly veiled as a competitor Microsoft Office. That is at least for users only requiring basic technology, however, the launch of a presentation application really makes any denial of competitiveness humorous.

Next we come to areas of interest for Google. “Mobile, mobile, mobile” certainly stood out as confirmation that getting into the mobile web scene is a smart move; do it now before everyone else does. Early adopters of mobile will be in a very good position once it catches on. Furthermore, the interest in local search is in perfect sync with Google’s desire to provide an enhanced regional experience. After all, the more local their search is, the more profits they can make since advertisers in every region will have their own top 10 listing to bid on. Exponential profit increases must sound mighty tempting to Google.

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by Ross Dunn is founder and CEO of StepForth Search Engine Placement.

Personalization and the Death of SEO

2008-09-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

… as we know it. On February 2, 2007 Google launched its big push into personalized search results. This was, to many, a dark day as SEO’s scrambled to determine exactly what this meant for the industry and for our clients. Different results showing up for different people? What are ranking reports if what you see differs from what I see? Who’s right? And of course, how do I prove it?

I’ll admit it; my first thoughts at the launch of personalization were not necessarily along the most positive tangents. Upon further reflection (and much of it) and after wading through seven patents to get a better feel for the variables and what they mean (and might mean down the road) I came to one conclusion, coincidentally the same conclusion I consistently come to after each major algorithm update or search technology advancement: Anything that improves the search experience improves the SEO industry. This may seem an obvious statement but when the search engines (especially Google) throw a curve ball at us, one cannot help but worry.

This article will focus on two tangents, what is personalization and how will the SEO industry evolve to accommodation this new feature? The answer to the later is quite clear once one understands how personalized results are created.

What Is Personalization?

The most basic explanation of personalization is that it a system by which the search engines are able to extract patterns from previous search behavior and adjust present and future search results based on “learned” preferences. The simplest example can be found in the repeated selection of a single site when it appears in the search results. Ego drives many (present company included) to click on their own site when it shows up in the search results. Once the site is selected multiple times it will rise in the results when the same or a similar search is run again by the same user. Google has thus learned that you like this site and is now making it easier to get to it again.

What we can see from the patents that are out there indicate that personalization is going to go MUCH further than this and get far more sophisticated. Like any new technology, it is now in its first stages and as more data can be collected and more time put into tweaking the way personalized results are created and displayed the more factors they will be looking at. The numbers of potential factors, as with any algorithm, are virtually endless in theory however there are some key factors that come up repeatedly in the patents that are sure to hold weight as personalization evolves. They are:

Your personal search history. What you look for and the sites/ads that you select will affect the results you receive when you search. Right now this seems to primarily be restricted to increasing the position of a site that is selected multiple times when it appears in a set of search engine result however as this technology evolves your past behaviors and the types of sites you select in the results will surely be applied to new searches, increasing the positions of sites that have similar characteristics to ones you have selected in the past for completely different queries.

Your behavior on a selected site. What you do on a site and how long it takes you to return to the search engine is or soon will be a factor. The search engines have clearly stated that their main goal is to deliver a positive experience to their users. The more readily a searcher finds the information they are looking for in a set of results, the better the experience and thus, the more likely that searcher is to continue to use that engine. If Google discovers that when a visitor lands on a site they are likely to stay for only a couple of seconds then that site can reasonably be considered less relevant for a specific query than one who’s visitor’s remain on their site for a minute or two. The former site will thus lose position for the phrase and the later will increase. All indications are that if this is the case for a single phrase, that the rankings for other phrases the site ranks for will not be affected however I would speculate that if visitors react poorly to a site for multiple phrases, that the value of the site as a whole will be reduced and the rankings will be affected globally.

Your location. Especially important for mobile search but sure to gain importance for specific, localized phrases – your business location relative to the searcher will gain importance. A search for a phrase such as “seo services” is likely to be unaffected by such factors (unless the searcher has a past history of selecting sites from his/her own region for multiple phrases) however if a searcher searches for “pizza victoria” and the engine is able to pick up that the searcher is from Victoria, Texas and not Victoria, BC those sites that promote a pizza restaurant in Victoria, Texas will be increased in the results.

