There is a lot to learn when it comes to online or internet marketing and search engine optimization. That is why a lot of people hire SEO consultants to worry about their internet marketing for them. However, if you do not want to have to pay SEO experts to help you with the marketing of your website, then you may want to think about doing it yourself! It is not that hard, it just takes some reading on the Internet from trusted sources. Really, most of the SEO services that are provided online are built around one thing, and that is search engine crawlers.
Today we are going to talk more about search engine crawlers, and what they do. Soon you will find out that pretty much everything that you do, as far as search engine optimization goes, is to make these little crawlers happy. It is no longer as easy as a quick search engine submission and your website becomes
As you may be able to guess by the name, these search engine crawlers are little bots that roam around the Internet looking for new websites and ranking them based on an algorithm. When they come across a new website, they rank it in different ways, taking many things in to consideration. These ranks help to determine where the site is going to end up in a search done on a search engine.
The first thing that you have to do for these crawlers is to get noticed by them, and that is the hardest part of SEO, or at least that is what SEO consultants want you to think! The truth of the matter is, you can get your website noticed by simply visiting different popular search engines and adding your URL to their submission forms. You also must get links from other web sites pointing to your web site to obtain link popularity and credibility with the search engines. This way the crawlers will know where your site is at, and find it a lot quicker. They will also consider it a relevant source of information if other sites link to you.
After that, it is all about marketing your web site on the Internet through search engine optimization techniques. These little crawlers are programmed to look for certain things on your web site; these are things that SEO experts study and have an understanding for. Using the services of SEO Consultants to help in your marketing, however they can be very costly, so you should hire a service provider that is talented and can provide a portfolio to ensure you get quality work.
Before hiring someone to work on your web site you should make sure they use ethical search optimization and marketing tactics and also make sure that they can provide results. The first thing that crawlers look for is, of course, keywords.
Keywords in your web sites content and keywords in the links pointing to your site. When it comes to search engine optimization, use keywords wisely. Do not over-saturate your web site with keywords because you can get docked as a spammer. These keywords have to be worked into the web page and not just listed there. You should integrate them in to your content, page titles, Meta tags and URL. Also, it will help the marketing of your web site if you work them into the titles of your web page as well.
Also make sure that your main page headings are bigger than that of your normal font so the crawlers can easily pick out what the main focus of your page is.
SEO consultants also worry about how many links there are out there that point back to your website. The more links, the better. However they must also be quality links from popular sites that are credible with the search engines. That is why SEO experts are always looking for different places where they can post links to your website. While crawlers are looking around, if they come across links to your website, then that helps to boost your ranking online.
As you can see, SEO services are very helpful, but if you can learn how to do online marketing by yourself, you do not need to hire anyone.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Pathway Landscape & The Seasonal Weather in Scottsdale, Arizona
This is the post about the Pathway Landscape Design & Maintenance. It is all about the landscape designs that inspired by the beauty and diversity of Arizona's natural terrain.
Most people hear Arizona and they think of a hot, empty, boring landscape. But in fact, Scottsdale, Arizona happens to be one of the top vacation spots with a beautiful natural setting, wide array of activities, enjoyable climate and so on.
In term of the temperatures, in Arizona is now at 80 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, and this will be the perfect weather for enjoying all your favorite outdoor activities such like fishing, golfing, dinning, shopping and so on.
Besides the whether, Pathway Landscape also concern about landscape design in Scottsdale AZ and maintenance for those who will use and enjoy these gardens and how they integrate with the architecture of their homes and their lives.
Most people hear Arizona and they think of a hot, empty, boring landscape. But in fact, Scottsdale, Arizona happens to be one of the top vacation spots with a beautiful natural setting, wide array of activities, enjoyable climate and so on.
In term of the temperatures, in Arizona is now at 80 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, and this will be the perfect weather for enjoying all your favorite outdoor activities such like fishing, golfing, dinning, shopping and so on.
Besides the whether, Pathway Landscape also concern about landscape design in Scottsdale AZ and maintenance for those who will use and enjoy these gardens and how they integrate with the architecture of their homes and their lives.
Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
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 engine 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 mis perception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered these 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 have not 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 kinds of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked 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 determining 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 a 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 perceives the use of hidden text! - 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.
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 "Key phrase 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 do not 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 "page jacking." 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.
Source From SEO News
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 engine 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 mis perception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered these 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 have not 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 kinds of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked 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 determining 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 a 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 perceives the use of hidden text! - 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.
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 "Key phrase 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 do not 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 "page jacking." 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.
Source From SEO News
Saturday, April 25, 2009
What Personalized Search Means for SEO and Your Website
Looking back over the 15 or so years that SEO has been researched, discussed and practiced, it is difficult to find any significant period of time when it was not changing.
Before Google came onto the search scene around the turn of the millennium, the search engines at the time were ranking websites based primarily on the sheer volume and density of keywords on the page. So ranking for "blue widgets" meant little more than finding ways to stuff those two words into every inch of your page possible while still maintaining at least the semblance of a user experience. The result was a plethora of webmasters who found creative ways to stuff keywords into every corner of their sites. Then Google changed the game.
With PageRank, Google introduced a new way of evaluating the relative authority of a website or page - links. PageRank, to put it in simple terms, provided a link map of the web. The more links pointing to a site or page, the more power or authority that page took on. And the anchor text of a link, the words that occur as clickable text, offered a clue as to what the linked-to page was all about. As Google garnered more market share, links became more valuable on the web. A whole new form of web spam was born - free-for-all links and link selling schemes. Google has yet to find an effective way to completely crack down on these tactics, but in the 3rd quarter of 2007 they took some significant steps including directly penalizing specific websites which were believed to be selling links for SEO benefits and relieving "free-for-all" directories of their power to pass PageRank altogether.
There should be no question that more big changes are coming in SEO - only a question of "what next - and how do I prepare for it?" Here is what is next: Personalized Search. In fact, it is already here - more likely than not you are already seeing personalized results when you search in Google.
Google has continually added to their impressive list of free services. To name a handful:
So What does Personalized Search Mean for You and Your Website?
1. You can no longer assume that rankings as you see them are global. Anyone logged in while they search is potentially seeing a different set of results for the same keyword. You can log out of your Google account to search or turn off personalized results, but it will not do much good since every other user is potentially searching with personalization.
2. If Google is incorporating usage data from other sources such as the Google Toolbar, Google Chrome and Google Analytics, it means that the user experience is going to play a heavier role in SEO. Keep this in mind: for Google, the user experience is everything. Does not it then make sense for them to incorporate available usage data when ranking websites?
3. With these new data sources, Google could potentially be scaling back the emphasis on inbound links in their ranking algorithm. Links to this point have been central for Google rankings. With their market share continually improving and the unparalleled usage data that affords them we can reasonably expect that they will be putting more emphasis on these metrics in the future.
4. Expected traffic estimates based on rankings just became difficult if not impossible to achieve. In the past, traffic could be reasonably estimated by multiplying the available search usage for a given keyword by the known traffic percentage of a given position. The 1st position, for example, received some 48% of traffic for a keyword according to leaked AOL data from a few years back. For a keyword receiving 100 searches per month, you could reasonably estimate 48 visits per month based on a #1 ranking for that keyword. SEO companies used that data to take some of the guesswork out of their campaigns. With personalized search these estimates are going to become far less accurate if not completely unreliable.
5. Overall, this means you need to keep your eyes OFF the search engine rankings to a large degree. Does a #1 position for your Google account mean you could be somewhere back on page 5 for someone else? Probably not. But the point is, from here on out we can not be sure without extensive testing. Rankings have not ever meant much – they have always been a means to an end, the end being quality traffic and ultimately more sales, attention or whatever your website goal may be. Now, more than ever, high-quality traffic should be your focus. Personalized search is not exactly a new concept – it is been discussed for at least a couple of years now. But we are seeing it receive heavier emphasis lately, and the buzz is on that Google is going to change the game again soon. Like it or not, we are likely going to have to let go of rankings as a metric for success.
Source From SitePro News
Before Google came onto the search scene around the turn of the millennium, the search engines at the time were ranking websites based primarily on the sheer volume and density of keywords on the page. So ranking for "blue widgets" meant little more than finding ways to stuff those two words into every inch of your page possible while still maintaining at least the semblance of a user experience. The result was a plethora of webmasters who found creative ways to stuff keywords into every corner of their sites. Then Google changed the game.
With PageRank, Google introduced a new way of evaluating the relative authority of a website or page - links. PageRank, to put it in simple terms, provided a link map of the web. The more links pointing to a site or page, the more power or authority that page took on. And the anchor text of a link, the words that occur as clickable text, offered a clue as to what the linked-to page was all about. As Google garnered more market share, links became more valuable on the web. A whole new form of web spam was born - free-for-all links and link selling schemes. Google has yet to find an effective way to completely crack down on these tactics, but in the 3rd quarter of 2007 they took some significant steps including directly penalizing specific websites which were believed to be selling links for SEO benefits and relieving "free-for-all" directories of their power to pass PageRank altogether.
There should be no question that more big changes are coming in SEO - only a question of "what next - and how do I prepare for it?" Here is what is next: Personalized Search. In fact, it is already here - more likely than not you are already seeing personalized results when you search in Google.
Google has continually added to their impressive list of free services. To name a handful:
- GMail
- Google Analytics
- Google Reader
- FeedBurner
- Google Desktop
- Google Chrome
- Google Toolbar
- etc.
So What does Personalized Search Mean for You and Your Website?
1. You can no longer assume that rankings as you see them are global. Anyone logged in while they search is potentially seeing a different set of results for the same keyword. You can log out of your Google account to search or turn off personalized results, but it will not do much good since every other user is potentially searching with personalization.
2. If Google is incorporating usage data from other sources such as the Google Toolbar, Google Chrome and Google Analytics, it means that the user experience is going to play a heavier role in SEO. Keep this in mind: for Google, the user experience is everything. Does not it then make sense for them to incorporate available usage data when ranking websites?
3. With these new data sources, Google could potentially be scaling back the emphasis on inbound links in their ranking algorithm. Links to this point have been central for Google rankings. With their market share continually improving and the unparalleled usage data that affords them we can reasonably expect that they will be putting more emphasis on these metrics in the future.
