The internet marketing industry is now flooded with various page and portal generators.
In the good old days the gateway page generators did very well, earning a lot of money for many people.
Then the search engines began to crack down on robot-generated pages, a trend which has led to the demise of such tools.
But how is it that the search engines are able to track down these sites so fast?
Add comment July 9th, 2006
Being a restaurant owner means you are always interested in getting more people into your restaurant, whether that be return customers or new customers, hopefully always a mixture of both. Fortunately, the Internet can help you in your marketing goals and not cost you a lot of money. However, since you will be marketing your particular restaurant, even if it is a chain, you will need to include a lot of locally specific information.
Tip #1 - Directories
Add comment July 9th, 2006
SEO Stoopid!
by: Bill Kruse
Why am I SEO Stoopid?
I’m SEO Stoopid because I didn’t properly take notice of what my stats could have told me.
If I would have done, I would have noticed something sooner and factoring that something into my response would very probably have saved me a goodly number of lost posters and art print sales.
My site, www.kruse.co.uk, is about SEO. I’ve been doing it since 1996 or thereabouts and have clients of many years standing. Halfway through last year, I started adding posters pages to it. It’s restful and unoressured compared with a lot of SEO, plus I wanted to see how fast I could get unrelated pages indexed and where and with whom, plus unexpectedly I found that I enjoyed doing it, lots of reasons.
When the first two phases of Jagger hit, I was cool. It washed over my seo clients the way I expected it to (it had no effects at all), and it washed over my (by now only mostly) SEO site the way I expected it to (it had no effect at all there either).
Then came the third wave. Oh dear!
My site’s serps (not my clients’ - they’re all fine) went into a decline that they still haven’t come out of. I was getting damp postcards from my serps telling me what depth they were reaching. They told me in one message they’d dived deeper than any known footballers. Imagine! If they ever come back up they’ll need time in a decompression chamber before they can surface again.
I decided that since I was tanking anyway no-one would be finding my poster pages from the engines and so now was the time to hive my poster pages off to their own site, something I’d been meaning to do for some time as a site is unlikely to do well for two such diverse subjects. I got myself a new domain for them too, www.here-be-posters.co.uk in anticipation of the day when I have more time and can settle them down on their own dedicated space - the demand I had for them shows that they deserve it and I’ll be attending to this in the new Year.
I put them in a little backwater personal hosting space I have with my Broadband ISP. I have a custom 404 on my main site and I adjusted it to make it plain to folk that I’d moved the posters to a new domain as they were swamping my SEO efforts.
Now I always kept a good eye on my stats but I’d failed to note that results from Google, these days, aren’t just from Google any more. They’re from Google Images too - and despite the fact that I’d tanked in Google.co etc for text seaarches, unknown to me as my old stats package didn’t make the distinction, my posters were still very very well ranked in Google Images. I only found this out by studying my Google Analytic stats, a service I’d only recently signed up to in anticipation of clients expecting me to keep them abreast of Search Engine and SEO events.
I checked out “Michael Sowa Prints”. I was in the 80’s in Google.com but to my amazement I was at positions 1 and 3 in Google Images. I checked out “Salvador Dali Prints” and “Escher-prints”. Same kind of deal, I was well off the main map and out in the boonies in the text-driven Googles but top 5 in Google Images. Go see, they’ll probably still be there even now.
So, what was I to do? All those potentially hard-to-get serps were going to waste as when people didn’t see the result they expected when they clicked through, just my 404 page (polite though it was) they just went somewhere else.
Hurriedly put all my pages back up again is what I did, and on my SEO site too, (www.kruse.co.uk), thinking to catch what business I can from what’s left of the Christmas rush. I’ve left all of the links to the new site (www.here-be-posters.co.uk) in place as they’ll get people hopping back and forth from each site to the other, hopefully without realising. All the posters and art prints, the wall tapestries too, will have to be moved over eventually and on a permanent basis. You can have a site about SEO or a site that uses SEO to sell posters, you can not, not for any length of time, have just the one site that does both.
Not the way Google are ordering the universe anyway.
I’ll change over slowly in January using individual 301 redirects and this time they really will be permanent.
For now I don’t believe it’ll matter as Google, according to their own stats via Google Sitemaps, have no info about www.here-be-posters.co.uk and given everything else they have on their plate just now I don’t suppose they’ll be indexing it all and handing out a content penalty before I’ve moved everything over permanently.
But look at the sales opportunity I very nearly missed, eh?
Moral of the story is, make sure your stats package is the best that it can be. I don’t think I’ll be using my old stats package too much from now on, but I’ll keep it on as it does have some individual visitor tracking capabilities that Google’s version of Urchin currently lacks. Reading your stats regularly will save you money and time in the long run.
But do make sure they’re as detailed as possible - you may miss important information if they aren’t! Don’t be an SEO Stoopid!
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About The Author
“Big” Bill Kruse has been running www.kruse.co.uk Kruse Internet Services since 1996. He has hobbies too; www.here-be-posters.co.uk and crystal & glass gifts site, www.crystal-liaison.com.