The patterns of similar searchers. And now it gets even more complex. It does not appear that at this time the search engines are yet grouping users together to find common search patterns however there are multiple references in their patent applications that Google will be looking for ways to group users together by search patters, interests, or memberships in communities to provide personalized results based on what others with similar interested have selected. For example, if I as a searcher am looking for blue widgets and after looking at a number sites I spend a few minutes on site xyz.com and you do the same and then a couple days later I am looking for green gromits the search engine will reference your search patterns. If you have looked for green gromits in the past the engine will use your experience (i.e. which sites did you visit and for how long) to affect my rankings based on our past similar behavior. Now, when we’re dealing with just two people searching there isn’t a lot of information to affect the rakings however when the engines are looking at global rules across millions of searchers they are able to determine which types of searchers are selecting which types of results by grouping users with similar interests/patterns together and increasing the position of those sites that the majority of the group has found most desirable.

The engines can also use memberships in communities and bookmarking similarities to establish common interests and patterns to increase and decrease a site’s position for specific phrases or to raise the sites value as a whole.

Your value as a visitor. A colleague of mine and a brilliant reporter on the industry, Jim Hedger brought a point to my attention that snuck past me the first time I read it but which now jumps out as both interesting and important. An engine can (and likely will) assign users with their own PageRank. What this basically translates into is a value that your vote will have when you visit a site and its effect on the overall results of the many. If Google decides that I am a lack-luster searcher and seem to select sites that others with similar interests do not then my personal PageRank will be decreases and thus, the sites I visit will be given less of a boost than those of a user whose selected sites match those that others find favorable. That user will then receive an increase in their personal PageRank as their voting power will be deemed higher than others and their decisions more reflective of the most-desired-results.

As noted, there are a wide array of factors covered in the patents and only through research, testing, watching and waiting will we discover the true nature of the evolution of this technology. This doesn’t mean that all we can do is sit and wait. There will be sites that do well as personalization evolves and sites that do not. So what do you do to help hedge your bets and increase your chances of being on the right side of the winners-losers table?

How Will The SEO Industry Evolve?

As with any evolution in the search engine algorithms, the addition of personalization into the equations means that the community needs to adjust what we’re doing and how we rank websites. This has ramifications for SEO’s and for website owners alike however one of the differences here compared to past changes is that some of the changes will affect only one of the two groups. Usually what affects SEO’s will affect the website owner and vice-versa. This is not necessarily the case with personalization.

Let us take for example a scenario in which algorithmic updates outside of the personalization realm affect the site in a negative manner but at the same time changes from within the personalization realm affect the site positively. This would result in a scenario where the global results would show decreases in rankings but where members of communities, regions or other relevant groupings would find the site appearing higher in their results. A ranking report would show decreases but a traffic and conversion report may well show increases due to the site appearing high to users who are likely searching for the type of information your site provides. This is where much of the concern and confusion lies in the minds of those offering SEO services.

From this one thing is clear, SEO as we know it will be coming to a slow but sure death. The rules that once applied, those that were universal, will no longer apply. New ways of conducting SEO campaigns need to be developed that don’t just target the universal algorithm but also take into account the factors included in the personalization components.

While currently the effects of personalization have not been widely recognized, this is due in large part to the fact that the majority of search users are not searching Google with the personalization turned on (by remaining signed into a Google service such as AdWords, GMail, Blogger, etc.). This will change. Here are ways that more and more of the search population will be added to those receiving personalized results (note: this is far from all of them and new ways to track user behavior are sure to be developed):

Toolbars added by default to installed browsers on new computers as is the case created in the recent agreement between Google and Dell in May, 2006.
Toolbars being included in browsers such as Firefox as was established in an agreement between the two in August, 2006.
Search engine produced browsers installed by default into mobile phones as was agreement upon in a deal between Google and LG in March, 2007.

Some other factors that are going to increase the number of searchers affected by personalized results:

New methods for tracking visitor behavior developed.
New engines providing personalized results. Yahoo!, with all their social properties, is well positioned to expand into this area and Microsoft, with their control over desktops and browsers, is in a highly superior position in the area of visitor behavior and site selection, even from competing search engines.