4. Expected traffic estimates based on rankings just became difficult if not impossible to achieve. In the past, traffic could be reasonably estimated by multiplying the available search usage for a given keyword by the known traffic percentage of a given position. The 1st position, for example, received some 48% of traffic for a keyword according to leaked AOL data from a few years back. For a keyword receiving 100 searches per month, you could reasonably estimate 48 visits per month based on a #1 ranking for that keyword. SEO companies used that data to take some of the guesswork out of their campaigns. With personalized search these estimates are going to become far less accurate if not completely unreliable.
5. Overall, this means you need to keep your eyes OFF the search engine rankings to a large degree. Does a #1 position for your Google account mean you could be somewhere back on page 5 for someone else? Probably not. But the point is, from here on out we can not be sure without extensive testing. Rankings have not ever meant much – they have always been a means to an end, the end being quality traffic and ultimately more sales, attention or whatever your website goal may be. Now, more than ever, high-quality traffic should be your focus. Personalized search is not exactly a new concept – it is been discussed for at least a couple of years now. But we are seeing it receive heavier emphasis lately, and the buzz is on that Google is going to change the game again soon. Like it or not, we are likely going to have to let go of rankings as a metric for success.
Source From SitePro News
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Upgrading Your Company Website
Dealing with website development issues can be an overwhelming task. There are many things your marketing team must consider, in fact, there are so many things to bear in mind that many of the most important ones never get dealt with, or are buried under competing interests.
To avoid project paralysis you should focus on certain key areas of concern from which all other issues flow. Whether upgrading your existing website or developing a new web media initiative from scratch, consider these four vital questions that need to be answered:
1. What content should be included?
2. How should content be delivered?
3. How is your website going to be marketed?
4. What will visitors remember?
What Content Should Be Included?
Content is a function of purpose. Unfortunately many websites do not have a clearly thought-out realistic purpose; and orders alone, is not an adequate website objective. Obviously every company needs sales, that is a given, but sales are a result of all the marketing elements you put in place, and the degree to which your presentation distinguishes you from your competition.
There is a prevailing view that traffic translates into sales; this viewpoint may be valid for websites whose economic model is commodity or advertising-based, but businesses that do not compete on price alone, or are more than an excuse to deliver advertising, must be structured around a purpose that is more meaningful, and far more compelling than 'give me an order or do not bother me.'
An over-emphasis on search engine friendly site design ignores the fact that when someone does a search for what you do, they will not only find you, they will also find many of your competitors as well. And even if you appear first in the search, nothing will stop potential clients from clicking on any of the other organic or advertised listings, or even the numerous Adword links on the side of the page.
The biggest website design problem companies have is not the amount of traffic generated from search engines, but rather how visitors react to your content. Are visitors engaged, enlightened, and entertained so that they stay on your site long enough to get your marketing message, and is that message compelling enough for them to remember it?
There are many misconceptions about advertising content, one of the biggest is that people hate it, but the truth is, what people hate is bad ad content; qualified clients actually look forward to good advertising because it presents a relevant problem, and provides a believable solution, in a distinctive memorable presentation.
If your content does not engage your audience with a persuasive, memorable presentation then you will never achieve whatever website marketing goals you have set.
How Should Content Be Delivered?
We know the vast majority of people do not like to read text on a computer screen, so they scan for relevant information concentrating on bulleted points, captions, and headlines, but does that truncated information really get your message across? Website text is really designed for search engine spiders, which are fine, but how about paying a little attention to people and how they absorb and remember information?
We also know people are impatient and are ready to abandon your website with the click of mouse, often in mid sentence before they ever get to the point you are trying to make. Your clients are sophisticated media consumers raised on video games and television, and are used to making quick decisions on limited information; this kind of leap-of-logic protocol demands a clever focused presentation.
Your audience will be gone in seconds no matter how convincing you think your content is, if it is not presented in a media-savvy manner that holds viewer attention, otherwise your website is nothing more than a glorified Yellow Page ad.
Audio and video has the potential to deliver information in a form and format that attracts and holds viewer interest while it makes a memorable impression. But even audio and video will fail if it is badly conceived, poorly written, and amateurishly performed.
How Is Your Website Going To Be Marketed?
Everyone is concerned with traffic and how to drive it to their websites. Search engine optimization is only one marketing technique, and it is one that ignores the impact of content on your audience in favor of attracting the attention of search engine robots. By all means, build search engine friendly elements into your site but do not ignore people-friendly elements as well.
Having text-based articles on your site is an excellent way to provide search friendly information, but presenting that same information as a professionally produced audio option, or a lively video presentation is certainly more memorable.
An entertaining web media presentation makes a lasting impression that viewers are more likely to recommend to colleagues, thereby increasing your traffic and reputation. Word-of-mouth is the best way to generate qualified traffic, and the best way to generate interest in your site is to make your site's presentation a rewarding experience.
What Will Visitors Remember?
In a brick-and-mortar environment, visitors are more likely to make a decision to purchase on the spot, simply to avoid driving halfway across town to save a few dollars, but on the Web jumping from New York to California is as easy as the click of a mouse. People are just more likely to shop-around because it is so easy.
Of course what people think they want is the lowest price, but providing the lowest price only attracts the least profitable buyers and ignores the biggest obstacle website businesses need to overcome, and that is credibility. Who are you, and can you be trusted? And after visiting ten different websites all selling the same thing, can they even remember who you are?
Your presentation has to be memorable and establish credibility so that when all the searching and browsing is finished, your site is the one they remember and go back to; your site must be the one visitor can trust to deliver what is promised.
How to Hire a Web Video Firm
The ability to produce an effective video or audio presentation requires more than the possession of some cool hardware and software. Owning an expensive camera does not make you a producer, and even the technical ability to edit does not qualify you as a commercial marketing expert. When the time comes to hire someone to add video and/or audio to your website what should you be looking for?
Below are eight things you should consider when hiring someone to create web media.
1. Can the web media provider deliver a turnkey solution from concept to implementation, or do you have to act as a producer yourself hiring different people with different skills complicating the project and creating both technical and conceptual implementation problems?
2. Can the web media provider produce everything from scripts to custom music in-house, or do they have to farm-out some of the work increasing costs?
3. Does the web media provider understand how to use verbal and visual performance to create a convincing, memorable presentation, or do they substitute expensive production techniques for cost-effective psychological persuasion?
4. Does the web media provider just shoot video, or do they have the ability to analyze your offering and purpose, and focus it into a consistent, meaningful, branded presentation?
5. Does the web media provider have the ability to think strategically as well as tactically? Can they implement and repurpose your investment into your existing website, create a targeted mini campaign site, and provide alternative versions ready for ad implementation?
6. Does the web media provider have the ability to create lasting campaigns that can be rolled out and built upon, or are they just interested in making a quick buck from a one-off effort? Are they willing and able to be your ongoing web media marketing advisor?
7. Does the web media provider have the ability to turn advertising into content, and content into an experience, or can they only produce nondescript infomercials?
8. Does the web media provider understand business, marketing, branding, and what can and can not be achieved so that you have appropriate achievable expectations?
Commercial presentation production requires a multitude of skills and talents. Big companies solve the problem by hiring advertising agencies that drive the cost of production beyond what most businesses can afford. By understanding what is needed to create an effective web media presentation, you can look for a firm that possesses all the necessary talents in-house; an approach that keeps costs down, while producing an exciting Web video campaign that achieves corporate marketing objectives.
Source From SitePro News
To avoid project paralysis you should focus on certain key areas of concern from which all other issues flow. Whether upgrading your existing website or developing a new web media initiative from scratch, consider these four vital questions that need to be answered:
1. What content should be included?
2. How should content be delivered?
3. How is your website going to be marketed?
4. What will visitors remember?
What Content Should Be Included?
Content is a function of purpose. Unfortunately many websites do not have a clearly thought-out realistic purpose; and orders alone, is not an adequate website objective. Obviously every company needs sales, that is a given, but sales are a result of all the marketing elements you put in place, and the degree to which your presentation distinguishes you from your competition.
There is a prevailing view that traffic translates into sales; this viewpoint may be valid for websites whose economic model is commodity or advertising-based, but businesses that do not compete on price alone, or are more than an excuse to deliver advertising, must be structured around a purpose that is more meaningful, and far more compelling than 'give me an order or do not bother me.'
An over-emphasis on search engine friendly site design ignores the fact that when someone does a search for what you do, they will not only find you, they will also find many of your competitors as well. And even if you appear first in the search, nothing will stop potential clients from clicking on any of the other organic or advertised listings, or even the numerous Adword links on the side of the page.
The biggest website design problem companies have is not the amount of traffic generated from search engines, but rather how visitors react to your content. Are visitors engaged, enlightened, and entertained so that they stay on your site long enough to get your marketing message, and is that message compelling enough for them to remember it?
There are many misconceptions about advertising content, one of the biggest is that people hate it, but the truth is, what people hate is bad ad content; qualified clients actually look forward to good advertising because it presents a relevant problem, and provides a believable solution, in a distinctive memorable presentation.
If your content does not engage your audience with a persuasive, memorable presentation then you will never achieve whatever website marketing goals you have set.
How Should Content Be Delivered?
We know the vast majority of people do not like to read text on a computer screen, so they scan for relevant information concentrating on bulleted points, captions, and headlines, but does that truncated information really get your message across? Website text is really designed for search engine spiders, which are fine, but how about paying a little attention to people and how they absorb and remember information?
We also know people are impatient and are ready to abandon your website with the click of mouse, often in mid sentence before they ever get to the point you are trying to make. Your clients are sophisticated media consumers raised on video games and television, and are used to making quick decisions on limited information; this kind of leap-of-logic protocol demands a clever focused presentation.
Your audience will be gone in seconds no matter how convincing you think your content is, if it is not presented in a media-savvy manner that holds viewer attention, otherwise your website is nothing more than a glorified Yellow Page ad.
Audio and video has the potential to deliver information in a form and format that attracts and holds viewer interest while it makes a memorable impression. But even audio and video will fail if it is badly conceived, poorly written, and amateurishly performed.
How Is Your Website Going To Be Marketed?
Everyone is concerned with traffic and how to drive it to their websites. Search engine optimization is only one marketing technique, and it is one that ignores the impact of content on your audience in favor of attracting the attention of search engine robots. By all means, build search engine friendly elements into your site but do not ignore people-friendly elements as well.
Having text-based articles on your site is an excellent way to provide search friendly information, but presenting that same information as a professionally produced audio option, or a lively video presentation is certainly more memorable.
An entertaining web media presentation makes a lasting impression that viewers are more likely to recommend to colleagues, thereby increasing your traffic and reputation. Word-of-mouth is the best way to generate qualified traffic, and the best way to generate interest in your site is to make your site's presentation a rewarding experience.
