Your company website can stand out and attract visitors in three simple ways. It must draw visitors in, keep visitors on the website long enough to understand what you can offer and keep visitors coming back for more.
If you feel that your current website is under-performing and the subject of online marketing brings you out in a cold sweat then check out our simple guide below to help you understand what you need to do the following steps.
1) Entice visitors
Your website has around three seconds to catch your visitors' attention or they are likely to click away. In order to keep your visitors interested you need a website which has an original design and layout and an enticing headline on every page.
Take a look at your website, are you happy with your design? Do you feel your headlines will compel your visitors to keep reading? If the answer to either of these questions is a no then it is time to make sure your website is reaching its potential.
Be honest about what your strengths are, if you have a great business brain but writing is not your forte then contact a website copywriter to help you with the content on your website. Website copywriters are paid to write headlines that draw visitors in and make sales.
Also, contact a selection of web designers who have a good knowledge of marketing and communicating your message to your visitors. Ask them for ideas and a quote to see what they would do differently in terms of the overall look and feel of your site. it is never too late for a re-brand; if your site has been up for some time and is not attracting visitors then you need to start to make changes.
2) Hold your visitors' attention
You should constantly be monitoring how long your visitors stay on your website for. If the average visitor sticks around for thirty seconds or less then it probably means that they have taken a look your website and then clicked away.
You need to be aiming to keep the visitor on your website for at least a few minutes so that they can read three or four of your main website pages otherwise they will not have a true understanding of what you can offer them.
Informative and enticing website copy is one way to hold your visitors' attention. Your website copy needs to be written to appeal to your target audience. It needs to be interesting, compelling and persuasive and you need strong calls to action on your website pages so that your visitors can easily contact you or buy from you.
If you do not have a dedicated marketing department or someone who specializes in online marketing then consider contacting a website copywriter. Website copywriters specialize in writing persuasive and targeted content for the web to help businesses generate inquiries and make sales.
3) Keep visitors coming back
Not all of your visitors will buy your products or contact you to make an inquiry the first time they visit your website. The majority of online customers will either compare your service and products to your competitors or take some time to consider their purchase before making an investment.
You need to make sure that your website has enough compelling, informative and interesting content to make visitors return. Weekly updates to your website via blogs and articles can provide a human element to the business and they are also a great way to share company news and advertise promotions.
It can take time to write the content for these so if you do not have someone in house who can provide the copy for blog posts and articles then consider contacting a website copywriter. Experienced website copywriters can produce compelling blog posts and articles for a variety of businesses in different industries, some even offer discounts for multiple articles or blog posts.
Source From SitePro News
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
SEO Results Take Time
There is one important factor to remember whenever you are involved in improving the organic rankings of a website, and that factor is time. One of the most common questions I receive as an SEO is How long till I start to see results? This article is dedicated to anyone who has ever asked that question.
It does not matter what industry you are involved in, or what techniques you follow, in all cases you will be a prisoner of time. In the vast majority of cases search engine rankings do not come over night.
Regardless of the scope of the SEO campaign you are undertaking, you will have to wait for results. It does not matter if you are undertaking a massive link building and social media campaign combined with extreme content development, you will still have to wait for those results. Just how long you need to wait however, will depend on a large number of factors.
In this article I will discuss some of these factors and give a few scenarios to help you gauge how long you may need to wait to start seeing results.
Factors to Consider
How long it will take for rankings starts with a few key factors:
How optimized is your site before SEO?
If your established site has no optimization in place at all, and has navigation that is blocking search engine spiders, sometimes opening the site up can result in a rather quick turn-around for results.
How many inbound links does your site have?
If you have an old site with no links, this will add to the time you need to wait. If you have a number of links already, Google will probably be in to check out things within a week or so of updating.
How new is your website?
A brand new site with no links has to wait. Google may find you, but probably not. If you do nothing, your site may not ever be indexed, you must get a few links, and an XML sitemap if you want to stand a chance with a new site. Go here for info on how to install and set up an XML site map.
How flexible is your site?
If your site utilizes a content management system, how flexible is this system for customization? If your current back end will not allow for SEO based changes, this will drastically slow down your ranking progress.
How competitive is your target phrase?
This is huge. The more competitive a target phrase is, the longer you will likely have to wait, and the more links, pages, and fresh content you will probably need. Picking a target phrase that has searches, but modest competition is your best bet to get started. As long as your "dream phrase" is relevant, you can go after the bigger fish once your site has some links, content, and has started to find its place on the map.
Is your site positioned to be able to compete?
Take a look at the top 10 sites for your target phrase. If on average the ranking sites have 10,000 inbound links and 1,000 plus pages, and your site has 7 links and 12 pages, you are likely doomed. You do not need to match the numbers of the top 10, but you do need to be in the ball park. If the top 10 is littered with all the big guys like Amazon, eBay, and the dreaded Wikipedia, you might just want to consider reevaluating your goals. If your site is not in a comparable position with the rest of the top 10, then you need to either step up your efforts in order to compete, or plan on waiting a very long time.
Get Google to Visit Your Site
How long it takes to start seeing results starts with Google. Once Google spiders your site you will still have to wait for the updated cache to appear in Google's index, and in most cases, you will have to wait longer still to see any impact in the search rankings.
In most cases getting Google to your site is relatively easy, but it can sometimes take a month or longer. Even a site with some inbound links and an XML sitemap, may have to wait a while.
Typically an established active website will seldom have to wait more than a month to get Google's eyes; however, if your site has been sitting stagnant for several years, it may take longer.
How Long Will it Take For Rankings?
You now know some of the determining factors, but how long will it take for your site to see an improvement in its organic rankings? I really wish there was a solid answer to this question, but with such a vast array of variables there is no way to know for sure. I can say however, that from experience, the time lines below are fairly accurate.
Niche Industry
A niche industry is represented by phrases that are relatively specific, such as "widgets Bellingham". While they do not require a geographic modifier, phrases focused on a very specific area often are considered niche. Phrases used for a niche site will also often return less than 100,000 results in a Google search. The top 10 ranking sites will also often have less than 100 inbound links each.
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: Possibly as little as a few months
- Established Site: Potentially it could literally be over night, but most likely around 6 weeks.
Medium Industry
Medium Industry terms are slightly more general, but still include some kind of modifier, such as a state or color; "Washington Widgets" or "Blue Widgets". These phrases often represent no more than a few million results in a typical Google search with the top 10 ranking sites having between 100-1,000 inbound links.
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: 6 months to a year
- Established Site: 2-4 months
Highly Competitive Industry
These pages are those with phrases that are rather broad and seldom have any modifiers, such as simply "widgets". You will often find tens or even hundreds of millions of competing pages in Google for your target phrase. Often the links required for the top 10 will be in the thousands, or tens of thousands (sometimes even in the millions).
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: Anywhere from 1 to 5 years
- Established Site: Could be as long as a year or more
For a brand new site, starting with nothing, in most cases you will be looking at around a year before you start to see significant ranking changes. You may get the odd ranking here and there, and start to see some traffic, but for any phrases that are remotely competitive, it can take quite a while. Unless you have a very tight niche, expect to wait at least 6 months before you see any movement at all. This is not to say that you can not get quick results, but in the majority of cases it is quite rare.
For more established sites, rankings tend to come much more quickly. One significant factor in determining time is links. If your established site has lots, but the site itself is simply lacking fundamental SEO or proper navigation, then you can sometimes see results rather quickly. If you have no links and need to build them, it significantly increases the wait time. Even for an established site, achieving links in a competitive industry can still take some time.
Rankings Are Taking Forever
There are a number of reasons why your site may not achieve results. If you find that your campaign has been going on for a long time and you have seen no movement what-so-ever, it is possible that one of the following is hindering your efforts.
Spamming & Penalties
In some cases your site may take forever to achieve rankings, or the rankings may not come at all. If your site has been previously penalized for spamming, you absolutely must clean up all traces of the past dirtiness. Once the site is entirely cleaned up, then you can apply for re-inclusion. This is certainly no assurance that Google will ever pay your site any attention again, but it is the first step to the land of maybe.
Duplicate Content
If your site has utilized mass amounts of duplicate content, chances are you will not ever see rankings until you replace it all with something original and meaningful. There is no "duplicate content" penalty per-se, but you are essentially penalizing yourself if you copy content. Google tends to look at the first instance it finds online for a piece of content as the official source (not always the case).
If you copy content that is already out there and indexed by Google, they will discount your content as it is already indexed somewhere else, and your site or page will simply not get any rankings for it - and rightfully so.
Links
If your site has no links, you probably will not get any rankings, even after you are fully indexed. This is not always the case, I have seen sites rank well for various phrases with zero inbound links - but it is rare, and should not be relied on. Build up your links – period.
On the flip side of this, letlet uss say your site has thousands of links, but they are from free for all sites, link farms, or "bad neighborhoods", and so on - they will not help you. These links will not necessarily hurt you, but will be essentially ignored. You need quality, relevant links.
Competition
You just may be out of your league. If you have a small operation, and are competing for a major ultra competitive term, chances are you will not ever see the light of day. Not to say it is not possible, but if you are competing in a well established industry where literally 10's of thousands of links are required, and your target phrase is experiencing millions of searches a month, you need to weigh your targets. Chances are your keywords need to be re-evaluated as your chances of success are slim.
Not Listening
If your SEO gives you actionable recommendations, follow them. Recommendations are given for a reason, to help you achieve rankings. If you are not willing to implement what is suggested, then your campaign may go nowhere. I have seen websites fail to rank simply because clients ignored recommendations. Your SEO will not be able to help you if you refuse to implement their advice.
Regardless of industry and target phrases, you will have to wait for your search results. Just how long you will wait varies on far too many factors to give a solid number, but expect to wait for results anywhere from a few days to several years. It is the best time frame I can give without knowing specific details of your site and project.
Source From SEO News
It does not matter what industry you are involved in, or what techniques you follow, in all cases you will be a prisoner of time. In the vast majority of cases search engine rankings do not come over night.
Regardless of the scope of the SEO campaign you are undertaking, you will have to wait for results. It does not matter if you are undertaking a massive link building and social media campaign combined with extreme content development, you will still have to wait for those results. Just how long you need to wait however, will depend on a large number of factors.
In this article I will discuss some of these factors and give a few scenarios to help you gauge how long you may need to wait to start seeing results.