Basically we’re heading into a world where more and more people will be receiving personalized results and in which more and more people are being tracked to provide superior sets of data to base group-based personalized results on. So what do we need to plan for and what can SEO’s do to prepare their clients and the websites they optimize to rank highly in the face of personalization? To be sure, new tactics will be developed and resources made available as the technology matures however here are some steps you can take today to help promote high rankings in personalized results. Below you will find them listed based on the criteria we listed above as being measured:

Personal search history. Having a website that ranks for multiple related phrases and which provides valuable content for all of them is a great way to affect a visitor’s search history. If a visitor goes to your site multiple times and remains on your site for a reasonable period of time then your site will be given a boost when future search queries are performed that include your site in the results. As a bonus, this is just a best practice regardless and will provide more high quality traffic in-and-of itself.

Behavior on a selected site. When visitors land on your site, the time they spend there can be tracked by the engine. This means that if your site has stickiness and searchers spend a reasonable amount of time there when it shows up in the results, the rankings will increase for that phrase. Basically, the better designed your site is to provide visitors with the information and experience they are looking for the higher it will show up in the results in future searches. The only tip I will give here on how to accomplish this is to make the information that a searcher is likely looking for when conducting a specific search easy to find. Past this we are getting into a variety of usability and copywriting issues. These are definitely important for SEO and for your site health and will only become more important over time however they could not possibly be covered adequately here. As an added bonus again, changes made to improve the visitor behavior on your website is going to increase conversions and keep the visitor there for longer periods of time.

You also may want to consider adding Google Analytics code to your site. Here I feel it necessary to give a few clarifications regarding some of the common reservations with using Google Analytics. The biggest common concern among web marketers in general is that Google will use the data obtained through Analytics (especially if you are using conversion tracking) to affect bids for those using AdWords at some point down the road. I’m not sure if I entirely believe they would do this however it is definitely within their abilities. They could also adjust the position of your paid add in the results based on how users react to your site once you give them the ability to view how visitors behave. It’s on the tangent that we head into the effects Google Analytics could theoretically have on your organic results. We know that Google wants to provide the best possible experience to their users (even more true in the organic realm than their paid). When you use Google Analytics you are effectively telling them how visitors behave on your site. If their behavior is not positive (low time on site or low page views) then Google could theoretically affect the position of your site in the search results based on this. This is the area that most concerns me personally and relates to this article. My rule of thumb is that it is best to use other analytics tools until you see that your traffic patterns are favorable and then install Analytics. At this point you would actually want Google to see your traffic patterns and visitor behavior.

Your location. While you can’t affect the location of your business or your searchers you can affect how you rank for localized phrases. The tactics here fall into standard SEO tactics, however the first step is outside of the traditional SEO realm and that is to be sure to get your business listed on Google maps. Most of us have seen the map results showing up in the search results. This gives you an opportunity to show up above the natural results for localized phrases or, in future, for generic phrases where the results are based on the searchers position geographically. It’s also a great way to “tell” Google where you’re located so if localization becomes a defining characteristic of a searcher, your site will appear when relevant.

You’ll also want to engage in traditional link building efforts from regionally specific resources such as city-specific business directories, and related business in the area. There have been many great articles written on link building and there is certainly not space here to do it justice.

The patterns of similar searchers. When you know what searchers of specific criteria (such as search phrase) do when they enter your site you need to let the engines themselves know that these searchers like what they see (assuming you’ve already dealt with the behavior points noted above). You need to associate your site with specific communities that you know your visitors are likely to be a part of. You also need to try to get your site added to social bookmarking sites by people who are likely to have common bookmarks with others who may search your targeted phrases or related phrases.

Basically you want to make sure that any connection you can help make between your site, your visitors, and other potential visitors with similar interests or patterns as your past/present visitors is established. This can be done by asking visitors to bookmark you on social bookmarking site by providing links to some of the popular bookmarking sites such as Google Bookmarks and del.icio.us. This will help make bridges between your site and others by people with similar interests. Getting links on industry-specific authority sites is another useful way to tie your site to other quality resources in your industry. To illustrate how Google would view this: if authority site A links to related sites B and C and site D is not linked to by site A Google can assume that if a visitor likes site B then they are more likely to also like site C than the unassociated random site D not linked to by the authority site A.