What Will Visitors Remember?
In a brick-and-mortar environment, visitors are more likely to make a decision to purchase on the spot, simply to avoid driving halfway across town to save a few dollars, but on the Web jumping from New York to California is as easy as the click of a mouse. People are just more likely to shop-around because it is so easy.
Of course what people think they want is the lowest price, but providing the lowest price only attracts the least profitable buyers and ignores the biggest obstacle website businesses need to overcome, and that is credibility. Who are you, and can you be trusted? And after visiting ten different websites all selling the same thing, can they even remember who you are?
Your presentation has to be memorable and establish credibility so that when all the searching and browsing is finished, your site is the one they remember and go back to; your site must be the one visitor can trust to deliver what is promised.
How to Hire a Web Video Firm
The ability to produce an effective video or audio presentation requires more than the possession of some cool hardware and software. Owning an expensive camera does not make you a producer, and even the technical ability to edit does not qualify you as a commercial marketing expert. When the time comes to hire someone to add video and/or audio to your website what should you be looking for?
Below are eight things you should consider when hiring someone to create web media.
1. Can the web media provider deliver a turnkey solution from concept to implementation, or do you have to act as a producer yourself hiring different people with different skills complicating the project and creating both technical and conceptual implementation problems?
2. Can the web media provider produce everything from scripts to custom music in-house, or do they have to farm-out some of the work increasing costs?
3. Does the web media provider understand how to use verbal and visual performance to create a convincing, memorable presentation, or do they substitute expensive production techniques for cost-effective psychological persuasion?
4. Does the web media provider just shoot video, or do they have the ability to analyze your offering and purpose, and focus it into a consistent, meaningful, branded presentation?
5. Does the web media provider have the ability to think strategically as well as tactically? Can they implement and repurpose your investment into your existing website, create a targeted mini campaign site, and provide alternative versions ready for ad implementation?
6. Does the web media provider have the ability to create lasting campaigns that can be rolled out and built upon, or are they just interested in making a quick buck from a one-off effort? Are they willing and able to be your ongoing web media marketing advisor?
7. Does the web media provider have the ability to turn advertising into content, and content into an experience, or can they only produce nondescript infomercials?
8. Does the web media provider understand business, marketing, branding, and what can and can not be achieved so that you have appropriate achievable expectations?
Commercial presentation production requires a multitude of skills and talents. Big companies solve the problem by hiring advertising agencies that drive the cost of production beyond what most businesses can afford. By understanding what is needed to create an effective web media presentation, you can look for a firm that possesses all the necessary talents in-house; an approach that keeps costs down, while producing an exciting Web video campaign that achieves corporate marketing objectives.
Source From SitePro News
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Secrets to Keywords - Expanding Your List
The Primary objective of a business website is to attract potential buyers and convert them into paying customers. Relevant keywords allow you to fulfill this primary objective. They help you attract relevant traffic that want to buy the types of products you have to offer, however, the more relevant keywords that you rank well for, the more business you will do. By effectively expanding your keyword lists, you expand the potential market for your business.
There are two fundamental ways of expanding your keyword lists:
1. Long tail keywords that give you depth and allow you to dominate a particular market - so, moving from 'chocolate' to 'chocolate gifts' to 'corporate chocolate gifts'. These long tailed keywords tend to have a smaller advertiser competition, therefore you get a better PPC price and also, you dominate that specific niche market.
2. Related keywords that allow you to broaden the range of market sectors that you can target. So, if you are selling gourmet chocolate, you may find opportunities in related keywords such as 'truffles', 'fudge' or 'luxury foods'. Related keywords can make you aware of markets that you might now have considered. So in building your online business, you need to make sure you have an effective sales process in place. You will have real benefit from expanding your keyword lists.
You need to convert people who arrive at your website into paying customers. If you do not do that, then it does not matter how extensive you keyword research is, or how effective your optimization efforts are in drawing new visitors to your website. If you can not convert a visitor into a customer then your efforts will be doomed to failure.
Only when you have got an effective sales process can you get the real benefit from expanding your keyword lists. And when you have that sales process in place, like any business you will want to expand. You could add new product lines, associated products and other ways to expand your potential income from each of the customers you attract.
However, before you embark on the path of product development you need to be sure that you are getting maximum return from what you have already. Let us suppose you have got a website that performs well - you get 100,000 unique visitors per month and you have a conversion rate of 3%. That equates to 3,000 paying customers per month. Not a bad business situation to be in.
Now look at your log files. From these you see that 30% of your traffic comes from search engines. Dig a little deeper and you find that 80% of this comes from around 20 good keywords. Here is a quick calculation of what this means:
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
There are two fundamental ways of expanding your keyword lists:
1. Long tail keywords that give you depth and allow you to dominate a particular market - so, moving from 'chocolate' to 'chocolate gifts' to 'corporate chocolate gifts'. These long tailed keywords tend to have a smaller advertiser competition, therefore you get a better PPC price and also, you dominate that specific niche market.
2. Related keywords that allow you to broaden the range of market sectors that you can target. So, if you are selling gourmet chocolate, you may find opportunities in related keywords such as 'truffles', 'fudge' or 'luxury foods'. Related keywords can make you aware of markets that you might now have considered. So in building your online business, you need to make sure you have an effective sales process in place. You will have real benefit from expanding your keyword lists.
You need to convert people who arrive at your website into paying customers. If you do not do that, then it does not matter how extensive you keyword research is, or how effective your optimization efforts are in drawing new visitors to your website. If you can not convert a visitor into a customer then your efforts will be doomed to failure.
Only when you have got an effective sales process can you get the real benefit from expanding your keyword lists. And when you have that sales process in place, like any business you will want to expand. You could add new product lines, associated products and other ways to expand your potential income from each of the customers you attract.
However, before you embark on the path of product development you need to be sure that you are getting maximum return from what you have already. Let us suppose you have got a website that performs well - you get 100,000 unique visitors per month and you have a conversion rate of 3%. That equates to 3,000 paying customers per month. Not a bad business situation to be in.
Now look at your log files. From these you see that 30% of your traffic comes from search engines. Dig a little deeper and you find that 80% of this comes from around 20 good keywords. Here is a quick calculation of what this means:
- 30% of your traffic comes from search engines so that is 30,000 unique visitors per month. 80% of these come from your top 20 keywords – that is 24,000 per month.
- With a conversion rate of 3%, those 20 keywords bring you 720 paying customers every month. Now, if you could find another 20 keywords that perform just as well, then you could add another 720 customers, giving you a total of 3,720 customers per month - an increase of 24%.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Is your competition beating you with SEO?
You have optimized your website for winning keywords, are mid-way with your link building campaign, and have been going absolutely crazy creating fresh SEO friendly content that pleases the users and search engines.
You are obviously very serious about your online business, and yet you cannot seem to cross the Rank # 12, Page 2 barrier of Google search listing for your primary keywords.
A series of questions arise from the imaginary situation above:
1. Why is my ranking for the particular keyword not going up?
2. Am I missing out on any SEO strategies?
3. Maybe I am not building enough links? How much will be enough?
4. Do I have to improve my content quality?
5. The search engine has changed their algorithm.
6. Others are using illegal SEO techniques
Now while one could go over the questions in your head, read up on latest search engine algorithms, contact a SEO expert, or blindly start buying links out of desperation, there is an easier way to find your answers.
Simply ask why are the other 10 websites ranking before your website?
Now that does not mean that the above questions 1 to 6 are not relevant, but simply put, one of the easiest ways to boost your search rankings is to study the top 5 to ten websites for your keyword and then apply what working for them into your own strategies.
Have a strategy that just involves beating the competition at the ranking game. It never works. What is needed is a better balance between your company's SEO strategies and of those of your competitors.
Like in any business strategy, you have to know your competitors, study what strategies they are using, and then apply the best of those strategies to your own game plan.
In the same way, in defining the SEO path ahead for your website you must analyze your competition. What are they doing to rank in the top 10 that you are not doing? After all those websites are listed on the top for a reason, and they are applying SEO strategies that the search engine in particular seems to like.
Now while finding the answers to those questions in the real business world may be difficult, in the online world all you have to do is to right-click and view the source of the page.
The below simple steps will open up a world of information to you.
1. Does the domain name contain the keyword? If the link is a sub domain then does the sub domain contain the keyword?
2. In what Meta tags, title, etc has the competition placed their keywords?
3. Does the link name contain the keyword?
4. How many keywords are listed in the keyword tag i.e. is the page focused around one or two keywords, or is it a jumble of keywords listed out.
5. Is the title and description captivating enough? How has the keyword/s been placed in the title and description and at what position?
6. Is the page graphic intensive? Is the site using a lot flash or active server pages? Search engines cannot understand graphics, only the text it can read on the page. Make sure there is a good balance between the graphics and content.
7. How long is the body text? Writing 400 to 600 words is normally fine.
8. Has the keyword (keyword weight) been used appropriately in the body content? Ideally the first 25 words of content should be keyword rich, and the keyword should appear after every 100 words in remaining content.
9. Is the content interesting to you as the reader? Does the content follow a theme? Is the content relevant to what keyword the page has been optimized for?
10. What is the page rank of the page (You can check page rank of any website by downloading the Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com.
11. Which is the first place in the source code the keyword appears?
12. Has the keyword been used appropriately in headline tags and link text?
13. Does the site use java script, tables, frames, dynamic content, CMS etc?
14. Is the page focused around a theme?
15. How many inbound links are there to the page? You can check the link popularity of the page on www.marketleap.com? Visit the sites that have given the link. What is their page rank? What is the link text that describes the link to the website? Has the keyword been used in the link text?
16. How many pages does the site have?
17. Does the site have a good site map that lists all the content pages, videos on the site that search engine spiders can crawly easily?
18. Are there any 404 errors on the website?
19. What is the domain name extension e.g. .com,. net, .edu, .co.in
20. How long has that domain name been in existence? Search engines rank those sites better that have been around for a while, or those that plan to be around for a while?
21. How many directories has that page/website been submitted to?
22. Has the site used any spamming or illegal SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, duplicate content and other such spam techniques? If yes you can inform the search engine of the same but do so with caution. For Google: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Please note that sometimes you will find no reasons why the competitors' website is ranked above yours. And that is ok. I have experienced many cases of certain sites which go against the search engines guidelines (set by search engines themselves), and yet they rank above meticulously optimized pages.