Factors to Consider
How long it will take for rankings starts with a few key factors:
How optimized is your site before SEO?
If your established site has no optimization in place at all, and has navigation that is blocking search engine spiders, sometimes opening the site up can result in a rather quick turn-around for results.
How many inbound links does your site have?
If you have an old site with no links, this will add to the time you need to wait. If you have a number of links already, Google will probably be in to check out things within a week or so of updating.
How new is your website?
A brand new site with no links has to wait. Google may find you, but probably not. If you do nothing, your site may not ever be indexed, you must get a few links, and an XML sitemap if you want to stand a chance with a new site. Go here for info on how to install and set up an XML site map.
How flexible is your site?
If your site utilizes a content management system, how flexible is this system for customization? If your current back end will not allow for SEO based changes, this will drastically slow down your ranking progress.
How competitive is your target phrase?
This is huge. The more competitive a target phrase is, the longer you will likely have to wait, and the more links, pages, and fresh content you will probably need. Picking a target phrase that has searches, but modest competition is your best bet to get started. As long as your "dream phrase" is relevant, you can go after the bigger fish once your site has some links, content, and has started to find its place on the map.
Is your site positioned to be able to compete?
Take a look at the top 10 sites for your target phrase. If on average the ranking sites have 10,000 inbound links and 1,000 plus pages, and your site has 7 links and 12 pages, you are likely doomed. You do not need to match the numbers of the top 10, but you do need to be in the ball park. If the top 10 is littered with all the big guys like Amazon, eBay, and the dreaded Wikipedia, you might just want to consider reevaluating your goals. If your site is not in a comparable position with the rest of the top 10, then you need to either step up your efforts in order to compete, or plan on waiting a very long time.
Get Google to Visit Your Site
How long it takes to start seeing results starts with Google. Once Google spiders your site you will still have to wait for the updated cache to appear in Google's index, and in most cases, you will have to wait longer still to see any impact in the search rankings.
In most cases getting Google to your site is relatively easy, but it can sometimes take a month or longer. Even a site with some inbound links and an XML sitemap, may have to wait a while.
Typically an established active website will seldom have to wait more than a month to get Google's eyes; however, if your site has been sitting stagnant for several years, it may take longer.
How Long Will it Take For Rankings?
You now know some of the determining factors, but how long will it take for your site to see an improvement in its organic rankings? I really wish there was a solid answer to this question, but with such a vast array of variables there is no way to know for sure. I can say however, that from experience, the time lines below are fairly accurate.
Niche Industry
A niche industry is represented by phrases that are relatively specific, such as "widgets Bellingham". While they do not require a geographic modifier, phrases focused on a very specific area often are considered niche. Phrases used for a niche site will also often return less than 100,000 results in a Google search. The top 10 ranking sites will also often have less than 100 inbound links each.
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: Possibly as little as a few months
- Established Site: Potentially it could literally be over night, but most likely around 6 weeks.
Medium Industry
Medium Industry terms are slightly more general, but still include some kind of modifier, such as a state or color; "Washington Widgets" or "Blue Widgets". These phrases often represent no more than a few million results in a typical Google search with the top 10 ranking sites having between 100-1,000 inbound links.
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: 6 months to a year
- Established Site: 2-4 months
Highly Competitive Industry
These pages are those with phrases that are rather broad and seldom have any modifiers, such as simply "widgets". You will often find tens or even hundreds of millions of competing pages in Google for your target phrase. Often the links required for the top 10 will be in the thousands, or tens of thousands (sometimes even in the millions).
Timeline:
- Brand New Site: Anywhere from 1 to 5 years
- Established Site: Could be as long as a year or more
For a brand new site, starting with nothing, in most cases you will be looking at around a year before you start to see significant ranking changes. You may get the odd ranking here and there, and start to see some traffic, but for any phrases that are remotely competitive, it can take quite a while. Unless you have a very tight niche, expect to wait at least 6 months before you see any movement at all. This is not to say that you can not get quick results, but in the majority of cases it is quite rare.
For more established sites, rankings tend to come much more quickly. One significant factor in determining time is links. If your established site has lots, but the site itself is simply lacking fundamental SEO or proper navigation, then you can sometimes see results rather quickly. If you have no links and need to build them, it significantly increases the wait time. Even for an established site, achieving links in a competitive industry can still take some time.
Rankings Are Taking Forever
There are a number of reasons why your site may not achieve results. If you find that your campaign has been going on for a long time and you have seen no movement what-so-ever, it is possible that one of the following is hindering your efforts.
Spamming & Penalties
In some cases your site may take forever to achieve rankings, or the rankings may not come at all. If your site has been previously penalized for spamming, you absolutely must clean up all traces of the past dirtiness. Once the site is entirely cleaned up, then you can apply for re-inclusion. This is certainly no assurance that Google will ever pay your site any attention again, but it is the first step to the land of maybe.
Duplicate Content
If your site has utilized mass amounts of duplicate content, chances are you will not ever see rankings until you replace it all with something original and meaningful. There is no "duplicate content" penalty per-se, but you are essentially penalizing yourself if you copy content. Google tends to look at the first instance it finds online for a piece of content as the official source (not always the case).
If you copy content that is already out there and indexed by Google, they will discount your content as it is already indexed somewhere else, and your site or page will simply not get any rankings for it - and rightfully so.
Links
If your site has no links, you probably will not get any rankings, even after you are fully indexed. This is not always the case, I have seen sites rank well for various phrases with zero inbound links - but it is rare, and should not be relied on. Build up your links – period.
On the flip side of this, letlet uss say your site has thousands of links, but they are from free for all sites, link farms, or "bad neighborhoods", and so on - they will not help you. These links will not necessarily hurt you, but will be essentially ignored. You need quality, relevant links.
Competition
You just may be out of your league. If you have a small operation, and are competing for a major ultra competitive term, chances are you will not ever see the light of day. Not to say it is not possible, but if you are competing in a well established industry where literally 10's of thousands of links are required, and your target phrase is experiencing millions of searches a month, you need to weigh your targets. Chances are your keywords need to be re-evaluated as your chances of success are slim.
Not Listening
If your SEO gives you actionable recommendations, follow them. Recommendations are given for a reason, to help you achieve rankings. If you are not willing to implement what is suggested, then your campaign may go nowhere. I have seen websites fail to rank simply because clients ignored recommendations. Your SEO will not be able to help you if you refuse to implement their advice.
Regardless of industry and target phrases, you will have to wait for your search results. Just how long you will wait varies on far too many factors to give a solid number, but expect to wait for results anywhere from a few days to several years. It is the best time frame I can give without knowing specific details of your site and project.
Source From SEO News
Friday, August 21, 2009
Streamlining Your Social Web Presence in 6 Steps
Following the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts, you have established your own blog and joined a number of social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Upcoming.org, among others. Now, the experts say you must add content to each of these accounts regularly to keep them dynamic. So, how is this supposed to make your life easier?
With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.
To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I will start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:
Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence
Step 1: Optimize Your Blog Feed
The very first step in streamlining your presence in the Social Web is burning your blog's feed to Feedburner. This is a free service, and obtaining a FeedBurner account will help you to easily manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new feed, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName .
Step 2: Feed Your Blog Now
You want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding applications. Remember that each social site may provide its own different way of accomplishing this.
Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that allows you to import notes from an external blog.
Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different. Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.
It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for streamlining your micro-blog entries.
Step 3: Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia
Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and by feeding your images and videos into your social networking profiles and pages.
WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag, a plugin that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right into your blog posts, and create galleries.
A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your Flickr account. Find out more by going to: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.
Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or Website by using your YouTube channels. After you have added videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.
To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr; for MySpace, use Happy Flickr.
You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing an application called YouTube Box, and using the application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips on your MySpace profile.
Step 4: Integrate Other Social Tools
The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social Web presence. In the example I have created, we have accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications in Facebook and MySpace, you will find that Facebook offers an application that allows you to integrate your Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books and book reviews.
Step 5: Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools
Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm is a useful tool that lets you post one brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a number of social sites.
Step 6: Research and Repeat
The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people through social platforms and applications; therefore, when deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a new social tool, it is best to research the ways that tool will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer applications to integrate the new tool?
When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable steps presented above.
Source From SitePro News
With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.
To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I will start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:
- A WordPress Blog
- A Facebook Profile
- A Facebook Page
- A MySpace Page
- A YouTube Account
- A Flickr Account
- A Twitter Account
- An Upcoming.org Account
- A GoodReads Account
Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence
Step 1: Optimize Your Blog Feed
The very first step in streamlining your presence in the Social Web is burning your blog's feed to Feedburner. This is a free service, and obtaining a FeedBurner account will help you to easily manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new feed, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName .
Step 2: Feed Your Blog Now
You want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding applications. Remember that each social site may provide its own different way of accomplishing this.
Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that allows you to import notes from an external blog.
Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different. Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.
It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for streamlining your micro-blog entries.
Step 3: Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia
Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and by feeding your images and videos into your social networking profiles and pages.
WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag, a plugin that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right into your blog posts, and create galleries.
A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your Flickr account. Find out more by going to: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.
Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or Website by using your YouTube channels. After you have added videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.
To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr; for MySpace, use Happy Flickr.
You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing an application called YouTube Box, and using the application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips on your MySpace profile.
Step 4: Integrate Other Social Tools
The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social Web presence. In the example I have created, we have accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications in Facebook and MySpace, you will find that Facebook offers an application that allows you to integrate your Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books and book reviews.
Step 5: Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools
Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm is a useful tool that lets you post one brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a number of social sites.
Step 6: Research and Repeat
The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people through social platforms and applications; therefore, when deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a new social tool, it is best to research the ways that tool will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer applications to integrate the new tool?
When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable steps presented above.
Source From SitePro News
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Quick and Easy Keyword Research for Traffic
To get visitors to your webpage you really need to know what keywords people will type into the search engines to find the service or product your specific site or webpage offers. Before you say "Oh no, not another keyword research article", let me just say you will learn exactly how to quickly and easily do keyword research and even create SEO friendly pages based on keywords you find.
Clearly one of the most beneficial ways to generate more traffic to your site is to create backlinks to it. Backlinks from relevant sites helps to boost your page rank and can even get your website, or a particular webpage, showing on the first pages of a Google search for that keyword.
