Web Promotion Articles

SEO Paradigm For 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?

Add comment September 9th, 2006

Has Your Business Hit a Wall? What to Do When Business Slows Down!

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!

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.

Add comment September 9th, 2006

Why Do Search Engines Look For “Inbound Links” For Ranking Websites?

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

Add comment September 9th, 2006

Three Little Known Tips For Keyword Optimnization

Three Little Known Tips For Keyword Optimnization

 by: Alden Smith

When a user enters a search term, or keyword phrase, at a search engine, regardless of whether it is Google, MSN, Yahoo! or AltaVista, the engine runs through the billions of pages in its database and awards each page a “relevancy score”. The higher the score, the higher the listing will appear on the results page. If your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it’s going to get is a zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites.

There are three ways to figure out which keywords work the best for your particular site:

1. Check Your Competitors

2. Check the pay-per-clicks

3. Use specialized tools

Checking your competitors is the easy way to find out what ranks them higher than you for your particular niche. Simply do a search on one of the search engines for your best keyword, and go to the top five sites on the results page. When visiting, check the page source by going to View-> Page Source. This will open up the HTML file of the site you are visiting. In the head portion of the page (it’ll be the first thing you’ll see) look for the phrase “meta=keywords content=”their keywords here” (It will be enclosed in ) and this will give you a list of their top keywords. Keywords should be listed in this meta tag with the highest ranking keyword first. One very big advantage of doing this research is that it gives you an idea of how your competitors have optimized their pages, and if not done properly, you have the advantage in doing your own pages in the proper fashion.

Checking the pay-per-click sites such as Overture or FindWhat will also let you see what keywords people are bidding on. The downside is that they require you to open an account, and it may cost a few dollars, but it is worth the extra expense to be able to check bids on PPC. Googlefight is also a good resource to find which of two keywords are more relevant. Although limited in use, it is rather fun to play with, and gives relevant reports.

Specialized tools are the best way to check keywords for popularity and competition. Wordtracker, a paid subscription site, is an invaluable resource for researching top keywords. At $250 USD a year, it is not cheap, but the time saved and excellent returns are worth the investment. Wordtracker has a free trial search that can be used, although it is somewhat limited in return of relevant keyword phrases. You can also purchase a subscription for monthly, weekly, and daily. Daily fees are about $8 USD, and is a worthwhile investment. A lot of research can be done in 1 day, and if you are prepared with basic keyword brainstorming, you can get a lot done in a day’s time.

As you build your keyword list from your root keyword, be mindful that when people search for product to buy, they generally use two to three phrase search terms. If they are doing research, they will search with the root word. For example if I wish to research “flowers” then that is the term I will input into the search engines. If, however, I am looking to purchase, I would use the term “buy red roses” or “buy cheap bouquets”. With careful planning and taking the proper amount of time to research root keywords, you can be successful with the proper optimization of your web pages.

On my website, http://www.for-the-record.biz, there are more articles for the beginning marketer - everything from beginning to learn CSS to search engine tactics.

Add comment September 9th, 2006

7 Ways to Increase Web Traffic

7 Ways to Increase Web Traffic

 by: Terrence Drumm

Every website needs traffic, in order to get traffic people need to know and find your website. There are many ways to increase traffic some free some cost. But like anything else word of mouth is the best. Here are 7 ways to increase Traffic cheaply.

1) Submit your website to search engines preferably the major engines such as google and yahoo. Google has a free submission and Yahoo has a free and payed submission depending where you want placed but there are better ways to spend that money so use the free.

2) Submit your website to free directories such as http://dmoz.org/. This increase your link popularity which increases your odds of having higher listings on search engines that rate based of off link popularity such as google.

3) Get involved in a free link exchange.

4) Write Articles and offer them up for reprint with your resource box. Doing this increases your link popularity plus adds your link to many other sites that use your content.

5) Use rss, lots of people are now using rss readers. Using rss allows them to be updated when you change your website rather than them having to stop in to check whether or not you have updated.