Search engines are constantly trying to remove badly optimized or spam pages which offer little or no value to the users. Our intent here is not to focus on the missing pieces/loopholes of search engines algorithms or isolated instances of sites that do not deserve it and yet are ranking high, but to work within the framework and guidelines for the long haul.
By mapping out the answers to the above questions (preferable on a spread sheet), you will find the overall patterns of what is working for those sites and why, and then figure out ways to modify your SEO strategies to improve your rankings.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
You are obviously very serious about your online business, and yet you cannot seem to cross the Rank # 12, Page 2 barrier of Google search listing for your primary keywords.
A series of questions arise from the imaginary situation above:
1. Why is my ranking for the particular keyword not going up?
2. Am I missing out on any SEO strategies?
3. Maybe I am not building enough links? How much will be enough?
4. Do I have to improve my content quality?
5. The search engine has changed their algorithm.
6. Others are using illegal SEO techniques
Now while one could go over the questions in your head, read up on latest search engine algorithms, contact a SEO expert, or blindly start buying links out of desperation, there is an easier way to find your answers.
Simply ask why are the other 10 websites ranking before your website?
Now that does not mean that the above questions 1 to 6 are not relevant, but simply put, one of the easiest ways to boost your search rankings is to study the top 5 to ten websites for your keyword and then apply what working for them into your own strategies.
Have a strategy that just involves beating the competition at the ranking game. It never works. What is needed is a better balance between your company's SEO strategies and of those of your competitors.
Like in any business strategy, you have to know your competitors, study what strategies they are using, and then apply the best of those strategies to your own game plan.
In the same way, in defining the SEO path ahead for your website you must analyze your competition. What are they doing to rank in the top 10 that you are not doing? After all those websites are listed on the top for a reason, and they are applying SEO strategies that the search engine in particular seems to like.
Now while finding the answers to those questions in the real business world may be difficult, in the online world all you have to do is to right-click and view the source of the page.
The below simple steps will open up a world of information to you.
1. Does the domain name contain the keyword? If the link is a sub domain then does the sub domain contain the keyword?
2. In what Meta tags, title, etc has the competition placed their keywords?
3. Does the link name contain the keyword?
4. How many keywords are listed in the keyword tag i.e. is the page focused around one or two keywords, or is it a jumble of keywords listed out.
5. Is the title and description captivating enough? How has the keyword/s been placed in the title and description and at what position?
6. Is the page graphic intensive? Is the site using a lot flash or active server pages? Search engines cannot understand graphics, only the text it can read on the page. Make sure there is a good balance between the graphics and content.
7. How long is the body text? Writing 400 to 600 words is normally fine.
8. Has the keyword (keyword weight) been used appropriately in the body content? Ideally the first 25 words of content should be keyword rich, and the keyword should appear after every 100 words in remaining content.
9. Is the content interesting to you as the reader? Does the content follow a theme? Is the content relevant to what keyword the page has been optimized for?
10. What is the page rank of the page (You can check page rank of any website by downloading the Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com.
11. Which is the first place in the source code the keyword appears?
12. Has the keyword been used appropriately in headline tags and link text?
13. Does the site use java script, tables, frames, dynamic content, CMS etc?
14. Is the page focused around a theme?
15. How many inbound links are there to the page? You can check the link popularity of the page on www.marketleap.com? Visit the sites that have given the link. What is their page rank? What is the link text that describes the link to the website? Has the keyword been used in the link text?
16. How many pages does the site have?
17. Does the site have a good site map that lists all the content pages, videos on the site that search engine spiders can crawly easily?
18. Are there any 404 errors on the website?
19. What is the domain name extension e.g. .com,. net, .edu, .co.in
20. How long has that domain name been in existence? Search engines rank those sites better that have been around for a while, or those that plan to be around for a while?
21. How many directories has that page/website been submitted to?
22. Has the site used any spamming or illegal SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, duplicate content and other such spam techniques? If yes you can inform the search engine of the same but do so with caution. For Google: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Please note that sometimes you will find no reasons why the competitors' website is ranked above yours. And that is ok. I have experienced many cases of certain sites which go against the search engines guidelines (set by search engines themselves), and yet they rank above meticulously optimized pages.
Search engines are constantly trying to remove badly optimized or spam pages which offer little or no value to the users. Our intent here is not to focus on the missing pieces/loopholes of search engines algorithms or isolated instances of sites that do not deserve it and yet are ranking high, but to work within the framework and guidelines for the long haul.
By mapping out the answers to the above questions (preferable on a spread sheet), you will find the overall patterns of what is working for those sites and why, and then figure out ways to modify your SEO strategies to improve your rankings.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
10 Secrets to Using Twitter to Attract More Followers and Get More Clients
I do wonder at times if some Twitter users have any time to get any work done. Several of the more prolific ones that I follow swear they spend no more than 30 minutes a day on Twitter, but I really find that hard to believe. Many times it seems they are twittering just to say something, like "Good morning Twitterverse" when they begin their day, give more details than I want to know about what they had for lunch, what their children said to them, or when they take a nap.
I realize that this is part of the "like, know, and trust" process that enables people to get to know each other, but sometimes it is simply too much information. I am Twittering primarily to market my business. Consequently, I try and limit my personal twitters to no more than 2 per day. My clients, who create Twitter accounts for marketing, as well, tell me, "I am signed up. Now what in the world do I Twitter about? How do I market my business with this tool?"
Here are 10 strategies that I use regularly to market my business and my expertise via Twitter. Remember, you have only 140 characters for your tweet (Twitter post).
1. How you are helping clients. Talk about specific ways that your business helps clients and use their Twitter ID if you have their permission, i.e. "Just finished @clientname brainstorm great Internet marketing plan for 2009" or "Finally finished setting up Quickbooks for local hardware store -- now they can invoice their clients"
2. What you are doing in your business. This is a perfect time to tell others when you are blogging, writing an article, creating your weekly ezine, recording your podcast, i.e. "Had great interview with Jane Smith today on speaking to grow your biz. Great ideas! Subscribe to podcast & listen here (URL here)"
3. Useful tool or resource you have found. I run across these all the time in my daily activities, and Twitter is a perfect place to share. i.e. "Found great new Firefox plug-in to monitor & check multiple Gmail accounts at same time at (URL here)" or "Read great blog post on working at home with kids under 5 at (URL here)"
4. Ask a question. Need some ideas or some quick brainstorming? Twitter is an ideal place to gather opinions, i.e. "Help! Desperately seeking new laser prÃnter. Recommendations?" or "How do I find training organizations online?"
5. Conduct a survey. What do your Tweeps think about a particular issue? Ask them via Twitter, i.e. "Quick poll: Do you get more clients from Facebook or Twitter? Respond at (URL here)"
6. Report on live events. The latest Twitter trend seems to be tweeting what is happening at conferences or workshops. In order for Twitter users to follow a particular event, it is usually referred to by a name preceded by a # sign, as in #JVAlert, for example, to make it simpler for people who want to follow those posts. So, if you were at an event, you might tweet "#JVAlert John Smith speaking on affiliate programs. Just got great idea on training affiliate managers!" Just do not get so wrapped up in tweeting that you ignore the content delivered in the conference!
7. Product or service launch. If you are about to launch a new product or introduce a new product, let your Twitter followers know, i.e. "Pre-launch pricing for new DVD set about how baby boomers can start an online biz. Get $100 early bird discount at (URL here)".
8. Responding to others with advice or answers. The way to build professional relationships on Twitter is to help your tweeps. So, if someone asks a question, comments about something to which you have a response or an idea, or you want to ask a follow up question, this is the perfect place to do so.
9. Acknowledging new followers. I have noticed a recent trend of acknowledging people who have decided to follow a Twitter user in the past day or so. I initially thought that others were doing this as a measure of popularity, but what I have come to realize is that it is actually helping out the new followers because it exposes their Twitter profiles to others who may have never heard of them and who might like to follow them. So, to thank your followers, you would tweet, "Welcome new followers @twittername, @twittername, etc."
10. Automate your tweets. Many of my tweets have been automated and connected to other things I do. TwitterFeed turns all of my blog posts into tweets. aWeber turns each ezine issue into a tweet. EzineArticles.com tweets my followers every time I publish an article through their service. Typically all that is involved here is connecting the particular service to my Twitter account. Once all the services are connected, I get free and automated Twitter posts with no additional effort on my part.
Twitter can be a great time-waster or a wonderful way to market your business and leverage your expertise online. Follow these 10 strategies and you will begin to attract more followers and get more clients through social networking.
Source From SitePro News
I realize that this is part of the "like, know, and trust" process that enables people to get to know each other, but sometimes it is simply too much information. I am Twittering primarily to market my business. Consequently, I try and limit my personal twitters to no more than 2 per day. My clients, who create Twitter accounts for marketing, as well, tell me, "I am signed up. Now what in the world do I Twitter about? How do I market my business with this tool?"
Here are 10 strategies that I use regularly to market my business and my expertise via Twitter. Remember, you have only 140 characters for your tweet (Twitter post).
1. How you are helping clients. Talk about specific ways that your business helps clients and use their Twitter ID if you have their permission, i.e. "Just finished @clientname brainstorm great Internet marketing plan for 2009" or "Finally finished setting up Quickbooks for local hardware store -- now they can invoice their clients"
2. What you are doing in your business. This is a perfect time to tell others when you are blogging, writing an article, creating your weekly ezine, recording your podcast, i.e. "Had great interview with Jane Smith today on speaking to grow your biz. Great ideas! Subscribe to podcast & listen here (URL here)"
3. Useful tool or resource you have found. I run across these all the time in my daily activities, and Twitter is a perfect place to share. i.e. "Found great new Firefox plug-in to monitor & check multiple Gmail accounts at same time at (URL here)" or "Read great blog post on working at home with kids under 5 at (URL here)"
4. Ask a question. Need some ideas or some quick brainstorming? Twitter is an ideal place to gather opinions, i.e. "Help! Desperately seeking new laser prÃnter. Recommendations?" or "How do I find training organizations online?"
5. Conduct a survey. What do your Tweeps think about a particular issue? Ask them via Twitter, i.e. "Quick poll: Do you get more clients from Facebook or Twitter? Respond at (URL here)"
6. Report on live events. The latest Twitter trend seems to be tweeting what is happening at conferences or workshops. In order for Twitter users to follow a particular event, it is usually referred to by a name preceded by a # sign, as in #JVAlert, for example, to make it simpler for people who want to follow those posts. So, if you were at an event, you might tweet "#JVAlert John Smith speaking on affiliate programs. Just got great idea on training affiliate managers!" Just do not get so wrapped up in tweeting that you ignore the content delivered in the conference!