The value of a visitor. So how to you get visitors that can positively affect the results to visit your site? While there is no definitive answer to this question there are a couple actions you can take to hedge your bets. The first is sheer numbers. Not necessarily the most scientific of answers but effective nonetheless. If you have 1000 visitors to your site your odds that you have visitors who have a high degree of PageRank assigned to them are much higher than if your site only receives 50 visitors. Ranking for multiple phrases and pulling in traffic from social bookmarking sites and authority communities are great ways to help increase your visitor numbers from people interested in the topic of your site.

Another way to attract high PageRank users to your site requires thinking like a high PageRank user. What type of person would visit related websites and view multiple pages and/or spend reasonable amounts of time on those sites? What are they looking for? How do they surf? What other sites do they visit? If you can get an understanding of how they surf the web and what they do on websites you’ll get a feel for what you need to do in regards to site structure and keyword targeting to get them and keep them on your site.

What Does All Of This Mean?

To understand what this all means we need only reflect back on the title: SEO as we know it is dead. SEO’s are going to need to develop new measurements for their campaigns that reside outside of the direct ranking-reports of old. New strategies to tie sites together and ensure that websites are included in communities and that visitors react favorably to them are going to become increasingly important.

What this means to the website owners is that the workload on your SEO provider (or on you if you’re a do-it-yourselfer) is about to go up and like all things, so too is the cost. On the other side of the coin, you’re about to get traffic from new sources and your site, by necessity, will be more visitor friendly so your conversions will go up. So while the workload and cost may increase, so too will the ROI.

In short, while the lives of SEO’s are once again going the to get a little more difficult, the search engines will benefit, their visitors will benefit, website owners will benefit and so in the end, this is good for all of us.

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by Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc.

Back to Basics, Custom 404 Error Pages Aid SEO

2008-09-04T15:57:00.000-07:00

Your job as a search marketer is to make your site easily navigable for both users and the search engines. Your navigation should be clearly and uniformly laid out, your internal linking structure should make sense to a user, and a site map should offer links to the most important pages on your Web site. Part of this responsibility includes acknowledging that mistakes happen and offering users a roadmap for when errors arise.

Despite your best efforts, users will click on broken links, they’ll mistype a URL, guess wrong at what they think a URL should be or try to access a bookmarked page that has since moved. Users do all sorts of things to get themselves confused; sometimes it’s not even their fault. And when they do, they’ll meet your 404 page.

A 404 or Page Not Found error is an HTTP standard response code that alerts your visitors and the search engines that the page they were trying to access no longer exists. By creating a custom page that addresses the needs of your users, you help them get back on track and find the information they were looking for. You give them a reason to stay on your site and not seek out the information elsewhere. Over time this can add up to a significant number of saved conversions.

The question is: What kind of 404 page do your visitors see when they meet a roadblock? Is it friendly and appropriate to their needs or does it look like the default 404 page - cold and ugly, offering them nowhere to go but back to the page that lead them astray? Even worse, does it redirect users back to the home page without explaining or even acknowledging the error?

Our experience tells us that creating unique 404 pages is often one of the most overlooked elements in a search engine optimization campaign. Clients become so consumed with creating great content, adding links, and mastering all the other on-page and off-page factors that go into optimization that they ignore the importance of keeping users on their site when a problem arises. Unfortunately, they do this to their own detriment.

Imagine you’re a searcher on the hunt for a new pair of cowboy boots. You’ve spent time researching the various styles and fit options and now you’re ready to make a purchase. You head to SEOCowboyBoots.com, your favorite stop for cowboy-related merchandise, and come across a pair of boots that you think meets your exact needs.

One problem: You go to view the product information of the pair you’re interested in and you’re hit with a default 404 page that looks something like this:

There’s no navigation, no links to relevant pages, nowhere to go but back, and no way to get back to your boots.

Are you going to stick around and try to figure out what happened or are you going to go the next site on your list, a site you’re confident will have your boots?

You’re going to bail out on the conversion path and go somewhere else.

Most users are intimidated by a default 404 error page. Essentially, you’ve just scolded them for doing something wrong and given them no way to make it right. Obviously, you do not care about their needs, so why should they stay on your site?