Now you do not want just any old backlinks but ones that contain specific keywords you have optimized a particular page, blog or website for. Lets say your website is about "dog training". A common and highly sought after keyword, but one that a new or even established site is going to find hard to be ranked high for.
Now we all know that trying to get a webpage ranked in Google for one of the primary search terms is a real challenge. Those keywords are in effect, out of the range of most marketers, both in time and money resources to try to rank for.
So the best possible way to raise search results and rank in your niche is to select secondary keywords that still get a lot of searches but do not eliminate you from the possibility for ranking for them.
Stick with me here because this is not as hard as you were perhaps ** lead ** to believe.
Now the first thing you should do is to narrow down the keyword(s) that you want to build or optimize a webpage for. You can do this very easily by going to the following website SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and typing in a primary keyword in the search box. In the results that show, you are going to get a good list of the highest searched for keywords related to the primary keyword you entered in the search box. You will also find a lot more information presented that can really help you narrow down your selection. You are looking for phrases that contain part or all of the primary keyword that you started your search with. The next thing you must do is determine what keywords are being used successfully to market products, services or websites online. To do this, I suggest you use the Google Adwords search term tool.
You can simply copy and paste a keyword from the list into the form, hit enter and get a listing of keywords based on the one you input and also provide a list of additional keywords to consider that expands the possibilities even further. Most importantly you will see a listing of keywords followed by a box filled in with the color green.
At this point, my suggestion to you is that you choose a keyword that has good monthly search quantity but whose box [colored in green] is only about half or less green. Less green means there is less competition for that particular keyword phrase.
Now we want to measure the link building competition for a keyword in Google's search engine by selecting a keyword from the above list and placing the phrase in the Google search box using the specific search operator: inanchor:"your keyword goes here"
Being that we are narrowing our keyword to a specific one you want to be sure to include the quotation marks before and after the keyword. If you use the inanchor operator without the quotation marks, it will give results for every page that contains every word in the phrase you entered individually or together, instead of the specific phrase, and does not narrow the pages down to relevant ones that you would be directly competing for on that particular keyword phrase.
Using the inanchor operator with the quotation marks will show the results (pages or links) shown (at top right of page) that contain the exact keyword phrase. These are sites already using that "keyword search term" on their webpages.
Note: you can find a full description of all google search operators at: GoogleGuide.com
After you find a suitable keyword with good search volume and minimal competition and build a webpage around it, you can begin creating backlinks to that page using several resources. Your backlinks should be from high traffic sites because they usually get spidered for new information regularly by the search engines looking for new content and links.
Here are some suggestions:
Source From SEO News
Clearly one of the most beneficial ways to generate more traffic to your site is to create backlinks to it. Backlinks from relevant sites helps to boost your page rank and can even get your website, or a particular webpage, showing on the first pages of a Google search for that keyword.
Now you do not want just any old backlinks but ones that contain specific keywords you have optimized a particular page, blog or website for. Lets say your website is about "dog training". A common and highly sought after keyword, but one that a new or even established site is going to find hard to be ranked high for.
Now we all know that trying to get a webpage ranked in Google for one of the primary search terms is a real challenge. Those keywords are in effect, out of the range of most marketers, both in time and money resources to try to rank for.
So the best possible way to raise search results and rank in your niche is to select secondary keywords that still get a lot of searches but do not eliminate you from the possibility for ranking for them.
Stick with me here because this is not as hard as you were perhaps ** lead ** to believe.
Now the first thing you should do is to narrow down the keyword(s) that you want to build or optimize a webpage for. You can do this very easily by going to the following website SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and typing in a primary keyword in the search box. In the results that show, you are going to get a good list of the highest searched for keywords related to the primary keyword you entered in the search box. You will also find a lot more information presented that can really help you narrow down your selection. You are looking for phrases that contain part or all of the primary keyword that you started your search with. The next thing you must do is determine what keywords are being used successfully to market products, services or websites online. To do this, I suggest you use the Google Adwords search term tool.
You can simply copy and paste a keyword from the list into the form, hit enter and get a listing of keywords based on the one you input and also provide a list of additional keywords to consider that expands the possibilities even further. Most importantly you will see a listing of keywords followed by a box filled in with the color green.
At this point, my suggestion to you is that you choose a keyword that has good monthly search quantity but whose box [colored in green] is only about half or less green. Less green means there is less competition for that particular keyword phrase.
Now we want to measure the link building competition for a keyword in Google's search engine by selecting a keyword from the above list and placing the phrase in the Google search box using the specific search operator: inanchor:"your keyword goes here"
Being that we are narrowing our keyword to a specific one you want to be sure to include the quotation marks before and after the keyword. If you use the inanchor operator without the quotation marks, it will give results for every page that contains every word in the phrase you entered individually or together, instead of the specific phrase, and does not narrow the pages down to relevant ones that you would be directly competing for on that particular keyword phrase.
Using the inanchor operator with the quotation marks will show the results (pages or links) shown (at top right of page) that contain the exact keyword phrase. These are sites already using that "keyword search term" on their webpages.
Note: you can find a full description of all google search operators at: GoogleGuide.com
After you find a suitable keyword with good search volume and minimal competition and build a webpage around it, you can begin creating backlinks to that page using several resources. Your backlinks should be from high traffic sites because they usually get spidered for new information regularly by the search engines looking for new content and links.
Here are some suggestions:
- Post to forums with your sig file containing the link to your webpage
- Leave a comment on blogs
- Write and submit articles
Source From SEO News
Monday, August 17, 2009
How to Create a Bad Website and Frustrate Your Visitors
If you are a sadistic kind of webmaster or website owner and have a burning desire to royally frustrate and anger your site visitors each and every time they visit your site, these three lists are just for you. If you want to have a terrible website that looks bad, works horribly and breaks fundamental marketing rules, read on.
First let me explain why there are three lists. One way to look at any website is to break it up into three equally important segments; design, technical and marketing. In other words, every site on the Web contains these three components. They all have a design or look and feel (design), they all have to be on a server and coded properly to be live on the Internet (technical) and they all have ways in which they attract visitors and make sales (marketing).
Let us look at the top ten ways in which you can annoy your website visitors and basically fail miserably at the whole website endeavor in each of the three segments. The following is a list, broken up into the three categories, defining exactly what NOT to do.
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes:
1. Not using Web conventions, instead use crazy and wacky formats that no one's ever seen and no one can understand.
2. Writing trite, predictable, boring or copied content only and not updating your site.
3. Creating totally different and unique navigation for every page so that your visitors need to waste time re-learning your navigation every time they go to a new page. Also creating totally different look & feels for every page so that your visitors do not know if they are on the same site or clicked away.
4. Using confusing, obfuscated and mysterious labels for all your links and buttons so that no one ever has any idea where they are going if they click. The more confusing, the better.
5. Making it impossible to search the site. Offering no search box, no site map and basically no possible way to find anything on your website.
6. Including content that only talks about you. Not mentioning anything about your visitors or how you can help them, just talk about you and your history and all your achievements. Including a big picture of you and your office building right on the home page.
7. Including only poorly-written copy with lots of grammar mistakes, and ubiquitous, curious and horrendous spelling and punctuation mistakes throughout your site.
8. Not including any text, making every page on your site one big picture. So for instance, on your home page have one giant picture of you and your office building and have no text so search engines can not see your site at all.
9. Using buttons for your navigation only, or use complicated JavaScript drop down menus that complicate your site's navigation. Either way, if you do this and include no text links, the search engines will not be able to spider (navigate and record) your website.
10. Making your site as difficult to read as possible. Use teeny, tiny fonts that are hard to read against some funky-colored background. For instance, use blue fonts on a black background.
Top 10 Technical Mistakes:
1. Making your website take forever to load in people's browsers. The longer the better.
2. Making it so that your site looks completely different on everybody's computer. So for Macs your site looks one way, and for PCs it looks another way. Or having it look totally different in Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox.
3. Making it so that any functionality on the site is confusing to figure out and works improperly and inconsistently every time it is used.
4. Including lots of broken links and missing images throughout.
5. Setting it up so that it regularly crashes. For example, if more than three people are visiting the site at the same time, the home page becomes inaccessible.
6. Has no form validation. Allowing visitors to enter any thing under the sun into your website forms. Maybe some smart hacker-types will enter executable code that corrupts or takes over your server.
7. Making all your site visitors have to download and install lots of plug-ins to view your site properly. If they do not, too bad.
8. Telling people that they have to view your site in a specific browser and browser version only.
9. Making it so that there are tons of pop-ups, moving newsletter sign-up boxes, running videos, animations and Flash movies that take forever to download before you can view the site.
10. Using lots of frames.
Top Ten E-Marketing Mistakes:
1. Making your website completely bounce-friendly. In other words, make it 'un-sticky' so that when people arrive on one of your pages, they leave immediately.
2. Including no calls to action so that your site does not ever ask your website visitors to do a thing. Making it so that every page is a dead end that leaves your visitors scratching their heads and then clicking away.
3. Does absolutely nothing to build your brand.
4. Has no terms or policies page.
5. Evoke no emotions. Making your site flat, boring, gray, dull and forgettable.
6. Making sure there is no way for anyone who visits your site to sign up for anything or give you their contact info or email address. Certainly do not use your site to build any kind of email list.
7. Converting absolutely no one who visits your site into a paying customer. Ever.
8. Including no phone number, email and absolutely no other way to contact you. Hide behind your website.
9. Not using any kind of an analytics program like Google Analytics or Web Trends and not measuring or even looking at your website activity.
10. Making it so that search engine can not read your site and make it so that people can not really read your site either.
Follow these three lists perfectly and you will be well on your way to having a bad and useless website and frustrating and angering everyone who visits.
Source From SitePro News
First let me explain why there are three lists. One way to look at any website is to break it up into three equally important segments; design, technical and marketing. In other words, every site on the Web contains these three components. They all have a design or look and feel (design), they all have to be on a server and coded properly to be live on the Internet (technical) and they all have ways in which they attract visitors and make sales (marketing).
Let us look at the top ten ways in which you can annoy your website visitors and basically fail miserably at the whole website endeavor in each of the three segments. The following is a list, broken up into the three categories, defining exactly what NOT to do.
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes:
1. Not using Web conventions, instead use crazy and wacky formats that no one's ever seen and no one can understand.
2. Writing trite, predictable, boring or copied content only and not updating your site.
3. Creating totally different and unique navigation for every page so that your visitors need to waste time re-learning your navigation every time they go to a new page. Also creating totally different look & feels for every page so that your visitors do not know if they are on the same site or clicked away.