7. Product or service launch. If you are about to launch a new product or introduce a new product, let your Twitter followers know, i.e. "Pre-launch pricing for new DVD set about how baby boomers can start an online biz. Get $100 early bird discount at (URL here)".
8. Responding to others with advice or answers. The way to build professional relationships on Twitter is to help your tweeps. So, if someone asks a question, comments about something to which you have a response or an idea, or you want to ask a follow up question, this is the perfect place to do so.
9. Acknowledging new followers. I have noticed a recent trend of acknowledging people who have decided to follow a Twitter user in the past day or so. I initially thought that others were doing this as a measure of popularity, but what I have come to realize is that it is actually helping out the new followers because it exposes their Twitter profiles to others who may have never heard of them and who might like to follow them. So, to thank your followers, you would tweet, "Welcome new followers @twittername, @twittername, etc."
10. Automate your tweets. Many of my tweets have been automated and connected to other things I do. TwitterFeed turns all of my blog posts into tweets. aWeber turns each ezine issue into a tweet. EzineArticles.com tweets my followers every time I publish an article through their service. Typically all that is involved here is connecting the particular service to my Twitter account. Once all the services are connected, I get free and automated Twitter posts with no additional effort on my part.
Twitter can be a great time-waster or a wonderful way to market your business and leverage your expertise online. Follow these 10 strategies and you will begin to attract more followers and get more clients through social networking.
Source From SitePro News
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Evolution of Online Advertising Technology - More Targeting Less Privacy (Part 2)
Even with the cookie-type behavioral advertising technology, there was a way for users to prevent these ads from targeting them. They could set their machines not to accept any cookies at all by setting their browser security setting to high. This solved the privacy issue, although many websites would (intentionally or not) render improperly with this setting on.
In recent news on the behavioral advertising technology front, Microsoft announced that its newest Internet Explorer, version 8, would have a mode called "InPrivate Blocking" that would prevent cookies from being placed on any machine. At first glance, it would seem that either:
A. Microsoft is genuinely concerned about online privacy, to the point that the company would allow users to block ads that come from the Microsoft network as well, or
B. Microsoft realized that the paltry share of the ad serving market that it currently controls is not as important as inflicting serious damage to Google, which owns a much more significant slice of the online advertising.
Whatever happens with this flavor of behavioral advertising, there was recently a new type of advertising technology that raised some serious eyebrows, and this one could have been the most nefarious of all.
This latest behavioral advertising technology, brought to the surface by a company called NebuAd, is aimed at tracking user behavior at the ISP level. In other words, there are not really a whole lot you can do about it. You need your ISP to get online, so your ISP has access to the information that you are accessing when you are online. They do not need cookies, so you can erase them to your content and they will happily keep tracking along.
For the unscrupulous ISP, this is a no-brainer. You allow NebuAd to install its platform at your service hub and then you split the profits. And this is exactly what some of the smaller firms did in several "trials" of the behavioral advertising technology in the U.S.
Of course, there is a caveat - even a firm with cash flow problems and without an iota of ethics would probably want to create an opt-out system before unleashing this behavioral advertising technology platform on its users (the people that already pay them and probably assume privacy). However, there is something very interesting about how these behavioral advertising trials were done in just about every case, the ISP seemed interested in keeping the opt-out information as obscure as possible from its users.
1. CenturyTel Inc. rolled out the platform to 20,000 of its subscribers. To inform them of the new advertising technology, the company sent an email letting these subscribers know only that the privacy policy had been updated and had added a paragraph about NebuAd to the privacy policy. 85 out of 20,000 opted out.
2. Embarq Corp. rolled out the platform to 26,000 of its paid subscribers. Embarq did not bother sending any emails to its subscribers; the company merely put a general notice within its privacy notice online. A whopping total of 15 out of the 26,000 people opted out.
3. WideOpenWest (or WOW) rolled out the NebuAd platform on 330,000 customers. The only notification before the fact was a posting on the company's website, along with a reminder in billing statements to review privacy policies online. They did email the 330,000 customers to tell them about the advertising technology trial - after it had concluded. 3,355 people opted out, but that figure may be inflated, because they are not sure how many came from a single customer. WOW indeed.
4. Bresnan Communications, LLC, tried the platform on 6,000 of its customers. Unlike the other three providers above, the company did send an email directly to its users about the trial and posted notices on its website. 18 people opted out.
There were two other participants in the trial - Cable One, Inc. and Knology, Inc. For the purposes of my numbers below not because they do not support the general theory, but because they do not fit the parameters. Knology will not reveal how many customers were involved and how many opted out, although the company did post a notice on its website. Cable One, Inc. ran the test on 14,000 customers, but did not give them the chance to opt out.
To sum this up, the total number of "participants" of the four providers for which we have sufficient data was 382,000, and the number that opted out was 3,473 (which may be inflated due to the WOW factor, but let us leave that alone). The total percentage of opt-outs was less than one percent. The number of opt-outs would have been much higher if each of these providers had sent a piece of direct mail for the sole purpose of informing the subscribers that this type of behavioral advertising technology tracking method was going to take place and that they needed to opt out at such-and-such address. Better yet, they needed to opt-in at such-and-such address.
All testing for behavioral advertising technology at this stage has been halted - it would appear because the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee have decided to look into the matter. If anyone is going to be force-feeding you behavioral advertising and other targeted ads without your explicit consent, it is going to be them, not some snot-nosed little start-up.
Recently, the CEO of NebuAd announced his departure, and the company has announced plans to move forward with a more "traditional" advertising technology model (probably similar to the cookie-based platforms we have already used to worrying about). However, another company in Europe named Phorm has been having success with a similar behavioral advertising technology business model (ISP-based), but EU regulators are starting to jump into the fray.
Will there be a company that emerges that is willing to provide free or very cheap broadband to people who are willing to be targeted at the ISP level? Time will tell.
Source From SitePro News
In recent news on the behavioral advertising technology front, Microsoft announced that its newest Internet Explorer, version 8, would have a mode called "InPrivate Blocking" that would prevent cookies from being placed on any machine. At first glance, it would seem that either:
A. Microsoft is genuinely concerned about online privacy, to the point that the company would allow users to block ads that come from the Microsoft network as well, or
B. Microsoft realized that the paltry share of the ad serving market that it currently controls is not as important as inflicting serious damage to Google, which owns a much more significant slice of the online advertising.
Whatever happens with this flavor of behavioral advertising, there was recently a new type of advertising technology that raised some serious eyebrows, and this one could have been the most nefarious of all.
This latest behavioral advertising technology, brought to the surface by a company called NebuAd, is aimed at tracking user behavior at the ISP level. In other words, there are not really a whole lot you can do about it. You need your ISP to get online, so your ISP has access to the information that you are accessing when you are online. They do not need cookies, so you can erase them to your content and they will happily keep tracking along.
For the unscrupulous ISP, this is a no-brainer. You allow NebuAd to install its platform at your service hub and then you split the profits. And this is exactly what some of the smaller firms did in several "trials" of the behavioral advertising technology in the U.S.
Of course, there is a caveat - even a firm with cash flow problems and without an iota of ethics would probably want to create an opt-out system before unleashing this behavioral advertising technology platform on its users (the people that already pay them and probably assume privacy). However, there is something very interesting about how these behavioral advertising trials were done in just about every case, the ISP seemed interested in keeping the opt-out information as obscure as possible from its users.
1. CenturyTel Inc. rolled out the platform to 20,000 of its subscribers. To inform them of the new advertising technology, the company sent an email letting these subscribers know only that the privacy policy had been updated and had added a paragraph about NebuAd to the privacy policy. 85 out of 20,000 opted out.
2. Embarq Corp. rolled out the platform to 26,000 of its paid subscribers. Embarq did not bother sending any emails to its subscribers; the company merely put a general notice within its privacy notice online. A whopping total of 15 out of the 26,000 people opted out.
3. WideOpenWest (or WOW) rolled out the NebuAd platform on 330,000 customers. The only notification before the fact was a posting on the company's website, along with a reminder in billing statements to review privacy policies online. They did email the 330,000 customers to tell them about the advertising technology trial - after it had concluded. 3,355 people opted out, but that figure may be inflated, because they are not sure how many came from a single customer. WOW indeed.
4. Bresnan Communications, LLC, tried the platform on 6,000 of its customers. Unlike the other three providers above, the company did send an email directly to its users about the trial and posted notices on its website. 18 people opted out.
There were two other participants in the trial - Cable One, Inc. and Knology, Inc. For the purposes of my numbers below not because they do not support the general theory, but because they do not fit the parameters. Knology will not reveal how many customers were involved and how many opted out, although the company did post a notice on its website. Cable One, Inc. ran the test on 14,000 customers, but did not give them the chance to opt out.
To sum this up, the total number of "participants" of the four providers for which we have sufficient data was 382,000, and the number that opted out was 3,473 (which may be inflated due to the WOW factor, but let us leave that alone). The total percentage of opt-outs was less than one percent. The number of opt-outs would have been much higher if each of these providers had sent a piece of direct mail for the sole purpose of informing the subscribers that this type of behavioral advertising technology tracking method was going to take place and that they needed to opt out at such-and-such address. Better yet, they needed to opt-in at such-and-such address.
All testing for behavioral advertising technology at this stage has been halted - it would appear because the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee have decided to look into the matter. If anyone is going to be force-feeding you behavioral advertising and other targeted ads without your explicit consent, it is going to be them, not some snot-nosed little start-up.
Recently, the CEO of NebuAd announced his departure, and the company has announced plans to move forward with a more "traditional" advertising technology model (probably similar to the cookie-based platforms we have already used to worrying about). However, another company in Europe named Phorm has been having success with a similar behavioral advertising technology business model (ISP-based), but EU regulators are starting to jump into the fray.
Will there be a company that emerges that is willing to provide free or very cheap broadband to people who are willing to be targeted at the ISP level? Time will tell.
Source From SitePro News
Saturday, April 11, 2009
The Evolution of Online Advertising Technology - More Targeting, Less Privacy
The evolution of targeted online advertising is interesting, because I believe the perceived harmlessness of early advertising technology and targeting tactics lulled many people into a sense of complacency or perhaps even false security.
In the beginning of targeted online advertising, there were banner ads. As many people recall, these were supposed to drive the Internet marketing industry in its infancy. Scads of publishers paid scads of money based on a CPI (cost per impression) model or simply paid huge dollars for banner ads and other targeted online advertising on well-trafficked sites.