6) Pay-per Click ads are the only real cost I would recommend using if you have the money to spend on them. There are a number of businesses out there that offer this, the best ones are Overture and Google’s adsense.

7) Join a discussion board with similar topics and put your address in your signature this way they will see your signature and may be interested and click and explore your site, even if you don’t get any clicks from the forum you will still get a increase in link popularity.

This article may be reprinted and distributed freely as long as credit is given and the article remains unchanged.

For more business and website information vist www.thetdog.com

Add comment September 9th, 2006

Business: Deliver Safe Information

Business: Deliver Safe Information

 by: Bob Power

Businesses that are not using feeds today, as part of their marketing and advertising plans, will soon do so, or should thinking of implementing them soon. Although this is a fairly new communications tool it is growing rapidly. The reason is that the information gatherer, consumers, etc., are or will be using >readers to view information. The main reason is that information can be viewed with No Spam, No Junk Mail and No Viruses threats.

Don’t worry, if you think you are behind the times, because you are not. People are just starting to get wind of the “Feeds Method” of gathering information. But if you prepare now, there’s a good cahnce you may be well ahead of your competition.

The good news is that feeds are good for any size business, even if you don’t have a web site. Companies such as ours provides for any size business, online or offline, big or small, to get their information to their customers safely.

The big reason feeds are becoming so popular is that there is no transfer of information to the user’s computer. Unlike e-mail there is no data sent to the user’s hard drive. The user cannot be spammed or sent junk mail or download a virus using a feeds reader. The feeds reader user, your customers etc., controls the information they view.

Business finds it exciting because people will use the feeds reader to gather information and stay updated on products, services and information they have an interest in. Some businesses that have been using mailing lists, have been frustrated in the last couple of years with the increase of spam and junk mail filters. Many of their customers simple do not receive or read the messages sent because the filters read the mail as Spam or Junk Mail and most times deleted.

As well small, and home based businesses, can now get equal billing with the world’s largest companies. On our site we list the smallest company with the biggest. It’s up to the user which feeds they enter into their reader to view.

How It Works

Consumers, or web surfers use a reader to view feeds. Let’s say a consumer visits your web site and you have a feed for them to use if they wish. You would list the feed URL for them to copy and a small icon theat indicates if it is an RSS or XML file etc. They copy and paste the feed URL into their reader an view you feed. The feed has one or more items. each item has a title, such as “ABC Home Decor”, a small description such as “Visit our store or web site to get 40% off all in stock furniture”, and a link to the page you want your visitors to view on your web site or if you don’t have a web site a page we would provide you.

The feed itself, that can contain one or many items, is a basic file. It is a RSS or XML file, that is stored on your server or on ours. The file is read with a reader by the consumer. The file is not a web page but similar to an e-mail message without the data transfer to the user’s computer.

You can update the feed 24/7, thus having the most up to date information on hand for the viewer of the feed. Whether you run a large online or offline corporation, a small business in a small town, or a home business, you can update your customers and potential customers immediately and 24/7.

You can have a free reader customized with your feed included that you can give away, even if you don;t have a web site.

The Bottom Line

Really you don’t need to know how feeds work, unless you are going to do it yourself. Simply understand that feeds are an exciting new communication tool that anyone can use. They are safe, and can be updated in real time. Feeds are easy to add to readers and easy to implement on your web site or from your offline business. They are something you should seriously consider for your business.

Try out feeds and how they work with our free reader at 1feed.com.

Add comment September 9th, 2006

Inbound Links to Your Website for SEO

Inbound Links to Your Website for SEO

 by: Deepak Dutta

Getting in-bound links to your site is one of the most important things you can do for generating traffic to your site:

* It helps to get your site listed in the search engine.

* It helps to boost your position in the search engine.

* It helps to build small streams of traffic to your site.

Links to your site are normally given by also giving a link from your site to the other one. These are called reciprocal links or link swaps. And naturally there are a few services available to automate the link somehow.

Some of these services will automatically add the link to your site and the other site once your link request is approved (through some software to be installed on your site).