4. Using confusing, obfuscated and mysterious labels for all your links and buttons so that no one ever has any idea where they are going if they click. The more confusing, the better.
5. Making it impossible to search the site. Offering no search box, no site map and basically no possible way to find anything on your website.
6. Including content that only talks about you. Not mentioning anything about your visitors or how you can help them, just talk about you and your history and all your achievements. Including a big picture of you and your office building right on the home page.
7. Including only poorly-written copy with lots of grammar mistakes, and ubiquitous, curious and horrendous spelling and punctuation mistakes throughout your site.
8. Not including any text, making every page on your site one big picture. So for instance, on your home page have one giant picture of you and your office building and have no text so search engines can not see your site at all.
9. Using buttons for your navigation only, or use complicated JavaScript drop down menus that complicate your site's navigation. Either way, if you do this and include no text links, the search engines will not be able to spider (navigate and record) your website.
10. Making your site as difficult to read as possible. Use teeny, tiny fonts that are hard to read against some funky-colored background. For instance, use blue fonts on a black background.
Top 10 Technical Mistakes:
1. Making your website take forever to load in people's browsers. The longer the better.
2. Making it so that your site looks completely different on everybody's computer. So for Macs your site looks one way, and for PCs it looks another way. Or having it look totally different in Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox.
3. Making it so that any functionality on the site is confusing to figure out and works improperly and inconsistently every time it is used.
4. Including lots of broken links and missing images throughout.
5. Setting it up so that it regularly crashes. For example, if more than three people are visiting the site at the same time, the home page becomes inaccessible.
6. Has no form validation. Allowing visitors to enter any thing under the sun into your website forms. Maybe some smart hacker-types will enter executable code that corrupts or takes over your server.
7. Making all your site visitors have to download and install lots of plug-ins to view your site properly. If they do not, too bad.
8. Telling people that they have to view your site in a specific browser and browser version only.
9. Making it so that there are tons of pop-ups, moving newsletter sign-up boxes, running videos, animations and Flash movies that take forever to download before you can view the site.
10. Using lots of frames.
Top Ten E-Marketing Mistakes:
1. Making your website completely bounce-friendly. In other words, make it 'un-sticky' so that when people arrive on one of your pages, they leave immediately.
2. Including no calls to action so that your site does not ever ask your website visitors to do a thing. Making it so that every page is a dead end that leaves your visitors scratching their heads and then clicking away.
3. Does absolutely nothing to build your brand.
4. Has no terms or policies page.
5. Evoke no emotions. Making your site flat, boring, gray, dull and forgettable.
6. Making sure there is no way for anyone who visits your site to sign up for anything or give you their contact info or email address. Certainly do not use your site to build any kind of email list.
7. Converting absolutely no one who visits your site into a paying customer. Ever.
8. Including no phone number, email and absolutely no other way to contact you. Hide behind your website.
9. Not using any kind of an analytics program like Google Analytics or Web Trends and not measuring or even looking at your website activity.
10. Making it so that search engine can not read your site and make it so that people can not really read your site either.
Follow these three lists perfectly and you will be well on your way to having a bad and useless website and frustrating and angering everyone who visits.
Source From SitePro News
Saturday, August 15, 2009
The Importance of Deep Linking in Your Search Engine Marketing
If you are an experienced webmaster then you probably know that creating back links to your website is one of the best things that you can do to improve your Search Engine Ranking Placement (SERP). Google openly discusses the importance that their algorithms place on back links and even recommend that webmasters who want to improve their traffic use back links. Both Yahoo! and MSN are starting to talk openly about the importance of back links in their search algorithms as well.
There are a number of strategies that you can use to create back links to your website. Some of these strategies include emailing webmasters and asking them to place a link to your website, submitting your site to directories, distributing free reprint articles, and paying for links. All of these have their pros and cons, and some have a better success ratio than others.
How Many Back Links Does Your Website Have?
Take a look at your website and see just how many back links you actually do have. Do not do this for only one search engine, but for all search engines where you are trying to get good SERP results. To check your backlinks, simply type into the particular search engine's box - link:http://www.yourdomainurl.com . Of course you will replace the yourdomainurl with the name of your domain.
The more back links that you have to your website, the better off you are. Not only do back links help your SERP, but also the visitors of pages where your back link is listed may just choose to visit your site.
A common mistake that new webmasters make is that they create back links, but they have all of these links pointing to their home page. It is great that you have 50 back links pointing to your home page, but take a look at other pages on your site. How many links are pointing to these pages? The answer is probably zero unless you have utilized deep linking in your link building campaigns.
What Are Deep Links?
Deep links are links that go to specific pages within your website. For example, let us say that you have a home improvement website that has a large number of pages and articles on it telling people how to do projects. If all of your back links are pointing only to your home page and you have none pointing to specific article pages, then you are not getting the full benefit of your linking activities.
Think about it this way, if I go to your website and find a piece of information that I find particularly helpful or interesting and I want to tell other people about it, how will I do it? When I tell all my friends on my blog about this great page of yours, am I going to link to your home page? No, I am going to copy and paste the actual webpage address out of my browser, into my blog. That is deep linking and what is considered to be natural linking by the search engines.
What Are Natural Links?
Natural links are those links that are created by people other than the website's marketing team. Suppose I posted a link in my own blog that said that the "most easily understood tutorial, I have read, for creating a php-xml parser" was: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-xml-parsing-rss-1-0 , and I put my quoted text into the link. That is a natural link, because I created the link with no prompting from the management at SitePoint.com.
Difficulties In Creating Deep Links
There are a few problems that you will run into when trying to create deep links to your site. One problem is that if you ask a Webmaster of another site to link to you, they will most likely just link to your home page. When you submit to directories, the vast majority of them will only allow you a link to your home page, not a deep link. Even if they do allow you to submit a deep link, they will not allow you to submit 10 deep links.
Success Tips For Creating Deep Links
Deep linking is quite a bit easier when utilizing free reprint articles as a part of your link building campaign. This is because you can put whatever link you want to put in the "About The Author" box. The About The Author box is required to stay intact in all websites that are using your article. If you intend on writing a large number of articles to promote your domain, then you will want to optimize your results by putting a different deep link into the About The Author box for each of the articles that you write.
Another method of doing this is free and easy, but requires a bit of time. Take keywords in each page of the text on your website and make a hyperlink on that word or phrase to another page on your site. This is very easily done if you know how to do basic HTML. The ultimate goal here is to have every page of your website linked to, at least once, by another page on your site. You will want to spread these out among your domain's webpages, instead of having just a couple of pages linking to the other 50 pages.
Another reason to spread your links across all of the pages of your domain, is that users are likely to be turned off by a page that is almost all hyperlinks; those pages often appear spammy or cluttered. A good idea for any Webmaster is to create these internal deep links when you create a new page. It is much easier to spend a couple of minutes from the beginning, rather than trying to go back and do all of them at a later date.
Incorporate Deep Linking Into Your Linking Strategies
Deep linking is as important a consideration as back linking! It does not matter which page visitors use to enter our websites. If they like what they read on our internal pages, they are more likely to view other pages on our websites. If they view other pages on our website, they are likely to find our homepage, and we will get a chance to tell them why they should buy our products or services.
Deep links to our website help to ensure that the search engines will have good cause to show our internal webpages as well as our homepage. For every page in our website that gets great SERP, our chances of getting a sale are increased significantly.
We have 15 pages on our website, eight of which provide real content to our prospective clients. All eight of these pages have a significant number of back links pointing to them. 48% of our visitors land on our home page. 37% of our visitors land on our internal pages. As a result, 85% of our traffic lands on our website as a result of our back links, either directly or through our natural search placement in the search engines. The remaining 15% arrive on our website through bookmarks, personal referrals, and paid listings.
Deep linking works. Give it a shot.
Source From SitePro News
There are a number of strategies that you can use to create back links to your website. Some of these strategies include emailing webmasters and asking them to place a link to your website, submitting your site to directories, distributing free reprint articles, and paying for links. All of these have their pros and cons, and some have a better success ratio than others.
How Many Back Links Does Your Website Have?
Take a look at your website and see just how many back links you actually do have. Do not do this for only one search engine, but for all search engines where you are trying to get good SERP results. To check your backlinks, simply type into the particular search engine's box - link:http://www.yourdomainurl.com . Of course you will replace the yourdomainurl with the name of your domain.
The more back links that you have to your website, the better off you are. Not only do back links help your SERP, but also the visitors of pages where your back link is listed may just choose to visit your site.
A common mistake that new webmasters make is that they create back links, but they have all of these links pointing to their home page. It is great that you have 50 back links pointing to your home page, but take a look at other pages on your site. How many links are pointing to these pages? The answer is probably zero unless you have utilized deep linking in your link building campaigns.
What Are Deep Links?
Deep links are links that go to specific pages within your website. For example, let us say that you have a home improvement website that has a large number of pages and articles on it telling people how to do projects. If all of your back links are pointing only to your home page and you have none pointing to specific article pages, then you are not getting the full benefit of your linking activities.
Think about it this way, if I go to your website and find a piece of information that I find particularly helpful or interesting and I want to tell other people about it, how will I do it? When I tell all my friends on my blog about this great page of yours, am I going to link to your home page? No, I am going to copy and paste the actual webpage address out of my browser, into my blog. That is deep linking and what is considered to be natural linking by the search engines.
What Are Natural Links?
Natural links are those links that are created by people other than the website's marketing team. Suppose I posted a link in my own blog that said that the "most easily understood tutorial, I have read, for creating a php-xml parser" was: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-xml-parsing-rss-1-0 , and I put my quoted text into the link. That is a natural link, because I created the link with no prompting from the management at SitePoint.com.
Difficulties In Creating Deep Links
There are a few problems that you will run into when trying to create deep links to your site. One problem is that if you ask a Webmaster of another site to link to you, they will most likely just link to your home page. When you submit to directories, the vast majority of them will only allow you a link to your home page, not a deep link. Even if they do allow you to submit a deep link, they will not allow you to submit 10 deep links.
Success Tips For Creating Deep Links
Deep linking is quite a bit easier when utilizing free reprint articles as a part of your link building campaign. This is because you can put whatever link you want to put in the "About The Author" box. The About The Author box is required to stay intact in all websites that are using your article. If you intend on writing a large number of articles to promote your domain, then you will want to optimize your results by putting a different deep link into the About The Author box for each of the articles that you write.