Then something crazy happened - nothing. It turns out that the banner advertising technology on the Internet was not the magic bullet it was purported to be. The old way of making money based on providing content (the way magazines and newspapers ran advertising) just did not seem to work in this context.
All the while, one company, originally called GoTo, then Overture, and finally bought by Yahoo!, actually formulated a targeted online advertising system that worked - keyword advertising. Companies could bid on a per-click basis for certain key terms, which sent valuable traffic to its website.
Obviously, the improvement in advertising technology had to do with the model itself, which was perpetuated on relevance. By only bidding on key phrases that you wanted, you could only pay for visitors who had already shown an interest in your products or services. This targeted online advertising model was soon copied by Google, who tweaked it and made it better.
There were not many raised eyebrows at this time, in terms of privacy. After all, the user was the one entering the query, and nobody suspected at the time that search engines might one day actually create individual profiles on users. We were all just really enjoying having the information at our fingertips without the potential hazards of ink stains and paper cuts that traditional research required.
Google then took a similar idea a step further. Instead of just serving up targeted online advertising on its home page, the company created a content distribution network called AdSense. In this program, owners of websites could sign up to have the ads placed on their sites. Google would then use a "contextual" logic to determine which ads to place where. In other words, Google would "read" the content on a page and then serve up targeted online advertising in the area provided by the site owner that was relevant to the content.
Suddenly, Gmail was offered and that raised some eyebrows. Gmail, of course, is Google's free email-based platform. Gmail gave people an (at that time) unprecedented 1 gigabyte of email space (Yahoo!, if memory serves, offered 4 megs for free email accounts and charged people for more memory). The only caveat – Gmail would use a similar advertising technology platform as AdSense, but it would decide which ads to serve up by reading through your emails.
Well, this new approach to advertising technology creeped some people out, and privacy advocates were a bit more vocal about using targeted online advertising by parsing through people's emails. A California lawmaker tried to introduce some legislation preventing the practice. International privacy groups chimed in with their own concerns. In the end, however, the fact remained that one had to sign up for a Gmail account and everyone that did was (presumably) aware of how the service worked before they did sign up. So it was an opt-in system – If you did not want Google parsing through your email and serving up relevant, targeted online advertising, you did not have to use the service.
Digital advertisers, however, saw another opportunity for targeted online advertising. They invented advertising technology that would scour through the cookies on your personal machine, figure out what you liked and disliked by looking at the types of sites you went to, and then feed up highly targeted online advertising based upon your browsing history. These companies included aQuantive, DoubleClick, ValueClick, and others. Of the companies I mentioned, only ValueClick is still independent. Google snapped up DoubleClick, while Microsoft snapped up aQuantive. Clearly, these companies believe in the future of Internet advertising technology and also believe in the long-term legality of this technology.
Now some real red flags were raised. Suffice to say that some government regulators were pretty skeptical about this new form of advertising technology and there have been numerous suggestions for regulation. The lack of uproar from the public, however, has not really created any backlash for the companies in question. It could be because there is widespread ignorance about Internet advertising technology. Perhaps a part of it is also that privacy has been eroding on the Internet one incremental step at a time.
Source From SitePro News
In the beginning of targeted online advertising, there were banner ads. As many people recall, these were supposed to drive the Internet marketing industry in its infancy. Scads of publishers paid scads of money based on a CPI (cost per impression) model or simply paid huge dollars for banner ads and other targeted online advertising on well-trafficked sites.
Then something crazy happened - nothing. It turns out that the banner advertising technology on the Internet was not the magic bullet it was purported to be. The old way of making money based on providing content (the way magazines and newspapers ran advertising) just did not seem to work in this context.
All the while, one company, originally called GoTo, then Overture, and finally bought by Yahoo!, actually formulated a targeted online advertising system that worked - keyword advertising. Companies could bid on a per-click basis for certain key terms, which sent valuable traffic to its website.
Obviously, the improvement in advertising technology had to do with the model itself, which was perpetuated on relevance. By only bidding on key phrases that you wanted, you could only pay for visitors who had already shown an interest in your products or services. This targeted online advertising model was soon copied by Google, who tweaked it and made it better.
There were not many raised eyebrows at this time, in terms of privacy. After all, the user was the one entering the query, and nobody suspected at the time that search engines might one day actually create individual profiles on users. We were all just really enjoying having the information at our fingertips without the potential hazards of ink stains and paper cuts that traditional research required.
Google then took a similar idea a step further. Instead of just serving up targeted online advertising on its home page, the company created a content distribution network called AdSense. In this program, owners of websites could sign up to have the ads placed on their sites. Google would then use a "contextual" logic to determine which ads to place where. In other words, Google would "read" the content on a page and then serve up targeted online advertising in the area provided by the site owner that was relevant to the content.
Suddenly, Gmail was offered and that raised some eyebrows. Gmail, of course, is Google's free email-based platform. Gmail gave people an (at that time) unprecedented 1 gigabyte of email space (Yahoo!, if memory serves, offered 4 megs for free email accounts and charged people for more memory). The only caveat – Gmail would use a similar advertising technology platform as AdSense, but it would decide which ads to serve up by reading through your emails.
Well, this new approach to advertising technology creeped some people out, and privacy advocates were a bit more vocal about using targeted online advertising by parsing through people's emails. A California lawmaker tried to introduce some legislation preventing the practice. International privacy groups chimed in with their own concerns. In the end, however, the fact remained that one had to sign up for a Gmail account and everyone that did was (presumably) aware of how the service worked before they did sign up. So it was an opt-in system – If you did not want Google parsing through your email and serving up relevant, targeted online advertising, you did not have to use the service.
Digital advertisers, however, saw another opportunity for targeted online advertising. They invented advertising technology that would scour through the cookies on your personal machine, figure out what you liked and disliked by looking at the types of sites you went to, and then feed up highly targeted online advertising based upon your browsing history. These companies included aQuantive, DoubleClick, ValueClick, and others. Of the companies I mentioned, only ValueClick is still independent. Google snapped up DoubleClick, while Microsoft snapped up aQuantive. Clearly, these companies believe in the future of Internet advertising technology and also believe in the long-term legality of this technology.
Now some real red flags were raised. Suffice to say that some government regulators were pretty skeptical about this new form of advertising technology and there have been numerous suggestions for regulation. The lack of uproar from the public, however, has not really created any backlash for the companies in question. It could be because there is widespread ignorance about Internet advertising technology. Perhaps a part of it is also that privacy has been eroding on the Internet one incremental step at a time.
Source From SitePro News
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Has the Fuse Been Lit For A Vertical and Social Search Explosion?
From Yahoo: BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.
BOSS is an effort to update the model, and develop a stronger footing in search. If you think about it, search engine progress has been slow lately, especially compared to the evolution of the rest of the web. The best way to make fast, impact headway is to peel away from horizontal search, and test out new Web 2.0 breeds of vertical search products.
Traditionally, there have been heavy risks and costs associated with this kind of venture. With BOSS, hopefully the tides can turn, and a plethora of attempts that were not previously possible based on these concerns, may suddenly ascend. Sure, there will be casualties, but it is much less likely to be Yahoo if they are the backbone to all these ventures. Yahoo is probably thinking, "If we ca not beat them, we can be their engine."
With social computing slated to reach everything from cell phone platforms, webmail accounts, video game consoles, and desktop applications, it is logical that it will hit search in a big way. The ball is rolling – the new engine Me.dium is a social search engine running off BOSS, and is ultimately supposed to be a crowd-controlled engine.
If there is one truism about the web, it is that things move incredibly fast. A site like eBay was nothing as a start-up in 1995, and a household name in 1998 – in web years, that is incredibly fast, especially considering that was more than 10 years ago. The novelty of bidding and the value of discounts, feedback, and communication ultimately made the spirit of purchasing online seem less like a fad. Granted, there was still a lot of fear about fraud and security then, but once those safety concerns started to quell (mainly in part to eBay's efforts, Paypal, and users' word of mouth), millions of people were at least semi-consciously accepting online ecommerce across the board.
All ecommerce, from Amazon to shopping verticals/ engines, were benefactors from this new phenomenon. The web is always accepting of the next big cultural influencer, and is usually poked by the last big sensation - in this case (as of 2008), social networks. History suggests it is going to happen fast, and sudden. In today's web-world, a 10 year span is a 1-2 year span; or, a blink of an eye to a busy human-being.
Well, it certainly suggests marketers will have to be on their toes, but this should still provide many new branding and ROI opportunities if leveraged correctly. It will most certainly lead to a higher likelihood of targeted, converting traffic. That is a huge benefit. Your pre-qualified visitors will be even more qualified. SEO 2.0 will likely become the norm, and leave the beta stage it is in now.
The idea of marrying SEO and communities may seem difficult, but it simply requires more marketing and visitor understanding than traditional SEO provides. SEO will simply have to morph in tandem with the search engines, and leave behind some of the general exposure tactics. Not only will a vertical and social affect the actions of your users, but it will likely start to play a more important role to your CPC quality scores, too, as visitors will start to become accustomed to improved results and search experience.
Some research firms think vertical search might draw a billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2009; hundreds of new engines are already popping up without the help of BOSS now, but this may grow exponentially making these huge profits a real possibility.
It is an exciting time to be on the web. It will be great to see what hands the other search properties are holding. In July Google showed their hand with their testing of social computing in their platform. This is just the beginning of something very, very cool.
Source From SEO News
BOSS is an effort to update the model, and develop a stronger footing in search. If you think about it, search engine progress has been slow lately, especially compared to the evolution of the rest of the web. The best way to make fast, impact headway is to peel away from horizontal search, and test out new Web 2.0 breeds of vertical search products.
Traditionally, there have been heavy risks and costs associated with this kind of venture. With BOSS, hopefully the tides can turn, and a plethora of attempts that were not previously possible based on these concerns, may suddenly ascend. Sure, there will be casualties, but it is much less likely to be Yahoo if they are the backbone to all these ventures. Yahoo is probably thinking, "If we ca not beat them, we can be their engine."
With social computing slated to reach everything from cell phone platforms, webmail accounts, video game consoles, and desktop applications, it is logical that it will hit search in a big way. The ball is rolling – the new engine Me.dium is a social search engine running off BOSS, and is ultimately supposed to be a crowd-controlled engine.