Some will simply point you to sites which do use link swaps and who are interested in hearing from you.

Some will also check that the link to your site remains in place, and email you if it disappears. It’s then up to you to either contact the owner of that site to find out why the link has vanished, or to remove the reciprocal link on your site.

But there is one thing they do not do, and which you need to watch for:

How would a visitor to the other site FIND the link back to your site?

Because you can be sure that if a human visitor cannot find it, then it’s unlikely that a search engine will.

Let me give you an example: Andrew was using the service at LinkMetro.com to get links to one of his sites. Someone had a site on a related topic, and they requested a link back to Andrew’s. He checked the link back to his site, and everything looked OK. The other site had requested a link back to their homepage (rather than another specific page), so Andrew checked out that home page.

What did he find?

* No links to the “link directory”.

* No link to a “related sites” page.

* No link to a “resources” page.

It seemed that the link directory on that other site was not linked from the home page of that site.

The other site was requesting inbound links back to its home page, but effectively hiding the return link from the search engines and from website visitors. And that makes the link back to Andrew’s site useless - it’s like that link doesn’t even exist.

So next time you get asked for a reciprocal link, check the route that people and search engines would use to get from that site over to yours. You might be surprised what you find.

Add comment September 8th, 2006

Search Engine Friendly Ways to Build Link Popularity

Acquiring relevant backlinks to your website is one of the most important parts of any Search Engine Optimization campaign. The search engine’s and especially Google value backlinks to your website as an indicator of your website’s importance. If a large number of webmaster’s have decided to link to your content then you must be an important information hub in your target keyword marketplace.

Link Popularity Checker

Add comment September 8th, 2006

Do Search Engines Level The Playing Field?

Do Search Engines Level The Playing Field?

 by: Jamey Perkins

As a small business owner on the Internet, I started out like many others. I built a website, and then waiting for traffic to come flowing in. Much to my dismay, that never happened. Nobody came to my site, and that meant, nobody bought my product. The problem is that I didn’t do my homework before jumping into the Internet market.

The Internet is a constantly changing environment, and growing every day. My small little website was no match for the competition, and I had to do something to bring more traffic to my site.

I began looking at different marketing techniques. Things like buying ad space on larger websites that had more traffic. I also looked at such things as sponsorships, and even email campaigns. The results of my investigations into Internet marketing were just not in my favor. I was just a small business, and to place ads on large websites is very expensive. Sponsorships were also expensive, and email campaigns showed very little potential, as they are usually thought of as spam and discarded. I had to do something else, and it had to be something that a small business like mine could reasonably afford.

I discovered search engine optimization. It was a means of making changes to my website that would better suit the desires of large search engines. Since it is free for people to find a website in a search engine, and free for me to be there, this seemed to be my best alternative.

I began my research into search engine optimization (SEO), and discovered that I had much to learn. It was going to take some time for me to do everything that I needed to do, but it was certainly better than losing all that I had invested so far.

I started by adjusting my website to fit the known standards of most search engines, and then began a link campaign. I distributed hundreds of free links, as well as purchased a few for a fair price. I wrote articles and newsletters. I even joined SEO discussion forums, and participated in topics about search engine optimization. In the end, my efforts started to pay off. Traffic started to flow in, and I began to get a few sales.

All of this started to make me think. What if there was no such thing as a search engine? Could small businesses like mine even compete with large companies? For most of us, it would be entirely too expensive to even attempt. Big corporations would have far more money to use on advertising, and “Internet real estate” would be far more expensive, as it would be the only real means of advertising. My conclusion is that search engines sort of level the playing field between small businesses and large companies. They give a small business the ability to have a chance at competing for traffic on the Internet.

Most of us start out with a dislike for search engines. We get discouraged because so many other websites rank higher than ours. However, there is a way for us to compete with those websites, and it means taking a little time in optimizing website content and links for search engines. With a lot of education, and some good SEO techniques, small businesses can compete, and they can bring in traffic.

Add comment September 8th, 2006