My wife laughs every time she sees me doing it.
At least once or twice every week, I’ll be at my desk (or at the dining room table) with my Franklin Covey planner open and a stack of laminated checklists in hand.
“What are you doing, honey?” she calls, already knowing the answer.
“I’m planning”, I reply with a smile.
She laughs and I get back to work.
Add comment September 9th, 2006
Once your site is up and running, the best method for getting immediate traffic is pay-per-click search engine marketing. Although you have to be patient, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization as a long term strategy.
Search Engine Optimization ? "SEO"
Search engine optimization, or "seo" as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Add comment September 9th, 2006
Blogging is a relatively new form of communication, closely related to the newsletters of days long past. Your thoughts, ideas, and activities are posted for the world (or a chosen few) to view, and if you choose to include the option, leave a comment. By creating a Blog and adding to it every day or relatively often, you create in your reader a desire to see "what was said next". They will return to read what you post next. Particularly, if what you posted the first time is interesting, valuable information, presented in a manner that is fun to read. A few ideas to get you off and running with your informational Blog, might include: travel, a new baby, planning your wedding, building a new business, working with your clients, developing a new product, counting your blessings, or ideas you are interested in sharing.
Add comment September 9th, 2006
To improve our website ranking and internet presence we need to exchange links with other websites. Some search engines won’t even spider websites that do not have links pointing to them. But to improve the page ranking you have to make sure that big majority of links you exchange are relevant to the content of your website. For example there is no need to exchange links with travel website if your website is about food. You can still have some links to the website of not relevant content, but you should try to limit them.
Add comment September 9th, 2006
SEO Paradigm For 2006?
by: John Sylvester
It is now two months since we started to regroup our efforts in contemporary SEO strategies. A real estate start-up was taken as the guinea pig for the exploration of our new SEO techniques - and with staggering early results. As one can imagine, a huge uplift in the site hits of a property company is worth a awful lot of money.
The site is still only four months old and therefore in the pending tray of Google’s, and to some extent Yahoo’s ’sandbox’. Still, the strategies we have employed this year has seen site traffic quintupled, after taking advice garnered from a raft of sources, especially SitePro News and ProBlogger.
The days of organic submissions are still with us but those of reciprocals, unless of specific benefit, are moribund - thankfully. Our latest methods have been passed on to our partners in the UK, Strategy Consulting, and they have been integrated into their new year’s marketing efforts.
What we did was to install WordPress as a seamless addition to the website, fill it with highly relevant copy, with Technorati trackbacks, register all of its pages with Google Sitemap and ping a hundred or more news aggregators. Blogcrawler now dominates the referrers list.
Alongside the on-site blogs, we saw that a certain blogspot was appearing above many of the established estate agents in Bangkok. We therefore researched (via Overture) all the property-related keywords and set up blogs with Blogspot for each, slightly amending the on-site copy - so as not to get blacklisted - and optimised the selected keywords, linked them all together with them all pointing to the website. Now, when searching for ‘tenancy management bangkok’ the site completely dominates the stage: the website plus blogs are #1-14 on MSN. As the site does not reciprocate, they now have twenty quality inbounds, helping the site’s real keywords to succeed.
Another helpful addition is article writing for sites having high PR. They seem to burn and fade very quickly from the search engine’s perspective, but very still a valuable part of our strategy.
So, in 2006, we can now offer our clients a five-pronged assault on the majors: quality, well-researched SEO on url, title, metas, alts, content and outbounds; relevant one-way, high PR link building; on-site blogging, thus elevating PR, building relevant content and auto-pinging RSS feeds; intelligent registration of keywords on Blogspot with specifically-crafted copy, with headline and alt tagging key phrases, linking them all together with links into the main site; last but not least, writing atricles for sites such as this to get feedback from experts to further enhance the strength of these strategies.
Now, we can also offer small companies templated but effective CMS solutions through WordPress for $250.
But how to relate this information to clients outside of demonstrating results?
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About The Author
John Sylvester - Media Director of V9 Design & Build (www.v9designbuild.com), providing both local and outsourcing web and SEO services: we provide both brochureware and custom-designed websites, with tasteful design and branding, professional design and build, proven and successful SEO and e-marketing, e- commerce-driven database integration and content management systems.
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Add comment September 9th, 2006
I doubt that anyone reading this article hasn’t at one time or another found his or her business dropping off significantly. For some unknown reason, and without any warning, everything seems to stop. The phone stops ringing, your e-mail box has nothing but advertisements and it appears as if your business has come to an end. What happened and even more important what should you do when it appears as if your business has hit a wall?