If there is one truism about the web, it is that things move incredibly fast. A site like eBay was nothing as a start-up in 1995, and a household name in 1998 – in web years, that is incredibly fast, especially considering that was more than 10 years ago. The novelty of bidding and the value of discounts, feedback, and communication ultimately made the spirit of purchasing online seem less like a fad. Granted, there was still a lot of fear about fraud and security then, but once those safety concerns started to quell (mainly in part to eBay's efforts, Paypal, and users' word of mouth), millions of people were at least semi-consciously accepting online ecommerce across the board.
All ecommerce, from Amazon to shopping verticals/ engines, were benefactors from this new phenomenon. The web is always accepting of the next big cultural influencer, and is usually poked by the last big sensation - in this case (as of 2008), social networks. History suggests it is going to happen fast, and sudden. In today's web-world, a 10 year span is a 1-2 year span; or, a blink of an eye to a busy human-being.
Well, it certainly suggests marketers will have to be on their toes, but this should still provide many new branding and ROI opportunities if leveraged correctly. It will most certainly lead to a higher likelihood of targeted, converting traffic. That is a huge benefit. Your pre-qualified visitors will be even more qualified. SEO 2.0 will likely become the norm, and leave the beta stage it is in now.
The idea of marrying SEO and communities may seem difficult, but it simply requires more marketing and visitor understanding than traditional SEO provides. SEO will simply have to morph in tandem with the search engines, and leave behind some of the general exposure tactics. Not only will a vertical and social affect the actions of your users, but it will likely start to play a more important role to your CPC quality scores, too, as visitors will start to become accustomed to improved results and search experience.
Some research firms think vertical search might draw a billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2009; hundreds of new engines are already popping up without the help of BOSS now, but this may grow exponentially making these huge profits a real possibility.
It is an exciting time to be on the web. It will be great to see what hands the other search properties are holding. In July Google showed their hand with their testing of social computing in their platform. This is just the beginning of something very, very cool.
Source From SEO News
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Has the Fuse Been Lit For A Vertical and Social Search Explosion?
From Yahoo: BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.
BOSS is an effort to update the model, and develop a stronger footing in search. If you think about it, search engine progress has been slow lately, especially compared to the evolution of the rest of the web. The best way to make fast, impact headway is to peel away from horizontal search, and test out new Web 2.0 breeds of vertical search products.
Traditionally, there have been heavy risks and costs associated with this kind of venture. With BOSS, hopefully the tides can turn, and a plethora of attempts that were not previously possible based on these concerns, may suddenly ascend. Sure, there will be casualties, but it is much less likely to be Yahoo if they are the backbone to all these ventures. Yahoo is probably thinking, "If we ca not beat them, we can be their engine."
With social computing slated to reach everything from cell phone platforms, webmail accounts, video game consoles, and desktop applications, it is logical that it will hit search in a big way. The ball is rolling – the new engine Me.dium is a social search engine running off BOSS, and is ultimately supposed to be a crowd-controlled engine.
If there is one truism about the web, it is that things move incredibly fast. A site like eBay was nothing as a start-up in 1995, and a household name in 1998 – in web years, that is incredibly fast, especially considering that was more than 10 years ago. The novelty of bidding and the value of discounts, feedback, and communication ultimately made the spirit of purchasing online seem less like a fad. Granted, there was still a lot of fear about fraud and security then, but once those safety concerns started to quell (mainly in part to eBay's efforts, Paypal, and users' word of mouth), millions of people were at least semi-consciously accepting online ecommerce across the board.
All ecommerce, from Amazon to shopping verticals/ engines, were benefactors from this new phenomenon. The web is always accepting of the next big cultural influencer, and is usually poked by the last big sensation - in this case (as of 2008), social networks. History suggests it is going to happen fast, and sudden. In today's web-world, a 10 year span is a 1-2 year span; or, a blink of an eye to a busy human-being.
Well, it certainly suggests marketers will have to be on their toes, but this should still provide many new branding and ROI opportunities if leveraged correctly. It will most certainly lead to a higher likelihood of targeted, converting traffic. That is a huge benefit. Your pre-qualified visitors will be even more qualified. SEO 2.0 will likely become the norm, and leave the beta stage it is in now.
The idea of marrying SEO and communities may seem difficult, but it simply requires more marketing and visitor understanding than traditional SEO provides. SEO will simply have to morph in tandem with the search engines, and leave behind some of the general exposure tactics. Not only will a vertical and social affect the actions of your users, but it will likely start to play a more important role to your CPC quality scores, too, as visitors will start to become accustomed to improved results and search experience.
Some research firms think vertical search might draw a billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2009; hundreds of new engines are already popping up without the help of BOSS now, but this may grow exponentially making these huge profits a real possibility.
It is an exciting time to be on the web. It will be great to see what hands the other search properties are holding. In July Google showed their hand with their testing of social computing in their platform. This is just the beginning of something very, very cool.
Source From SEO News
BOSS is an effort to update the model, and develop a stronger footing in search. If you think about it, search engine progress has been slow lately, especially compared to the evolution of the rest of the web. The best way to make fast, impact headway is to peel away from horizontal search, and test out new Web 2.0 breeds of vertical search products.
Traditionally, there have been heavy risks and costs associated with this kind of venture. With BOSS, hopefully the tides can turn, and a plethora of attempts that were not previously possible based on these concerns, may suddenly ascend. Sure, there will be casualties, but it is much less likely to be Yahoo if they are the backbone to all these ventures. Yahoo is probably thinking, "If we ca not beat them, we can be their engine."
With social computing slated to reach everything from cell phone platforms, webmail accounts, video game consoles, and desktop applications, it is logical that it will hit search in a big way. The ball is rolling – the new engine Me.dium is a social search engine running off BOSS, and is ultimately supposed to be a crowd-controlled engine.
If there is one truism about the web, it is that things move incredibly fast. A site like eBay was nothing as a start-up in 1995, and a household name in 1998 – in web years, that is incredibly fast, especially considering that was more than 10 years ago. The novelty of bidding and the value of discounts, feedback, and communication ultimately made the spirit of purchasing online seem less like a fad. Granted, there was still a lot of fear about fraud and security then, but once those safety concerns started to quell (mainly in part to eBay's efforts, Paypal, and users' word of mouth), millions of people were at least semi-consciously accepting online ecommerce across the board.
All ecommerce, from Amazon to shopping verticals/ engines, were benefactors from this new phenomenon. The web is always accepting of the next big cultural influencer, and is usually poked by the last big sensation - in this case (as of 2008), social networks. History suggests it is going to happen fast, and sudden. In today's web-world, a 10 year span is a 1-2 year span; or, a blink of an eye to a busy human-being.
Well, it certainly suggests marketers will have to be on their toes, but this should still provide many new branding and ROI opportunities if leveraged correctly. It will most certainly lead to a higher likelihood of targeted, converting traffic. That is a huge benefit. Your pre-qualified visitors will be even more qualified. SEO 2.0 will likely become the norm, and leave the beta stage it is in now.
The idea of marrying SEO and communities may seem difficult, but it simply requires more marketing and visitor understanding than traditional SEO provides. SEO will simply have to morph in tandem with the search engines, and leave behind some of the general exposure tactics. Not only will a vertical and social affect the actions of your users, but it will likely start to play a more important role to your CPC quality scores, too, as visitors will start to become accustomed to improved results and search experience.
Some research firms think vertical search might draw a billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2009; hundreds of new engines are already popping up without the help of BOSS now, but this may grow exponentially making these huge profits a real possibility.
It is an exciting time to be on the web. It will be great to see what hands the other search properties are holding. In July Google showed their hand with their testing of social computing in their platform. This is just the beginning of something very, very cool.
Source From SEO News
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Dominate Google Rankings Quick and Easy (2)
Competition:
Competition: Less is Better: "Less is better." Well that is the understatement of the year. But how do you know how much competition you will be up against? It is easy. Simple division does the trick nicely. Here is how...
Google It: Go to Google and paste in your first keyword phrase. Look in the upper right area of the page and see how many pages you will be competing against if you try to optimize for that keyword (Results 1 - 10 of about 123,000,000 for "keyword".) Now record that number in the cell to the right of "searches performed." You can go ahead and do the same for each keyword. When you have all the info you need have Excel divide the number of "competing pages" by the number of "searches performed." The lower the resulting ratio; the better your chances. Your best bet is to take the lowest ratio number with the highest number of "searches performed." This is your optimal target. Even More: But we are not done yet. Now find the next best two runner-up keywords and write them down in order of importance. We will need them soon.
Content:
The King Lives: You are probably sick of hearing it but content really is king. Developing search engine friendly, well optimized content is key to your success. Google can read a Web page just like a person thanks to its natural text algorithm. So keyword spamming and robotic writing do not work with Google. But here is what DOES work...
Keep it real: Call a close friend and tell him or her exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Then as quick as you can write it down, as close to "word for word" as you can remember. Just let the words flow. You can fix spelling and grammar later.
Fitting In: Now, with your list of three keywords, go back through your text and fit your most important keyword as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible. Now go ahead and place your number two keyword someplace else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. Your third keyword should go into the beginning of the second paragraph if possible.
Now use only one of your keywords for each of the next three paragraphs. Try to make them fit naturally toward the beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.
Throw in a Curve: Now use a reverse order for the very last paragraph. Put your least important keyword at the beginning of the paragraph and your best keyword at the end. This shows consistency.
Last but not least, do not repeat any keyword more than three or four times on a page. I stick with a 3 x 3 method and it works great (3 keywords each mentioned 3 times over the course of about 9 paragraphs.)
Getting Links and Monitoring Your Site:
Inbound Links: Having high quality inbound links can account for more than 75% of your search engine ranking success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top. At the same time you need to monitor your progress and your site's status. This will tell you not just where you are - but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we had to do all of the link work and monitoring by hand. And believe me, it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per week; per site). My advice is to find a good SEO tool and let it do the tough and repetitive work for you. If you get hold of the right product, it is the best money you will ever spend.
I started out with Web Position Pro and used it for a couple years but switched to another tool that has automated linking, which I find to be the most time-consuming and now most important aspect of SEO on Google. This was probably a good call since Web Position was recently banned by Google for abuse.
Now you are ready to dominate Google. Good luck!
Source From SitePro News
Competition: Less is Better: "Less is better." Well that is the understatement of the year. But how do you know how much competition you will be up against? It is easy. Simple division does the trick nicely. Here is how...