Another method of doing this is free and easy, but requires a bit of time. Take keywords in each page of the text on your website and make a hyperlink on that word or phrase to another page on your site. This is very easily done if you know how to do basic HTML. The ultimate goal here is to have every page of your website linked to, at least once, by another page on your site. You will want to spread these out among your domain's webpages, instead of having just a couple of pages linking to the other 50 pages.
Another reason to spread your links across all of the pages of your domain, is that users are likely to be turned off by a page that is almost all hyperlinks; those pages often appear spammy or cluttered. A good idea for any Webmaster is to create these internal deep links when you create a new page. It is much easier to spend a couple of minutes from the beginning, rather than trying to go back and do all of them at a later date.
Incorporate Deep Linking Into Your Linking Strategies
Deep linking is as important a consideration as back linking! It does not matter which page visitors use to enter our websites. If they like what they read on our internal pages, they are more likely to view other pages on our websites. If they view other pages on our website, they are likely to find our homepage, and we will get a chance to tell them why they should buy our products or services.
Deep links to our website help to ensure that the search engines will have good cause to show our internal webpages as well as our homepage. For every page in our website that gets great SERP, our chances of getting a sale are increased significantly.
We have 15 pages on our website, eight of which provide real content to our prospective clients. All eight of these pages have a significant number of back links pointing to them. 48% of our visitors land on our home page. 37% of our visitors land on our internal pages. As a result, 85% of our traffic lands on our website as a result of our back links, either directly or through our natural search placement in the search engines. The remaining 15% arrive on our website through bookmarks, personal referrals, and paid listings.
Deep linking works. Give it a shot.
Source From SitePro News
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The WHY of Search Engine Optimization
There are many articles written on the HOW of SEO, covering the many and varied aspects of the art of improving your site's position in search engine ranking pages (SERPs). While most people have heard the term "search engine optimization" and have a vague appreciation (or apprehension) of the hoped-for outcome, surprisingly few people seem to really understand WHY it is absolutely essential.
That includes a depressing number of website designers, some of whom actually tell their clients that SEO is a waste of time and money, and that it is quite unnecessary these days because Google is smarter than ever before, it becomes more and more critical every day, as website numbers expand exponentially. Lack of knowledge is not confined to website designers, it also includes a number of wanna-be SEO firms who make outrageous claims about their special relationship and affinity with Google etc, but have little idea of what it takes to consistently succeed in attaining Top 30 rankings.
Be very aware that in most cases website design is taught as an Art, not as a Business discipline. Website designers are rarely taught anything about search engine optimization, and few are interested in mastering the skills required to produce optimal results. That is all very fine and dandy but it leaves a lot of website owners desperately disappointed in mediocre results. You have probably heard the analogy about building a shop in the middle of a forest too, seriously, it really does not matter how beautiful the site is, if no one finds it, then it is just a gorgeous waste of virtual space.
Content is Still King
Regardless of the various conflicting opinions, Google conspiracy theories and misinformation, it comes down to a very simple concept - content quality, and accurate content classification.
Content is where many sites fail dismally. The sites that thrive are those with well written, well organized original, interesting and useful content. Do not copy other peoples stuff. Aside from being illegal, at best it immediately downgrades you to second best as a general rule, from an SEO perspective, bear in mind the most fundamental issue Google loathes duplicate content.
Classification
There are literally millions of websites, each competing for viewers in a particular niche. Reasons for their existence vary across the A to Z spectrum - advertising, entertainment, comedy, educational, humor, informational, music, news, promotional, sports, wine, video, zoos.
In the world of books we have the Dewey decimal classification system. Every published work is assigned an ISBN number, and libraries classify all books under a rigid hierarchical subject classification system. It is not perfect, but it works pretty well because every one uses and understands it. Erudite people write insightful book reviews, which are sometimes included in advertising and promotions. Hold this thought, it is relevant to a following section.
Relevancy Ranking
Using different terminology, search engines are trying hard to do the same thing - to give their searchers the most accurate list possible, containing exactly what they want, so they can pick and choose from it. The closest thing to a hierarchical subject listing is the Open Directory, Yahoo, or one of the thousands of other web directories - all of which are inconsistently organized into completely different illogical structures. So, here we have Google and other search engines trying valiantly to index and categorize the billions of pages on millions of websites, in hundreds of countries in a multiplicity of languages. Then, they have to calculate each page's relevance to specific search queries.
Are You Helping or Hindering?
That is where you come into the picture. It is a big, big task have you made any effort at all to help Google to help you? Or is your website fuzzy and unfocused, with no clear statement of content or purpose? In most cases, sites are constructed with vague intentions to do SEO as an optional extra sometime in the future.
Done Any Homework?
Do you have any idea how your primary audience searches for the information, products or services you offer? Do the pages on your site describe your content using terms your clients use? Because that is the only way Google can match searchers with relevant content. You actually forgot to do any market research before launching the site? You have no accurate, researched, hard data on the keywords your potential clients would use? You asked your friends at work for ideas? Absolutely incredible!
So You Want Google To Work For You?
You would really like Google et al to help connect your potential clients to your business via Search Engine Results Pages by making your site No.1 and you certainly want "qualified" traffic from Google, visitors who are specifically looking for exactly what you provide.
Anyone who thinks they can survive online without Google, Yahoo and MSN is either a thoroughly well-rounded idiot, or is a household name who does not need to advertise to generate qualified traffic. There is no middle ground. But here is where it gets hard! How will Google do that? What solid information have you provided Google in your on-site content, and in the off-site links to your site?
What is On-Site SEO
Think about it this way... Does your home page have an explicit and accurate Title that provides a direct and unequivocal statement of the site's business purpose in 70 characters? Does your home page have an explicit and accurate Description that provides a brief outline of your business purpose, unique selling proposition, and call to action, encapsulated in 150 – 200 characters? Or does it contain some vague warm and fuzzy drivel about beaches and sunsets? Keep the book analogy in your mind, and take a look at your Home page, particularly the first heading and first paragraph "Welcome to my website" is not a productive approach. What does it tell your visitors about you? It tells me that you are at best naive and both you and your website designer need SEO counselling! And think about that first paragraph is it an accurate summary of the site's reason for existence. If your website is required to deliver a return on investment, particularly by selling products or services, or delivering customer service, informing or entertaining, you really need to accurately describe your website's content, and allow it to become visible online. Oh, you want it to make you rich as well? But you do not really want to make a serious commitment or effort to do the job properly? Right... good luck with that! And remember that old GIGO acronym - "Garbage In, Garbage Out!"
What is Off-Site SEO?
This may surprise you, but some people are dishonest about their site content. Frankly, some people handle the truth in a very awkward fashion indeed. Telling Google that your site is about Pamela Anderson, when its actually selling Bart Simpson comics, is deuced annoying to the people who visit it. Therefore, Google and other SE's decided long ago that some external verification of every website's content would assist their efforts to deliver the most relevant SERPs to their clients. Makes perfect sense to me. How is this achieved, I hear you ask. Well, you have heard of links. Back to the book analogy think of good links as being like a series of book reviews. The balance of probability that your site is relevant to such a search is positively impacted by this external confirmation. A coincidence of keywords in on-site content and off-site links reassures Google immensely! Those keywords in the off-site links are referred to as anchor text, and should form the link title.
No, Its Not Rocket Science
Frankly, search engine optimization, in the pure sense of the term, is not particularly difficult to understand, or to do. The aim of the search engines is to provide their customers with the content most relevant to the search they are making. Therefore, your salvation lies in making your content relevant to the known searches. Do some thorough keyword research, learn and understand your target audience's searching behavior. Plan pages that target specific, high-volume, low competition search phrases.
Do not be vague, do not waffle, and help Google to help you. When the economic gravy pot is bubbling merrily, and there is ample business gravy slopping over, even the mediocre get a share. But when the economic ice age casts midnight shadows at noon, and credit wolf packs softly pad the empty streets, howling balefully at the waning moon. When you are sucking the last congealed streaks of business gravy off your tarnished spoon. Ask yourself, can you afford your website to be 2nd rate, disorganized and inarticulate, with the Why of SEO ringing in your ears?
Source From SEO News
That includes a depressing number of website designers, some of whom actually tell their clients that SEO is a waste of time and money, and that it is quite unnecessary these days because Google is smarter than ever before, it becomes more and more critical every day, as website numbers expand exponentially. Lack of knowledge is not confined to website designers, it also includes a number of wanna-be SEO firms who make outrageous claims about their special relationship and affinity with Google etc, but have little idea of what it takes to consistently succeed in attaining Top 30 rankings.
Be very aware that in most cases website design is taught as an Art, not as a Business discipline. Website designers are rarely taught anything about search engine optimization, and few are interested in mastering the skills required to produce optimal results. That is all very fine and dandy but it leaves a lot of website owners desperately disappointed in mediocre results. You have probably heard the analogy about building a shop in the middle of a forest too, seriously, it really does not matter how beautiful the site is, if no one finds it, then it is just a gorgeous waste of virtual space.
Content is Still King
Regardless of the various conflicting opinions, Google conspiracy theories and misinformation, it comes down to a very simple concept - content quality, and accurate content classification.
Content is where many sites fail dismally. The sites that thrive are those with well written, well organized original, interesting and useful content. Do not copy other peoples stuff. Aside from being illegal, at best it immediately downgrades you to second best as a general rule, from an SEO perspective, bear in mind the most fundamental issue Google loathes duplicate content.
Classification
There are literally millions of websites, each competing for viewers in a particular niche. Reasons for their existence vary across the A to Z spectrum - advertising, entertainment, comedy, educational, humor, informational, music, news, promotional, sports, wine, video, zoos.
In the world of books we have the Dewey decimal classification system. Every published work is assigned an ISBN number, and libraries classify all books under a rigid hierarchical subject classification system. It is not perfect, but it works pretty well because every one uses and understands it. Erudite people write insightful book reviews, which are sometimes included in advertising and promotions. Hold this thought, it is relevant to a following section.