Add comment September 9th, 2006
SEO, PPC & SEM - ASAP!
by: Todd Levi
This article examines the basics behind quality site promotion.
Let us take a good look at acronyms in the industry! Search Engine Optimization(SEO), is a term thrown around a million times a day online. So many sites use old techniques that will get there rankings hurt or reversed with there hap-hazard web designs it frustrates me. I don’t want you to be one of them. In fact this article is aimed for creating SEEN web design projects. If you don’t use this anti-SEO (i.e. cloaking and doorway pages) and follow the following rules you can expect decent results with your web design. The basics for SEO are simple and should be used by all web designers and web design services (although that doesn’t mean they are always used):
1. Optimize your site with a high percentage of text relevant to the search terms you intend to go after.
2. Make sure all alt (alternate image tags) and title tags have relative descriptions including keywords.
3. Make sure your site meets current online standards and can be equally viewed among all browsers and operating machines. Even though some pages may still display correctly with incorrect HTML, it can hinder the way search engines will look at them, bringing the overall optimization of the page down.
4. Make sure all pages are under 800K (recommended for fast loading pages).
5. Submit (manually, by hand) to all major search engines, an automatically to lesser engines through (at least) a free search engine submission service or program.
Keeping these five rules in mind will help, however a serious look at other aspects will help even more in SEO. I will go into these aspects in more detail with articles to come at http://SEO-Marketing.LeviSolutions.com but this is a good start.
PPC, otherwise known as Pay Per Click advertising is found on numerous search engines and smaller ones alike. The two major players are Google and Overture (now own by Yahoo), however there are some other PPC engines that use a multiple of lesser engines and quality websites to offer there services. Some will give you a top ten ranking within your keyword searches while others have you bid for placement among there engines. A few simple rules to follow:
1. The content of your site must match the keywords bid on.
2. SELL! SELL! SELL! While traditional SEO focuses on how the search engines will view your page, this is your chance to engage the human customer! Traditional sales techniques work best here.
3. Will visits to your web pages convert into quality leads or actual sales? Make sure the cost of bidding will be recovered, plus some.
4. The more popular the search terms = the more expensive it will be. Keep this in mind and target populated terms with financial efficiency.
5. All of your keywords stand no chance whatsoever of being listed in the top ten positions on the major search engines. Organic top ten placements can be very expensive so this is your chance of competing with terms you don’t rank well with.
Make sure to have a relevant page for your search term. This is critical as we all know from browsing; if a site doesn’t fit the bill in the first three seconds we are more than happy to click that back button.
SEM = Structural Equation Modeling? NOPE! SEM = Search Engine Marketing? NOPE! SEM = Standard Error of Mean? Nope! While all of these are acronyms for SEM, there not the ones we care to discuss here in our brief overview of Search Engine Mechanics. Anything I say in this column may be outdated with the next big search engine “patch” so what I mean by SEM is simple: Keep Up! That’s right, by simply going by what you know, or an article written 8 months ago you will get lost or penalized in your attempts for effective online marketing. Search Engine mechanics is the mathematical art behind the algorithms of the popular, well producing engine online. To find out that a “Jagger Update” relinquishes all reciprocal links to your website in the eyes of the 75%+ that currently engage Google is huge. The mechanics of the currently used search engines is something to keep your eye on. While HTML doesn’t change much each year (comparatively), search engines do. Simply put: make sure you know what to do to get ranked in this ever evolving market!
-One last note: make sure you know what pages are visited and where users are spending there time. If you have a well visited page (found through your web stats) that isn’t receiving much time spent: GUESS WHERE YOU NEED A REWRITE!
This is meant to be, and should be a good start to all wanting high search engine ranking within there web design realm.
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About The Author
Todd Levi has prided himself in expertise knowledge of Web Design and Search Engine Optimization throughout the past few years. Please visit his work at http://www.LeviSolutions.com.
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Add comment September 9th, 2006
You have put lot of sweat in making your site. Now you want it to engender revenues and only source of traffic is search engines. You have completed your seo optimization well but there is no precursor of any traffic. Yes Google places new sites in “Sandbox” and this means that your site would not rank well for high traffic keywords for a certain period. This phenomenon is called as “Sandbox”. What if your site is in “Sandbox” or on hold? Should you hang around or is there any way out. Lets look at few of them:
Add comment September 9th, 2006
Why Do Search Engines Look For “Inbound Links” For Ranking Websites?
by: Shrinivas Vaidya
Dear friends, ranking high at the search engines for a keyword
which has high demand is every marketers dream. No matter what
your website about, a fully loaded super store or a hobby site,
you need traffic and search engines have a capacity to provide
an unending supply of thousands of visitors (if your niche has
that much demand) at zero cost.