Google It: Go to Google and paste in your first keyword phrase. Look in the upper right area of the page and see how many pages you will be competing against if you try to optimize for that keyword (Results 1 - 10 of about 123,000,000 for "keyword".) Now record that number in the cell to the right of "searches performed." You can go ahead and do the same for each keyword. When you have all the info you need have Excel divide the number of "competing pages" by the number of "searches performed." The lower the resulting ratio; the better your chances. Your best bet is to take the lowest ratio number with the highest number of "searches performed." This is your optimal target. Even More: But we are not done yet. Now find the next best two runner-up keywords and write them down in order of importance. We will need them soon.
Content:
The King Lives: You are probably sick of hearing it but content really is king. Developing search engine friendly, well optimized content is key to your success. Google can read a Web page just like a person thanks to its natural text algorithm. So keyword spamming and robotic writing do not work with Google. But here is what DOES work...
Keep it real: Call a close friend and tell him or her exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Then as quick as you can write it down, as close to "word for word" as you can remember. Just let the words flow. You can fix spelling and grammar later.
Fitting In: Now, with your list of three keywords, go back through your text and fit your most important keyword as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible. Now go ahead and place your number two keyword someplace else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. Your third keyword should go into the beginning of the second paragraph if possible.
Now use only one of your keywords for each of the next three paragraphs. Try to make them fit naturally toward the beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.
Throw in a Curve: Now use a reverse order for the very last paragraph. Put your least important keyword at the beginning of the paragraph and your best keyword at the end. This shows consistency.
Last but not least, do not repeat any keyword more than three or four times on a page. I stick with a 3 x 3 method and it works great (3 keywords each mentioned 3 times over the course of about 9 paragraphs.)
Getting Links and Monitoring Your Site:
Inbound Links: Having high quality inbound links can account for more than 75% of your search engine ranking success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top. At the same time you need to monitor your progress and your site's status. This will tell you not just where you are - but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we had to do all of the link work and monitoring by hand. And believe me, it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per week; per site). My advice is to find a good SEO tool and let it do the tough and repetitive work for you. If you get hold of the right product, it is the best money you will ever spend.
I started out with Web Position Pro and used it for a couple years but switched to another tool that has automated linking, which I find to be the most time-consuming and now most important aspect of SEO on Google. This was probably a good call since Web Position was recently banned by Google for abuse.
Now you are ready to dominate Google. Good luck!
Source From SitePro News
Friday, April 3, 2009
Dominate Google Rankings Quick and Easy
Does dominating Google rankings quick and easy sound too good to be true? It really is not. Following are a bunch of surefire SEO tips that have kept hundreds of clients' sites on top of Google for years, with new ones every month.
There is a lot to cover and I will keep the info short and sweet. Let us start with the domain name.
Domain Names:
Age: Make sure your domain name is at least six months old. If it is more than a year old, that is even better. Google often (but not always) likes domains to be at least six months old before indexing the site. How do they know? They use a "whois" database like the one at: http://www.allwhois.com
Go there and enter your domain if you want to see what Google can instantly know about your site.
TLD Type: TLD stands for Top Level Domain, which is to say the letters after the dot. The best ones to have are ".com, .net. .org and .edu." These get the most play in Google's top 3 rankings for just about every keyword you can imagine, with ".com" and ".edu" being the best.
Embedded Keywords: If you have your main keyword as a dotcom domain name with even just halfway decent page text and some good inbound links you can usually nail number one on Google for that keyword.
Dashes: Having a dash in your domain name might be bad for branding, but it can open whole new doors of opportunity for your search engine optimization efforts. You see Google treats a dash as a null value and can take them or leave them with equal indifference. So, if your main keyword phrase is a few words long, you can place a dash between each word. If that is taken, just try one dash separating the first and second words but leave the second and third word grouped together. You get the idea. Just keep trying combinations until you have one that works and scoop up the domain. Even if you sit on it for six months, you will have it when you want it.
Now on to the next big item; keywords. The best keyword embedded domain name in the world will mean little if nobody is searching for that keyword. That said; let us find the best keywords possible for your site. Here is how.
Keywords:
Keywords in Demand: Let us snoop into Google's keyword database and find some winners. Go to Google Keyword Tool and enter any keyword or phrase you think your target audience is looking for. Now click on the top header link to sort by desired search volume to see which words get the most searches.
Go Long: And do not be afraid to use longer keywords as long as they get plenty of searches. Not only will this narrow the tasks of your workload for actual optimization but it will open all kinds of new options for finding great (dash laden) domain names and even help cut back on your competition.
Narrow Your Field: Now take the top ten or so relevant keywords and phrases and list them in order of "Approximate Monthly Searches Performed." You might want to paste the keyword into one column of a spreadsheet and the number of searches into the next column. This next part takes a bit of math so we might as well let Excel do it.
To be continued..
There is a lot to cover and I will keep the info short and sweet. Let us start with the domain name.
Domain Names:
Age: Make sure your domain name is at least six months old. If it is more than a year old, that is even better. Google often (but not always) likes domains to be at least six months old before indexing the site. How do they know? They use a "whois" database like the one at: http://www.allwhois.com
Go there and enter your domain if you want to see what Google can instantly know about your site.
TLD Type: TLD stands for Top Level Domain, which is to say the letters after the dot. The best ones to have are ".com, .net. .org and .edu." These get the most play in Google's top 3 rankings for just about every keyword you can imagine, with ".com" and ".edu" being the best.
Embedded Keywords: If you have your main keyword as a dotcom domain name with even just halfway decent page text and some good inbound links you can usually nail number one on Google for that keyword.
Dashes: Having a dash in your domain name might be bad for branding, but it can open whole new doors of opportunity for your search engine optimization efforts. You see Google treats a dash as a null value and can take them or leave them with equal indifference. So, if your main keyword phrase is a few words long, you can place a dash between each word. If that is taken, just try one dash separating the first and second words but leave the second and third word grouped together. You get the idea. Just keep trying combinations until you have one that works and scoop up the domain. Even if you sit on it for six months, you will have it when you want it.
Now on to the next big item; keywords. The best keyword embedded domain name in the world will mean little if nobody is searching for that keyword. That said; let us find the best keywords possible for your site. Here is how.
Keywords:
Keywords in Demand: Let us snoop into Google's keyword database and find some winners. Go to Google Keyword Tool and enter any keyword or phrase you think your target audience is looking for. Now click on the top header link to sort by desired search volume to see which words get the most searches.
Go Long: And do not be afraid to use longer keywords as long as they get plenty of searches. Not only will this narrow the tasks of your workload for actual optimization but it will open all kinds of new options for finding great (dash laden) domain names and even help cut back on your competition.
Narrow Your Field: Now take the top ten or so relevant keywords and phrases and list them in order of "Approximate Monthly Searches Performed." You might want to paste the keyword into one column of a spreadsheet and the number of searches into the next column. This next part takes a bit of math so we might as well let Excel do it.
To be continued..
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
How to Use Forums to Drive Laser Targeted Traffic to Your Site in 7 Steps
There is no doubt about the fact that Forum posting works when it comes to driving traffic to a site. On many occasions, Many people have successfully used posting to forums to gain exposure to my affiliate landing page, squeeze page, sales page, etc.
If you are really smart, the goal of every forum post you make is to get as many people to subscribe to your list! Posting to forums is a very fast and powerful way to build your base of subscribers in as little as 30 minutes. Below is a step-by-step guide:
Step 1 - Find Forums About Your Niche Very Easily
Just Google the following:
+"your niche" +forum
or
+"your niche" +"discussion board"
For instance, if I am looking for Forums in the Internet Marketing field, I type +"Internet Marketing" +forum. The results show the top Internet marketing Forums such as:
www.im4newbies.com/forum
www.warriorforum.com
www.forums.digitalpoint.com
Step 2 - Join the Forums and Set Up Your Signature
Remember to include your website address in your signature. Signature is another name for your resource box. Your resource box is just like an 'about the author info'. This appears at the end of every post you make and drives traffic to your website.
Step 3 - Read the Rules and Regulations of the Forum Before Posting
This ensures that your posts are not deleted by the Administrators of the Forum. Now, do not go about spamming all members of the Forum with your website advert. In fact, I will advise you not to post an obvious ad. It is a pure waste of time because it will be deleted.
Step 4 - Ask for Input
Approach from a weak man's position. Assuming you have written an article on your site entitled "13 Ways to Drive Traffic to a New Site." You could make a post asking folks to check out the article and see if you missed anything. Or you can ask for additional points to add to your article. Of course you will have your opt in box at the end of the article with a compelling offering.
Let us say you have written an article on meeting the right partner. You could post a message like this: "If you had a chance to learn how to meet your right partner now, what would you do?"
It is a great way to get the attention of forum members to your article. You also get them engaged in the article by asking for their input. And who knows, you may also get other publishers who would use your content in their engines, thereby getting more exposure for your site.
To be continued..
If you are really smart, the goal of every forum post you make is to get as many people to subscribe to your list! Posting to forums is a very fast and powerful way to build your base of subscribers in as little as 30 minutes. Below is a step-by-step guide:
Step 1 - Find Forums About Your Niche Very Easily
Just Google the following:
+"your niche" +forum
or
+"your niche" +"discussion board"
For instance, if I am looking for Forums in the Internet Marketing field, I type +"Internet Marketing" +forum. The results show the top Internet marketing Forums such as:
www.im4newbies.com/forum
www.warriorforum.com
www.forums.digitalpoint.com
Step 2 - Join the Forums and Set Up Your Signature
Remember to include your website address in your signature. Signature is another name for your resource box. Your resource box is just like an 'about the author info'. This appears at the end of every post you make and drives traffic to your website.
Step 3 - Read the Rules and Regulations of the Forum Before Posting
This ensures that your posts are not deleted by the Administrators of the Forum. Now, do not go about spamming all members of the Forum with your website advert. In fact, I will advise you not to post an obvious ad. It is a pure waste of time because it will be deleted.
Step 4 - Ask for Input
Approach from a weak man's position. Assuming you have written an article on your site entitled "13 Ways to Drive Traffic to a New Site." You could make a post asking folks to check out the article and see if you missed anything. Or you can ask for additional points to add to your article. Of course you will have your opt in box at the end of the article with a compelling offering.
Let us say you have written an article on meeting the right partner. You could post a message like this: "If you had a chance to learn how to meet your right partner now, what would you do?"
It is a great way to get the attention of forum members to your article. You also get them engaged in the article by asking for their input. And who knows, you may also get other publishers who would use your content in their engines, thereby getting more exposure for your site.
To be continued..
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