Relevancy Ranking
Using different terminology, search engines are trying hard to do the same thing - to give their searchers the most accurate list possible, containing exactly what they want, so they can pick and choose from it. The closest thing to a hierarchical subject listing is the Open Directory, Yahoo, or one of the thousands of other web directories - all of which are inconsistently organized into completely different illogical structures. So, here we have Google and other search engines trying valiantly to index and categorize the billions of pages on millions of websites, in hundreds of countries in a multiplicity of languages. Then, they have to calculate each page's relevance to specific search queries.
Are You Helping or Hindering?
That is where you come into the picture. It is a big, big task have you made any effort at all to help Google to help you? Or is your website fuzzy and unfocused, with no clear statement of content or purpose? In most cases, sites are constructed with vague intentions to do SEO as an optional extra sometime in the future.
Done Any Homework?
Do you have any idea how your primary audience searches for the information, products or services you offer? Do the pages on your site describe your content using terms your clients use? Because that is the only way Google can match searchers with relevant content. You actually forgot to do any market research before launching the site? You have no accurate, researched, hard data on the keywords your potential clients would use? You asked your friends at work for ideas? Absolutely incredible!
So You Want Google To Work For You?
You would really like Google et al to help connect your potential clients to your business via Search Engine Results Pages by making your site No.1 and you certainly want "qualified" traffic from Google, visitors who are specifically looking for exactly what you provide.
Anyone who thinks they can survive online without Google, Yahoo and MSN is either a thoroughly well-rounded idiot, or is a household name who does not need to advertise to generate qualified traffic. There is no middle ground. But here is where it gets hard! How will Google do that? What solid information have you provided Google in your on-site content, and in the off-site links to your site?
What is On-Site SEO
Think about it this way... Does your home page have an explicit and accurate Title that provides a direct and unequivocal statement of the site's business purpose in 70 characters? Does your home page have an explicit and accurate Description that provides a brief outline of your business purpose, unique selling proposition, and call to action, encapsulated in 150 – 200 characters? Or does it contain some vague warm and fuzzy drivel about beaches and sunsets? Keep the book analogy in your mind, and take a look at your Home page, particularly the first heading and first paragraph "Welcome to my website" is not a productive approach. What does it tell your visitors about you? It tells me that you are at best naive and both you and your website designer need SEO counselling! And think about that first paragraph is it an accurate summary of the site's reason for existence. If your website is required to deliver a return on investment, particularly by selling products or services, or delivering customer service, informing or entertaining, you really need to accurately describe your website's content, and allow it to become visible online. Oh, you want it to make you rich as well? But you do not really want to make a serious commitment or effort to do the job properly? Right... good luck with that! And remember that old GIGO acronym - "Garbage In, Garbage Out!"
What is Off-Site SEO?
This may surprise you, but some people are dishonest about their site content. Frankly, some people handle the truth in a very awkward fashion indeed. Telling Google that your site is about Pamela Anderson, when its actually selling Bart Simpson comics, is deuced annoying to the people who visit it. Therefore, Google and other SE's decided long ago that some external verification of every website's content would assist their efforts to deliver the most relevant SERPs to their clients. Makes perfect sense to me. How is this achieved, I hear you ask. Well, you have heard of links. Back to the book analogy think of good links as being like a series of book reviews. The balance of probability that your site is relevant to such a search is positively impacted by this external confirmation. A coincidence of keywords in on-site content and off-site links reassures Google immensely! Those keywords in the off-site links are referred to as anchor text, and should form the link title.
No, Its Not Rocket Science
Frankly, search engine optimization, in the pure sense of the term, is not particularly difficult to understand, or to do. The aim of the search engines is to provide their customers with the content most relevant to the search they are making. Therefore, your salvation lies in making your content relevant to the known searches. Do some thorough keyword research, learn and understand your target audience's searching behavior. Plan pages that target specific, high-volume, low competition search phrases.
Do not be vague, do not waffle, and help Google to help you. When the economic gravy pot is bubbling merrily, and there is ample business gravy slopping over, even the mediocre get a share. But when the economic ice age casts midnight shadows at noon, and credit wolf packs softly pad the empty streets, howling balefully at the waning moon. When you are sucking the last congealed streaks of business gravy off your tarnished spoon. Ask yourself, can you afford your website to be 2nd rate, disorganized and inarticulate, with the Why of SEO ringing in your ears?
Source From SEO News
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Search Engine and Website Optimization
SEO is an essential part of website optimization, involving the formatting of a web page so that search engine algorithms score it highly for the relevant keyword. Each page should be optimized for only one keyword so that the page is listed in as high a position as possible for that keyword.
If you understand how search engines work you will be able to apply your knowledge of SEO to optimize your website and ensure, not only a listing, but a search engine listing worth having. So, exactly how does a search engine such as Google work?
The answer to that is that nobody knows - except some Google employees of course. However, by carrying out certain actions and analyzing the results, it is possible to come to certain conclusions as to what Google are looking for and using that information to your advantage. Keep in mind, however, that the number of variables Google is evaluating is believed to reach three figures, so you will only ever scratch the surface, but we know that some of these are given more weighting than others.
SEO variables come in groups, and your website optimization strategy should take as many of these into account as possible. These groups can be categorized into increasingly narrower sets, the broadest being on-page and off-page optimization. The variables with most weighting are currently believed to be:
1. ON-PAGE WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
On-page optimization is, as the term suggests, carried out on the web page itself. This can either be on the visible part of the page, or in the underlying source html code. This optimization can be further classified into:
a) The Keywords. Each web page should be optimized for one keyword, and can contain a few sub-keywords for which the page might also be listed. These, however, are less important than they once were in view of Google's latent semantic indexing (LSI) algorithm. That is another subject! The choice of keyword is important, and there is software available (free and not so free) to help you choose the best keyword for your needs. Do not overuse keywords - instead use lots of related text and synonyms to tell the spiders what your page is about.
b) The Title. This 'title' is not visible on the page, but contained within the html 'Title' tag prior to the 'Body' section of the page html. It should contain the keyword, and is the title that appears at the head of the search engine listing for the page.
c) Meta Tags. In SEO, the Meta tags, again contained prior to the visible 'body' section, provide the search engine crawlers or spiders with information about your site. The only tags of use today are:
i. The Description Meta tag. This describes the content of your site and is shown in full or part below the title in your search engine listing. Include your selling point and any toll-free number you might have.
ii. The Keyword Meta tag. Not generally used, but who knows - it costs nothing and does no harm.
iii. The Robots Meta tag should be used to block any page from spiders that you do not want visited, in case they dilute the overall site relevance. For example, duplicate sales pages. Use it blank even if you are not blocking anything.
d) Headings Page and paragraph headings should be in bold text within H (heading) html tags, H1 for page and H2 for paragraph headings. Use keywords because heading tags stress the importance of the text within them, especially if formatted bold.
e) Navigation Links
i. Your navigation is best if made using keyword anchor text and with a small description of the page linked to just below it.
ii. Try to arrange your html so that the spider sees your body text first, followed by the links that will lead it away from your page. Most importance is placed on the first 100 words and the last paragraph, so do not let these words be your navigation links.
iii. Pay attention to your on-site linking strategy. There is a formula you can use to maximize the PageRank points for each or any individual page.
2. OFF-PAGE WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
Off-page optimization is a massive subject, and would require a separate article to even scratch the surface. It includes techniques such as one-way back links, reciprocal linking, article marketing, directory submissions, interlinking your own sites and blogs, use of social bookmarking sites and social networking, Twitter and so on. These SEO techniques can in many respects be more important than on-page SEO, and it is not uncommon to see a page with no content but adverts listed at position #1 on Google due solely to the number of other web pages linked to it.
SEO is an extensive subject, but you can improve your chances of getting a high listing if you take advantage of what is known. Information is available, some of it genuine and some opinion. Make sure you find the former and avoid the latter in your website optimization strategy.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
If you understand how search engines work you will be able to apply your knowledge of SEO to optimize your website and ensure, not only a listing, but a search engine listing worth having. So, exactly how does a search engine such as Google work?
The answer to that is that nobody knows - except some Google employees of course. However, by carrying out certain actions and analyzing the results, it is possible to come to certain conclusions as to what Google are looking for and using that information to your advantage. Keep in mind, however, that the number of variables Google is evaluating is believed to reach three figures, so you will only ever scratch the surface, but we know that some of these are given more weighting than others.
SEO variables come in groups, and your website optimization strategy should take as many of these into account as possible. These groups can be categorized into increasingly narrower sets, the broadest being on-page and off-page optimization. The variables with most weighting are currently believed to be:
1. ON-PAGE WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
On-page optimization is, as the term suggests, carried out on the web page itself. This can either be on the visible part of the page, or in the underlying source html code. This optimization can be further classified into:
a) The Keywords. Each web page should be optimized for one keyword, and can contain a few sub-keywords for which the page might also be listed. These, however, are less important than they once were in view of Google's latent semantic indexing (LSI) algorithm. That is another subject! The choice of keyword is important, and there is software available (free and not so free) to help you choose the best keyword for your needs. Do not overuse keywords - instead use lots of related text and synonyms to tell the spiders what your page is about.
b) The Title. This 'title' is not visible on the page, but contained within the html 'Title' tag prior to the 'Body' section of the page html. It should contain the keyword, and is the title that appears at the head of the search engine listing for the page.
c) Meta Tags. In SEO, the Meta tags, again contained prior to the visible 'body' section, provide the search engine crawlers or spiders with information about your site. The only tags of use today are:
i. The Description Meta tag. This describes the content of your site and is shown in full or part below the title in your search engine listing. Include your selling point and any toll-free number you might have.
ii. The Keyword Meta tag. Not generally used, but who knows - it costs nothing and does no harm.
iii. The Robots Meta tag should be used to block any page from spiders that you do not want visited, in case they dilute the overall site relevance. For example, duplicate sales pages. Use it blank even if you are not blocking anything.
d) Headings Page and paragraph headings should be in bold text within H (heading) html tags, H1 for page and H2 for paragraph headings. Use keywords because heading tags stress the importance of the text within them, especially if formatted bold.
e) Navigation Links
i. Your navigation is best if made using keyword anchor text and with a small description of the page linked to just below it.
ii. Try to arrange your html so that the spider sees your body text first, followed by the links that will lead it away from your page. Most importance is placed on the first 100 words and the last paragraph, so do not let these words be your navigation links.
iii. Pay attention to your on-site linking strategy. There is a formula you can use to maximize the PageRank points for each or any individual page.