The most effective 404 pages are invisible to users because they actually become part of the site. They use the same site template, they’re clearly written, and instead of scaring users away, they invite them to continue interacting with your site.

The five Must Have’s for every custom 404 page are:

An apology for the error (even if it user error)
A prominent search box
A link to your site map
A link to your home page
Links to the other main areas of your site

On BruceClay.com, we go above and beyond the five Must Haves. Our 404 page includes our full navigation, a link to our home page, an area for SEOToolSet members to log in, a link to our site map, as well as links to other popular areas like our Search Engine Relationship Chart, SEO Methodology page, and our Code of Ethics. We’ve intentionally made it really easy for visitors to find the pages most relevant to their needs. We do this because we believe it aides in our search engine optimization goals and because we want to make it easy for users to navigate our site.

When appropriate, we sometimes encourage clients to create 404 pages that include a touch of humor. Make light of the situation; acknowledge the goof and encourage users to get back on track and dig deeper into your site. If you’re that site selling cowboy boots, display an image of a cowboy stuck in his own lasso, a boot with its heel broken off, or a rodeo clown two seconds away from getting pummeled. There’s no rule that says your error page has to be boring. Keep users entertained and they’ll be more forgiving of the casual misstep.

There’s also no rule that says your error page has to include the frightening term “404 Error Page” anywhere on it. This phrase provides no value to your users. Most of them don’t know what it means, nor do they care to. All they want to know is how to get to the page they were originally looking for.

Custom 404 pages aid search engine optimization by ensuring that more of your pages are indexed. If you leave the spiders to find a default 404 page you’re throwing a roadblock in front of them that they have no way to get over. Search engines can’t hit the back button or use the other advanced features of your Web site. All they can do is follow links. If they come across a bad link and you don’t give them anywhere else to go, they’ll leave your site. This may result in entire sections of your site not being indexed. Creating a custom 404 page that includes links to your site map and your site’s most popular pages will help prevent this from happening. You have to give the engines something to follow.

Providing access to your site map becomes even more beneficial since the engines will continually return to your site to see if those nonexistent pages have returned. If they have, they’ll reindex them. If they haven’t, they’re once again left with your 404 page and all of your relevant links.

Something else to consider is that if you’re using a 404 that quickly redirects back to home page, you may be penalized. The search engines could potentially see the redirect and take it as a sign that cloaking. In most cases, it’s in your best interest to include a custom 404 error page.

You may even want to create one for every occasion and possible misstep. With just a basic understanding of JavaScript, site owners can create dynamic 404 pages that are specific to what went wrong. If a user click on a broken link, you can create a page that apologizes and gives visitors a place to report the broken link. If they’ve clicked on a product page that no longer exists, you can design a page that includes links to related products. Or you can take a one-size-fits-all approach and deliver one 404 page regardless of what caused the error. Find what works for your site.

When you design your custom 404, make sure you create it to be larger than 512 bytes. This is to ensure that your server will actually display the page you’ve created. If it’s under 512 bytes, some browsers will assume that is the boring default error page and replace it on their own. After spending the time and energy to create a page that stands out and addresses your user’s concerns, you don’t want to leave the decision of which page is shown to your browser.

We recommend adding to the top of your 404 page so that the search engines will not index this page. The last thing you want is for your 404 page to start ranking in the engine’s index.

Once you’ve created the page, you need to upload the page to your server and tell it which page to use. Depending on which kind of server you are using, this is done differently.

To do this for a Microsoft IIS Server, open up your “Internet Service Manager” and click on the site you want to set the custom 404 error page for. From there, select “Properties”, and then “Custom Errors” from the list of Radio tabs. Once selected, scroll down until you come to the file associated with your 404 error page. You can then edit this file or upload a new one for your server to display.

For a Unix server, modify the .htaccess file (create one in new text document if you do not already have an .htaccess) to include the command(s):

ErrorDocument 404 /404.htm
ErrorDocument 403 /404.htm

Note that this will redirect all 404 errors (File not found) and 403 errors (Forbidden) to your custom page.

Save the modified .htaccess and you’re done.

Making your site easily navigable and addressing visitor concerns will keep users happy and planted on your site. An optimized 404 page is one that blends in with your site and seamlessly gets visitors on their way to a conversion again.