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Add comment July 9th, 2006
Links From Articles
by: Henry James
Links building is a primary job for developing link popularity. Link popularity is one of the vital measures taken in consideration by the search engines to rank your web pages. The number and the quality of links on your website would also play an important role for raising your page ranking. You can use various strategies such as article writing, software and tools to raise your link popularity.
But before you use any of these strategies for link building, it is a must for you to know your existing status. So you should, first of all, find out the link popularity of your website. And it is really a simple process. You can go to any search engine and type “Links: domain name of the website”. Complete information regarding the links of the website will be presented to you by the search engines.
Now you can work to build up your links’ popularity. A number of people are making persistent efforts for building links from various resources. Articles are a good source of displaying the quality of information on your website. Indeed links from articles are greatly helpful in finding a better place in the search engine ranking.
Articles are actually the real attention grabbers on the web. They provide knowledge and information to the users and thus the users keep seeking for these articles regularly.
Unless you have a really good content on your website, you are not going to get the desired links. The basic rule for getting links from articles is to write them on a particular theme. Your articles must be focused and give relevant information to a subject related to your website. Keywords also play a significant role in generating links for you.
You can generate inbound or one way links as well as reciprocal links via these articles. Always make a thorough research of the most used keywords on the internet. The keywords suggest you a topic that people usually seek for information, on the internet. The articles you write must be rich in the keywords. You have to produce the relevant information keeping the good keyword density in your articles. For, this will make your article search engine friendly.
Every one is not skillful to develop such articles. Get some professional writers to do it for you. You can have your own team of writers or can get the articles written by freelance writers as well. Articles written by professional writers will help you in getting the targeted links. You can also keep these articles in a separate section in your website.
One more way to get links from articles is to get them published on the other sites, i.e., other than your site. Internet is full of flourishing websites that offer to publish your articles for free. These sites are a good platform to get noticed in the cyber world. The ezines, ebooks and online news sources are there to help you popularize your website as well.
You can also find some forums to publish your articles for free. Generally the forums do not allow you to put a link at the end of your articles. But the regular members can post their links under their articles. And this turns out to be really profitable for link building.
The primary advantage of getting your articles published is that the internet traffic you get from the article links is targeted. The articles of a particular theme will be only read by the people having interest in that particular subject. This surely, is going to improve your search engine ratings.
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About The Author
Henry James Discover advanced link building and link popularity tools and resources as a Member of: http://www.Link-Advantage.com.
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Add comment July 9th, 2006
On Friday, July 15th all Google advertisers got the email message entitled "Google AdWords(TM) Announcement: Keyword Evaluation Changes". Now, I don’t know about you, but whenever I get a message from Google concerning Adwords, everything else seems to take a backseat.
So we’ve decided to give you a heads up on what you can be expecting in the future, how you can expect these new changes to effect your advertising efforts, and what you should be doing to make sure that you can compete after they’ve been implemented.
Add comment July 9th, 2006
The world of search engine optimization (SEO) can be a big scary place for newbies. Most SEO professional companies charge astronomical prices that may or may not guarantee success.
The search engines are forever changing the way they rank websites and what is important to achieve a higher ranking. Even with these everchanging factors, there are 8 important points that you must use with your website that are not likely to change any time soon.
Add comment July 9th, 2006
Where is the need to worry? Who needs a PR Tool Bar Anyway!
Everywhere its the same topic. Its getting stale and beginning to stink already. When it first disappeared all of us thought we were penalized for something we had not done. Some of us were informed by stranger webmasters that we were black listed and soon all of us realized, it had little to do with us and more to do with Google and their software and engineers. And the forums overflowed with information and assumptions!(they still are!).
Add comment July 9th, 2006
The name of the game is search engine optimization and there are 20 winners and a million losers. It is a massive game that is conducted each and every minute by the top search engines. The fun is the referee of the game tries to modify the format each minute, to make the game useful for the spectators, in this case the folks who search. This is a high stakes game with billions of dollars at stake and the rules change daily. The playing field changes daily and the folks who compete constantly change. Wow what a fun filled game this is. This game has consistently shown that the folks with the right tools win consistently and the ones’ who don’t but with good ideas win at random and like shooting stars fade out real quick.
Add comment July 9th, 2006
Build Your Opt-In Email List: 7 Important Basics
by: Elizabeth McGee
You’ve heard it before, your best friend online is your opt-in email list.
Time and time again you have heard how important it is to develop a list of email subscribers that will allow you to place your products, special offers and priceless information in front of them on a regular basis.
Not sure about that? Let’s consider the facts:
Fact: Online buyers are skeptical.
Fact: Online buyers need to trust you before they buy from you.
Fact: Online buyers require your product or service to be placed in front of them an average of 7 times before they actually buy from you.
Fact: Buyers that buy from you once are likely to buy from you again.
Fact: Your email subscribers need to be extremely targeted (interested) in what you have to offer.
Fact: Most visitors leave your site and never return.
So what do these facts mean to you? They mean your success as an online marketer depends on creating, nurturing and communicating with an opt-in email list.