2. OFF-PAGE WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
Off-page optimization is a massive subject, and would require a separate article to even scratch the surface. It includes techniques such as one-way back links, reciprocal linking, article marketing, directory submissions, interlinking your own sites and blogs, use of social bookmarking sites and social networking, Twitter and so on. These SEO techniques can in many respects be more important than on-page SEO, and it is not uncommon to see a page with no content but adverts listed at position #1 on Google due solely to the number of other web pages linked to it.
SEO is an extensive subject, but you can improve your chances of getting a high listing if you take advantage of what is known. Information is available, some of it genuine and some opinion. Make sure you find the former and avoid the latter in your website optimization strategy.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Before Your Web Site Makeover Goes Live: A Checklist
The web designer shows you her final version of your long-in-the- making revamped site. You click around and can hardly believe how gorgeous and rich it is. "Love it! Launch it!"
Too many times I have seen that sentiment lead to frantic scrambling, even to disaster. Before making your revamped site live, use this checklist to make sure you have caught or prevented horrible new-site glitches.
1. Timing. Never, never launch your new web site on a holiday, weekend or even on a Friday. Why? Because chances are high you will discover something weirdly wrong with your shopping cart, images, blog or regular web pages, and the tech support you need will be closed down or just skeletally staffed. Likewise, make sure your web designer or developer will be on hand for the next day or two to quickly fix any problems that become evident.
2. Test on as many computers as you can, and request feedback with the site parked in a test location. A colleague of mine (whose experience inspired this article) replaced her old site with the new one, then asked for feedback on a discussion board. Several people reported pages looking peculiar in their browsers or receiving an obnoxious warning message instead of simply seeing the home page.
3. Match the new file names with the former ones. When your web site has been up and running for quite a while, visitors have bookmarked various pages of it or created links to your pages on their sites. You would be foolish to sacrifice the benefit of those bookmarks and links by having all new files names and sending those looking for the old page names to an error page. Instead, as much as you can, make the new file names match the old ones and redirect any old pages lacking a corresponding new page to the nearest equivalent.
Designers and developers, focused on creating a new site for you, do not usually take care of this unless you ask them to. I often run across this foolish oversight when updating one of my reports that has a lot of links in it, discovering article links that go to a dead link rather than to the article that was given a new URL during a site makeover.
4. For SEO purposes, keep page titles the same. Experts in search engine optimization advise that if your site was getting good traffic from search engines prior to your makeover, keep your old page titles as much as possible. (The page title is the text that shows up in the upper left corner of the browser.) To search engines, a new page title can cause the built-up search engine ranking for the page to get lost.
5. Hunt down and eliminate boilerplate copy. If your designer or developer used a template (and if so, they will rarely tell you they did), the template may have pre-written text on extra pages that unexpectedly become visible to your visitors. The testing described in step #2 above usually flushes out these blunders so you can purge them from the site. Unless the new site is gargantuan, you can also hunt down the unwanted content by viewing all the pages one by one from your file manager program.
6. Run a sample order and subscription signup from the new site. If possible, test the ordering and list signup procedures from your test location before making the new site live. Sometimes the "thank you" messages do not show up properly or orders just do not go through correctly after a makeover. If you can not check this from the test location, run these checks as soon as possible after making the new site live and be prepared to fix the glitches immediately. Having a non-functioning site up even for an hour can lose you sales.
7. Delete all the old pages from the server. Do this just before uploading the new site if you can, or after uploading the new site hunt for and delete any former pages that were not replaced by new ones. Otherwise, you will be startled later by a visitor finding pages you thought had been superseded.
8. Immediately after uploading the new site, recheck all the links and pages. Start from the home page and first systematically follow all the links in your navigation system, then follow all the links on pages that contain many links, like an index of articles or your newsletter archive. As you do this, keep your eyes peeled for any missing images. Fix any problems you notice.
9. And last, for the next four or five days, monitor all the errors that show up in your web logs. This alerts you to images that visitors are not seeing, pages that are not linked to correctly, pages that are taking too long to load for some of your visitors and other problems. Fix any remaining glitches and bask in the praise for your well-done, nicely functioning makeover.
Source From SitePro News
Too many times I have seen that sentiment lead to frantic scrambling, even to disaster. Before making your revamped site live, use this checklist to make sure you have caught or prevented horrible new-site glitches.
1. Timing. Never, never launch your new web site on a holiday, weekend or even on a Friday. Why? Because chances are high you will discover something weirdly wrong with your shopping cart, images, blog or regular web pages, and the tech support you need will be closed down or just skeletally staffed. Likewise, make sure your web designer or developer will be on hand for the next day or two to quickly fix any problems that become evident.
2. Test on as many computers as you can, and request feedback with the site parked in a test location. A colleague of mine (whose experience inspired this article) replaced her old site with the new one, then asked for feedback on a discussion board. Several people reported pages looking peculiar in their browsers or receiving an obnoxious warning message instead of simply seeing the home page.
3. Match the new file names with the former ones. When your web site has been up and running for quite a while, visitors have bookmarked various pages of it or created links to your pages on their sites. You would be foolish to sacrifice the benefit of those bookmarks and links by having all new files names and sending those looking for the old page names to an error page. Instead, as much as you can, make the new file names match the old ones and redirect any old pages lacking a corresponding new page to the nearest equivalent.
Designers and developers, focused on creating a new site for you, do not usually take care of this unless you ask them to. I often run across this foolish oversight when updating one of my reports that has a lot of links in it, discovering article links that go to a dead link rather than to the article that was given a new URL during a site makeover.
4. For SEO purposes, keep page titles the same. Experts in search engine optimization advise that if your site was getting good traffic from search engines prior to your makeover, keep your old page titles as much as possible. (The page title is the text that shows up in the upper left corner of the browser.) To search engines, a new page title can cause the built-up search engine ranking for the page to get lost.
5. Hunt down and eliminate boilerplate copy. If your designer or developer used a template (and if so, they will rarely tell you they did), the template may have pre-written text on extra pages that unexpectedly become visible to your visitors. The testing described in step #2 above usually flushes out these blunders so you can purge them from the site. Unless the new site is gargantuan, you can also hunt down the unwanted content by viewing all the pages one by one from your file manager program.
6. Run a sample order and subscription signup from the new site. If possible, test the ordering and list signup procedures from your test location before making the new site live. Sometimes the "thank you" messages do not show up properly or orders just do not go through correctly after a makeover. If you can not check this from the test location, run these checks as soon as possible after making the new site live and be prepared to fix the glitches immediately. Having a non-functioning site up even for an hour can lose you sales.
7. Delete all the old pages from the server. Do this just before uploading the new site if you can, or after uploading the new site hunt for and delete any former pages that were not replaced by new ones. Otherwise, you will be startled later by a visitor finding pages you thought had been superseded.
8. Immediately after uploading the new site, recheck all the links and pages. Start from the home page and first systematically follow all the links in your navigation system, then follow all the links on pages that contain many links, like an index of articles or your newsletter archive. As you do this, keep your eyes peeled for any missing images. Fix any problems you notice.
9. And last, for the next four or five days, monitor all the errors that show up in your web logs. This alerts you to images that visitors are not seeing, pages that are not linked to correctly, pages that are taking too long to load for some of your visitors and other problems. Fix any remaining glitches and bask in the praise for your well-done, nicely functioning makeover.
Source From SitePro News
Friday, August 7, 2009
Give Your Site a 10-Point Legal Check-Up
It is early in the year, and it is time to fulfill your resolution to give your site a quick legal check-up. Online businesses are now highly regulated, and there is substantial liability if your site is not legally compliant. In addition, your customers are becoming more Internet savvy, and a site that is not legally compliant is not going to be trusted.
Use This Checklist If You Already Have The Basic Site Documents In Place
1. Copyright Notice. Check Your Copyright Notice. Your copyright notice consists of the following elements: the word "copyright" or copyright symbol (c in a circle) followed by the year of first publication followed by the name of the copyright owner. It is also a good idea to add "All rights reserved worldwide". Example: Copyright 1996-09 Digital Contracts, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Note that if you update your site from time to time, you should add a date range reflecting the fact that the site has been updated each year within the date range. If you have not updated yet for 2009, do it now.
2. Blogs, etc. Have you recently added a blog or any other functionality that permits visitors to post text or digital files to your site? Or, do you plan to do so as part of your marketing plans for 2009? If so, you need to have a DMCA notice in your Terms of Use and you also need to file a DMCA Registration form with the U.S. Copyright Office. These steps will create a "safe harbor" from strict liability for copyright infringement if a site visitor posts infringing material to your site.
3. Personal Information. Do you collect personal information from site visitors? If so, review your Privacy Policy to make sure that you identify all of the categories of personal information you collect and the way in which you share this personal information.
4. Data Security. Check your data security measures. If you collect personal information, you are required to implement "reasonable and appropriate" data security measures. These measures are essentially moving targets since data security technology evolves at a relatively rapid pace. What may have been "reasonable and appropriate" a couple of years ago may not pass muster today. Update your security procedures, if necessary.
5. Future Sale of Your Business? If your online business is starting to be successful and generate positive revenue, have you ever considered that you might want to sell it for a profit in the future? If so, be sure that your Privacy Policy specifies that personal information collected may be transferred and shared in the event of a sale. If you do not do this prior to collecting personal information, you will not be able to pass it on to your purchaser. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stipulated in recent settlements that personal information collected prior to posting this notice in your Privacy Policy will not be transferable in the event of a sale. And this personal information (your opt-in lists and customer lists) are the real value of your online business.
6. Service Providers. Do you use service providers to provide hosting, site maintenance, SEO services, or other site functions where they have access to your server? If you do not collect personal information, your answer to this question is immaterial, but if you do (and only an email address will suffice), you need to enter into privacy and security agreements with your service providers. The FTC stipulated in a couple of recent settlements that you would be liable if you do not.
7. Registration Agreement. Does your site require site visitors to register for certain benefits such as a membership or subscription rights? If so, you need an electronic agreement (a so-called "click-wrapped" agreement where the user clicks on "I ACCEPT"). Your agreement should be presented conspicuously in the registration process and it should require an affirmative act (clicking on "I ACCEPT") to complete the registration. You also need to be sure that all of your warranty disclaimers and limitations of liability pass muster.
8. Collect Birth Dates? Do you collect the date of birth as part of your registration process? If so, and if this date indicates that children under 13 are registering, you will be liable for substantial damages under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) if you do not comply with COPPA's stringent requirements. You should either modify your information collection practices or comply with COPPA, or both.