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

Hot HTML Tips that Never Fail to Deliver

2008-09-03T03:55:00.000-07:00

When it comes to HTML, you can always count on accuracy and detail delivering your website’s content in proper order to the search engines. If you are new to website building, or are struggling to understand why your website is not performing this article may be of tremendous value to you.

First, let’s look at meta tags, these are the main points of interest to the search engines, they do not look at a webpage as humans do, so meta tags are the brail, if you will, to what they see. Meta tags should always be between the and tags, like so:

</strong>(Your Website Title)<strong>

The section is where all the content goes about your site, closed by

The next step is to have the search engines focus on your main points of interest. You can call attention to these words or phrases inside your content section using HEADING symbols;

Making Money Online

Top Paying Keywords

Landscape Rock

Just encase these phrases with the

etc, wherever they fall within the content.

This draws special attention to the search engines and helps your site rank higher in the search engines. Do not use more than 3 tags or it will only distract from what the search engines consider important on your webpage.

In your keyword meta tags above, adding the right keywords is important. Use keywords that highlight your subject matter, but avoid using, a, and, the, more, less, again, those type of words are frowned upon by the search engines. Search engines don’t actually read, they just want to know the relevant words in your content.

Using Top Paying Keywords is a way to increase your Adsense Ads revenue, if you use them to benefit from the content or subject matter of your webpage. This is a very valuable asset you can add to your site, if you apply the right keywords.

Alternate tags is another great way to align your website for optimum display for the search engines. Alternate tags are used with images or pictures on your webpage. They allow the search engines to recognize the picture with words you provide. For example;

A picture html description would look like this:

By adding the alternate tag, you can add keywords that are relevant to the picture or the content of your page, like this:

alt=”website traffic” src=”internet-traffic-2.gif” >

Anchor Text is a way to focus on keywords that link to another page or website. Again, search engines really like this and it draws attention to the relationship of keywords and relevant webpages or other websites.

< href="”http://www.Your-website.com”">Making Money Online < /a>

For more priceless information like this lesson article, visit http://wealthsmith.com.

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By Jim Wilson

Green with Envy in the Google Game

2008-09-02T03:53:00.000-07:00

Beginning on April 14th, 2007, a firestorm blew through the Internet community with the search engine optimization (SEO) community burning the hottest. The embers were warm and waiting for a strong wind to blow and kick up the flames, but it took Matt Cutts, the Google engineer extraordinaire to fire the flames with an off-the-cuff comment about “paid links.”