Actually it would be wrong if we say that search engines send traffic
at zero cost. There is a price you need to pay to rank high
and that’s TIME. Yes, it takes time to reach there. (especially
at Google)
there are many factors that undergo a normal Search Engine
Optimization exercise and building “inbound links” is considered
one of the most challenging tasks involved today. To understand
better why search engines look for inbound links, let’s take
a real life example.
For a moment forget the Internet, forget you website/search engines
anything that has to do “ranking high”, just read this small
story.
There was a young boy Jim, about 21 years old. He was a fantastic
painter. He painted in water colors on canvas. His favorite
subjects were landscapes, natural beauty, mountains, etc…He
could spend hours painting and playing with colors. Colors were
his passion, his life.
He lived in a small village that was away from a major metro city.
With a small population, no one really visited this village very
often. Jim was very happy with his passion of painting.
One day Jim’s uncle visited his home on a Sunday. When he saw Jim’s
paintings he thought Jim has got an inborn talent of colors, of
looking towards the surrounding beauty that he was able to capture
on canvas. His was a special skill that very few people have.
So he suggested Jim to move to the city to display his work to
people out there. Jim assured him that whenever he gets the
opportunity he would definitely make the best of it.
Then the golden day arrived. Jim was listening to a radio station,
when he heard the announcement of an exhibiting of paintings to be
held in the metro city. Jim thought this is what I was looking for an
quickly rushed to the city at his Uncle’s place to arrange for the
formalities.
Five of Jim’s paintings got selected and displayed at the metro city
exhibition. He got a tons of post and is still getting from his
fans and now the best part is he is making thousands of bucks just
from a single painting. He is happy and wealthy too. His passion
is keeping satisfied and now he is famous guy. The villagers are
proud of having him in their village.
OK… now what’s this story got to do with SEO..you ask..
A lot…If you read the story again you will discover that Jim is
already happy when he is in his village, spending most of his
time with paints and brushes. But when he displays his work out
to public, his work is admired by more and more people. It has
to do with “numbers”. Again when no one knew about his talents,
he still was a great painter, but now because now thousands of
people say that “Jim is a great painter” his value becomes
magnified thousands of times.
Now if Jim launches his website on water color paintings where do
you think it must rank.. You see, it’s a numbers game. Of course
it’s also important that who recommends Jim as a great painter.
But Jim doesn’t care, he’s already taken all the care for years
polishing his painting skills. All he knows is producing great
quality paintings for his customers which are ready to pay him
truckloads of money.
There is a simple exercise to do. Put yourself in Google’s shoes,
imagine that you are Google.com [:-)] and then look at Jim’s new
website. If I am a regular Google user I will take all the care
to see that my search results for the keyword “water color paintings”
show up results that are best and most importantly recognized by
experts in the art industry.
This is true for every search engine out there, including Yahoo! and
MSN, because they want to retain their users.
Here “inbounds links” come into picture. The number and the quality
of inbound links is the only way for the search engines to
recognize the quality of the website it is supposed to rank. Of
course as I mentioned there are many factors that a search engine
will look for, but inbound links can have a major impact on your
rankings.
Again if Jim wants his website to rank well for many years to come,
he will have to keep on producing quality work just the way he is
doing now. Most people think that search engines are money
machines, just build a website, get is indexed and forget about it.
But it is getting a long term goal now a days to rank high at the
search engines. As I said it comes at the cost of TIME. If you
are ready to go for it, creating traffic through search engines
will be one of the most profitable skills you will ever learn
in this lifetime.
I hope this article was useful….
Copyright 2005 Shrinivas Vaidya
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About The Author
Shrinivas Vaidya Do you think that inbound links matter a lot to rank high at the search engines? Visit Shrinivas Vaidya’s blog on how to suggest link and skyrocket your rank at the search engines.
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Add comment September 9th, 2006
In parts 1 - 4 you learnt how to develop your online business proposition, generate a list of key words and optimize at a site level. You were also introduced to our mythical Doug (who sells antique doors, door handles, knockers, door bells or pulls and fitting services) in Windsor in the UK.
Now it is time to focus on optimizing each individual page. My key message is keep each page brief! You shoul only be covering one key product, service or key piece of information per page. If you find yourself covering more, split the content and create more pages!
Add comment September 9th, 2006
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