This is what your email list will do for you:
- Allow you to capture your visitor so you can get them to return to your site on a regular basis.
- Allow your visitors to develop a trust in you. The best way I know to gain trust is to communicate with people. Tell them what you’re about, what you offer and what your products and services can do for them.
- Keep them abreast of new products, specials and events. If they had a positive buying experience once, they’re likely to buy again.
If you’re a savvy business person and understand how this strategy can help you build a successful online business here’s what you’ll need to do.
1) Publish A Newsletter This is not as hard as it sounds. Start with a simple informational newsletter that you can send to your readers at a minimum of once a month, preferably once a week. Offer information relating to your products or services and sprinkle it with sales offers, product information, website updates, FAQ’s, etc. Keep your newsletters fun and develop a writing style that has flair. You want your readers to look forward to hearing from you. Encourage feedback, respond quickly to inquiries and be helpful.
2) Invest In An Email Autoresponder An autoresponder service or autoresponder software will automatically collect your email list information. It will also allow you to send emails automatically to your list. You can pre-write your emails and schedule them however you wish. It will also send auto replies for any email you receive. The options are tremendous, however the key is automation and we all need lots of that.
3) Set Up An Email Opt-in Form Typically your autoresponder will help you create a form to put on your website. The key to setting up an opt-in form is to keep it simple. You only need to request a name and email address. Also be sure to state on your form that you will not sell or share email addresses with anyone.
4) Offer Free Incentives As an incentive to getting your viewers to subscribe to your newsletter offer them something free. You can write a simple e-book and give it away, or find an e-book online that you can give away.
Remember that if you really want someone to do something, it helps if you can give them something in return for their patronage.
5) Write articles Writing articles is an excellent way to get subscribers. It works by placing a link to your newsletter subscription in the byline of your article. If someone enjoys your article they’re very likely to want to find out more and subscribe.
Not a writer? Not a problem. There are plenty of people out there willing to write articles for very reasonable fees. The amount of sign-ups you gain and the potential for sales can more than make of for the cost of the article.
6) Write an e-book Did you ever write a term paper in school? Writing an e-book is not much different. If you are knowledgeable enough to have a product and a website, you are knowledgeable enough to write an informative and useful e-book on your topic. Think carefully about your products or services and list everything you know about it. You might be surprised at how much you really know.
An e-book will capture email addresses because your e-book should promote your newsletter link as well as your website link. Try giving away your e-book to other business owners to use as a free give away. Once your e-book gets into the hands of interested parties, you’re email list will grow like wildfire.
7) Join and participate in online forums. Respond to comments, answer questions and give advice when you can. Most forums allow you to create a signature line which you can setup with the link to your newsletter opt-in form or the page of your website that has your form on it. Another excellent way to build trust, promote your expertise or simply make a few business acquaintances.
If you can offer valuable information for free, establish yourself as an expert and remind your viewers to come back to your site, you’ll be well on your way to achieving increased traffic and in return, increased sales.
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About The Author
Elizabeth McGee is the creator of Pro Marketing Online, an internet marketing tools site with no B.S., no hype, just trusted information on building your business with the very best marketing tools and software available. Sign up for her free marketing tips newsletter at: http://www.pro-marketing-online.com.
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Add comment July 9th, 2006
How To Succeed With Banner Ads!
by: John Iacovakis
Is Banner Advertising still effective? YES: But you need traffic to get traffic from banner ads!
A trick is to try banner campaigns in combination with a pop-under campaign. Send cheap traffic to a web page with original content and some banners from 2-4 free banner exchanges.
On average, banners receive a click trough rate of 0.2% - 0.6%, but some banner ads receive a CTR of up to 3%. It’s up to you to create a professional banner with an incredible free offer, so that nobody can resist!
Now let’s assume that your banner has a click through rate of 1% (one click for every 100 banner impressions).
You will usually earn one banner impression for your banner for every two visitors you receive. Suppose you join four free banner exchanges. Then order a 50,000 cheap visitors package (traffic pop-under windows) for about $100 and send that traffic to the page you putted the banner code on it.
You should earn about 100,000 free banner impressions from the banner exchanges (25,000 credits from each banner exchange network). With a well-designed banner, expect to achieve a 1% Click Through Rate (CTR) or even more.
That’s one thousand (1,000) targeted visitors, who have already demonstrated an interest in your product (by clicking on your ad).
Targeted banner impressions often cost $10 per 1,000 impressions ($10 CPM). This equates to an advertising value of $1,000.00 and a cost per click (CPC) of only 10 cents!
Not to mention the branding effects: Your logo and web address will appear 150,000 times on other sites (100,000 on your banner and 50,000 on your pop-under window)! Sooner or later, your product or name will become known throughout the Internet.
There are several banner exchanges on the Internet. Visit the page below to find some of the best banner exchange networks and a few banner design services:
http://www.cnetcs.com/resources.htm
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About The Author
John Iacovakis is an Internet consultant and has over 10 years of marketing experience. He is the owner of CreativeNet Online Advertising.
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Add comment July 9th, 2006
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