The flames raged and in most forums, the wind quickly shifted moving the firestorm back towards Cutts and Google. Thread Watch offered the most biting rebuttal to Cutts’ comments: Google Wants Reports of Paid Links… What a Joke and The Real Reason Google Doesn’t Like Paid Links.
Aaron Wall at Thread Watch is a respectable fellow, and he tore into Google with a ferociousness that I had not anticipated. Matt Cutts tried to answer some of Aaron’s questions, but it seemed that Cutts’ rebuttals only added more fuel to the fire.
I would not have wanted to be in Matt Cutts’ shoes that week. Oh my, it was brutal!
Even on Cutts’ own blog where the “paid link” comment originally surfaced (Hidden Links), Danny Sullivan posted a question that went unanswered, so Sullivan commented about it on his site: Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?
Search Engine Watch even mentioned this issue and linked to additional forums where the debate was raging: Google Goes to War on Paid Text Links
What Most Readers Took From Cutts’ Comments
There were only a few readers who took Matt Cutts’ comments to be brotherly-advice.
The vast majority of people were screaming that Google intended to exercise their “monopoly control” over the Internet to run all of their competitors out of business.
Generally, I am not a “reactionary” type person. But for about an hour, even I had a ball in the pit of my stomach.
The ball passed from the pit of my stomach when I read a post that mirrored an opinion I have openly written about numerous times before: How does Google determine the “intent” of a person making a link? They can’t!
Understanding The Nuances Of Similar Items
Some people suggest that I should be ashamed of myself for speculating about the future of Google’s algorithms. There is even one clown, who has suggested that I should fear mentioning Matt Cutts’ name in an article, because I am bound to draw Cutts’ ire against me and my businesses. But, I am not worried.
I am simply laying out my “speculative” opinion about what Cutts’ comments might mean to my business and yours. You are free to use your own brain to judge the value of my words.
Am I playing a double standard when I say that Google cannot determine the intent of the person placing a link, and then I comment on how I interpret the future of the Google search algorithms? I don’t think so, and let me tell you why.
Google uses algorithms (software programs) to make distinctions about what a web page is about, how they value that page, and to judge the nature of a link.
I use my intellect (or as some would suggest, my lack thereof) to make a judgment about what Google has told us we should expect from them in the future.
I trust software to a certain extent, but software cannot always read the nuance that separates two very similar items. So, how can the Google algorithm be expected to determine the intent of a person who placed a link?
It has always been my contention that humans are “required” in any process that must make an interpretation of nuance. In my businesses, we refuse to trust computers to make judgments of nuance, because they can’t. That is the reason we employ human beings to process orders.
What Is Google’s Intent Behind The Paid Links Issue?
The whole of Cutts’ argument seems to hinge on nixing “paid links” that are designed to manipulate or “game Google’s PageRank” and to a lesser extent, their organic search results. Google seems to be really agitated that webmasters are “selling links based on the PageRank value of a page.”
The problem is that webmasters are selling an intangible asset that is wholly owned by Google and maintained for “Google’s benefit.” Webmasters are selling this Google asset, but Google will not receive any of the proceeds from that sale.
As a result, Cutts suggested that webmasters should use some method that Google’s spider can use to recognize and distinguish “paid links” from “given links.” Since Google’s algorithm is based on the theory that links are given to websites that deserve those links, the paid links on high PageRank pages can really skew Google’s PageRank values and its organic search results.
Here Is Where It Gets Ugly
Both honest and dishonest people inhabit this Internet.
Google wants webmasters who are selling links to distinguish paid links from given links, so that Google can ignore “links purchased to influence PageRank.”
If honest people distinguish paid links in a way that Google can recognize, then the market demand for those links will dry up. Once the PageRank value of a link is taken away from the buyer, the buyer will be forced to purchase links based only on the traffic that the specific web page receives. If all paid link decisions were based only on a web page’s traffic, then the market value of a link would be decimated.
Once a webmaster tells his link-buying customers that his or her links will no longer carry PageRank value to the buyer’s website, then the value of that link will drop in most cases by 80% or more. Why would a webmaster want to reduce the market value of his links by 80%?
Although Google’s links do not pass PageRank to the websites that are in their index or paid listings, we have to ask ourselves one thing. Would Google be willing to take a step that would reduce the market value of their own links by 80%? They certainly would not do anything that would cut their own bottom line that deeply, yet they are asking webmasters to do just that.
This is the reason people are teed off at Google. At least 80% of the market value of a link is driven by the PageRank value of the web page where the link will be placed.
Dishonest people don’t care to play by the rules; they will continue to sell their PageRank value, as long as they continue to have buyers. Only the honest will suffer.
Link Buyers Are Green With Envy
Link Buyers are envious of the PageRank value given to other web pages, and they want a bit of that value passed over to their own websites.
Link buyers are green with envy, because they can see that little green bar in the top of their browser that tells them how much value Google gives a web page in its algorithms.
If Google were to keep PageRank as a private value, known only to them, then “paid links” would not be an issue for them to manage.
If the public cannot see what a page’s PageRank value is, then link buyers would not be able to use PageRank to influence their link buying decisions, and webmasters would not be able to market their PageRank value to other websites.
How Simple Is That?
All Google has to do to solve this problem of theirs, is to take away the indicator people use to buy and sell PageRank.
Someone suggested to me that Google would never do away with the PageRank indicator in their toolbar, because Google feels that it is the only thing that ensures that people will keep the Google toolbar in their browser. Personally, I will continue to use the Google toolbar for my searches, even if the PageRank indicator was not there, because I like the search results Google gives to me. But that is just my opinion, and I am only one person out of millions of Google toolbar users.
What it boils down to is this. If Google is serious about nixing schemes to buy and sell PageRank, then they would simply take their PageRank indicator away from us. But will they take it away? Only time will tell.

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By Bill Platt