9. Creditor Under FACTA? Do your registered users make periodic payments payable as monthly or quarterly installments, or do you extend credit so that payment is made after receipt of the product or service? If so, you fall within the statutory requirements of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (FACTA). FACTA requires that you adopt a "Red Flag" Identity Theft Policy before May 1, 2009, or face substantial liability.
10. Sales Intermediaries? Do you use affiliates or resellers? If so, a recent New York case illustrates that you may be liable for their actions if they violate certain laws acting on your behalf. For example, are your affiliates engaged in illegal spamming activities? If they are offering their own end user license agreements, do they properly disclose certain activities such as the use of pop up ads? You should check your affiliate and reseller agreements and modify them, if required.
Conclusion
The checklists provided above are not exhaustive. However, they should point you in the right direction as you give your site a new year's legal compliance check-up. A simple check-up and remedial action if necessary is one of the best investments you can make in your online business.
Source From SitePro News
Use This Checklist If You Already Have The Basic Site Documents In Place
1. Copyright Notice. Check Your Copyright Notice. Your copyright notice consists of the following elements: the word "copyright" or copyright symbol (c in a circle) followed by the year of first publication followed by the name of the copyright owner. It is also a good idea to add "All rights reserved worldwide". Example: Copyright 1996-09 Digital Contracts, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Note that if you update your site from time to time, you should add a date range reflecting the fact that the site has been updated each year within the date range. If you have not updated yet for 2009, do it now.
2. Blogs, etc. Have you recently added a blog or any other functionality that permits visitors to post text or digital files to your site? Or, do you plan to do so as part of your marketing plans for 2009? If so, you need to have a DMCA notice in your Terms of Use and you also need to file a DMCA Registration form with the U.S. Copyright Office. These steps will create a "safe harbor" from strict liability for copyright infringement if a site visitor posts infringing material to your site.
3. Personal Information. Do you collect personal information from site visitors? If so, review your Privacy Policy to make sure that you identify all of the categories of personal information you collect and the way in which you share this personal information.
4. Data Security. Check your data security measures. If you collect personal information, you are required to implement "reasonable and appropriate" data security measures. These measures are essentially moving targets since data security technology evolves at a relatively rapid pace. What may have been "reasonable and appropriate" a couple of years ago may not pass muster today. Update your security procedures, if necessary.
5. Future Sale of Your Business? If your online business is starting to be successful and generate positive revenue, have you ever considered that you might want to sell it for a profit in the future? If so, be sure that your Privacy Policy specifies that personal information collected may be transferred and shared in the event of a sale. If you do not do this prior to collecting personal information, you will not be able to pass it on to your purchaser. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stipulated in recent settlements that personal information collected prior to posting this notice in your Privacy Policy will not be transferable in the event of a sale. And this personal information (your opt-in lists and customer lists) are the real value of your online business.
6. Service Providers. Do you use service providers to provide hosting, site maintenance, SEO services, or other site functions where they have access to your server? If you do not collect personal information, your answer to this question is immaterial, but if you do (and only an email address will suffice), you need to enter into privacy and security agreements with your service providers. The FTC stipulated in a couple of recent settlements that you would be liable if you do not.
7. Registration Agreement. Does your site require site visitors to register for certain benefits such as a membership or subscription rights? If so, you need an electronic agreement (a so-called "click-wrapped" agreement where the user clicks on "I ACCEPT"). Your agreement should be presented conspicuously in the registration process and it should require an affirmative act (clicking on "I ACCEPT") to complete the registration. You also need to be sure that all of your warranty disclaimers and limitations of liability pass muster.
8. Collect Birth Dates? Do you collect the date of birth as part of your registration process? If so, and if this date indicates that children under 13 are registering, you will be liable for substantial damages under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) if you do not comply with COPPA's stringent requirements. You should either modify your information collection practices or comply with COPPA, or both.
9. Creditor Under FACTA? Do your registered users make periodic payments payable as monthly or quarterly installments, or do you extend credit so that payment is made after receipt of the product or service? If so, you fall within the statutory requirements of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (FACTA). FACTA requires that you adopt a "Red Flag" Identity Theft Policy before May 1, 2009, or face substantial liability.
10. Sales Intermediaries? Do you use affiliates or resellers? If so, a recent New York case illustrates that you may be liable for their actions if they violate certain laws acting on your behalf. For example, are your affiliates engaged in illegal spamming activities? If they are offering their own end user license agreements, do they properly disclose certain activities such as the use of pop up ads? You should check your affiliate and reseller agreements and modify them, if required.
Conclusion
The checklists provided above are not exhaustive. However, they should point you in the right direction as you give your site a new year's legal compliance check-up. A simple check-up and remedial action if necessary is one of the best investments you can make in your online business.
Source From SitePro News
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
How to Get Massive Free Traffic to Your Website
There is only one real secret to getting a lot of visitors to your website. That is merely figuring out where lots of your ideal visitors are, and standing in front of them. When you think of it in those terms, it is really simple. There are also only three real ways to get in front of the traffic flow. You can buy traffic, borrow traffic, or create traffic.
You buy traffic using pay-per-click search engines. It is very dependable, and can give you a steady flow of consistent traffic. The big drawback with using pay-per-clicks to generate traffic is that it can be very risky. Those who use pay-per- clicks to generate 100% of their traffic, and are considered the best of the best, will tell you that as many as 7 out of 10 campaigns that they set up will lose money. The professionals very quickly shut off the losers, and their winners more than make up for the losses, but it is really not a game for someone not properly trained.
You can also buy traffic using an affiliate program. Since you only pay for the traffic when a sale is made, it is a very low-risk method. Since your affiliates are sending you their best customers, you can also think of it as borrowing traffic.
You can also create traffic by putting things on the Internet that people are attracted to. You can create content by writing articles or blogging for example. I love content creation and have written over 1100 different articles. My articles teach people how to solve pressing problems, and at the same time point them to me (my sites) as a great resource.
When you create content your big challenge is to get it noticed and indexed by the search engines, so that people can follow links from there to your site. It is actually fairly easy - but time and labor intensive.
If your content is "viral" it will be something that others will happily share. Examples include in-depth articles, essays that touch people on a deep emotional level, or humorous videos that you post on YouTube. Of the three methods of getting traffic (buying, borrowing, and creating it) my favorite has to be borrowing it with creating it second.
The key to generating an absolute flood of free traffic is getting noticed, getting backlinks, etc., from high traffic websites such as Google, Craig's List, Yahoo, YouTube, and the various bookmarking and social networking sites.
This can be as simple as searching through Yahoo Answers for questions on your area of expertise, and then posting a great answer along with an appropriate link to your website or product. It can be as simple as searching through YouTube for videos on your area of expertise, and then leaving a comment along with a link sharing that they can find more information on the topic at your site. It can be as simple as using the search engines to locate dozens or even hundreds of blogs and forums in your niche, and then interacting with these communities.
There is only one problem with most of the methods that I just mentioned. They can be time consuming and labor intensive. Just locating active communities in your niche can literally take hours.
I use automated software to monitor and notify me of active blogs, forums, and communities in my niche. I use automated software to notify me when they are discussing my area of expertise or there is a new video posted pertaining to my area of expertise.
When I discover a new resource, I then analyze it, and if appropriate, I interact with that high traffic site, and leave a link back to my site, which is a perfectly acceptable practice. So there you have my secret for generating literally hundreds of thousands of free hits to even my newest sites. Of course, your site has to be about something that people are interested it. I do strongly advocate using software to automate many of the mundane processes such as just finding these sites. Many webmasters really struggle with website traffic generation, and there is absolutely no need to. You merely find the huge pools of traffic interested in your topic, and then you stand underneath the waterfall, and enjoy the cool, refreshing flow of new visitors.
Source From SEO News
You buy traffic using pay-per-click search engines. It is very dependable, and can give you a steady flow of consistent traffic. The big drawback with using pay-per-clicks to generate traffic is that it can be very risky. Those who use pay-per- clicks to generate 100% of their traffic, and are considered the best of the best, will tell you that as many as 7 out of 10 campaigns that they set up will lose money. The professionals very quickly shut off the losers, and their winners more than make up for the losses, but it is really not a game for someone not properly trained.
You can also buy traffic using an affiliate program. Since you only pay for the traffic when a sale is made, it is a very low-risk method. Since your affiliates are sending you their best customers, you can also think of it as borrowing traffic.
You can also create traffic by putting things on the Internet that people are attracted to. You can create content by writing articles or blogging for example. I love content creation and have written over 1100 different articles. My articles teach people how to solve pressing problems, and at the same time point them to me (my sites) as a great resource.
When you create content your big challenge is to get it noticed and indexed by the search engines, so that people can follow links from there to your site. It is actually fairly easy - but time and labor intensive.
If your content is "viral" it will be something that others will happily share. Examples include in-depth articles, essays that touch people on a deep emotional level, or humorous videos that you post on YouTube. Of the three methods of getting traffic (buying, borrowing, and creating it) my favorite has to be borrowing it with creating it second.
The key to generating an absolute flood of free traffic is getting noticed, getting backlinks, etc., from high traffic websites such as Google, Craig's List, Yahoo, YouTube, and the various bookmarking and social networking sites.
This can be as simple as searching through Yahoo Answers for questions on your area of expertise, and then posting a great answer along with an appropriate link to your website or product. It can be as simple as searching through YouTube for videos on your area of expertise, and then leaving a comment along with a link sharing that they can find more information on the topic at your site. It can be as simple as using the search engines to locate dozens or even hundreds of blogs and forums in your niche, and then interacting with these communities.
There is only one problem with most of the methods that I just mentioned. They can be time consuming and labor intensive. Just locating active communities in your niche can literally take hours.
I use automated software to monitor and notify me of active blogs, forums, and communities in my niche. I use automated software to notify me when they are discussing my area of expertise or there is a new video posted pertaining to my area of expertise.
When I discover a new resource, I then analyze it, and if appropriate, I interact with that high traffic site, and leave a link back to my site, which is a perfectly acceptable practice. So there you have my secret for generating literally hundreds of thousands of free hits to even my newest sites. Of course, your site has to be about something that people are interested it. I do strongly advocate using software to automate many of the mundane processes such as just finding these sites. Many webmasters really struggle with website traffic generation, and there is absolutely no need to. You merely find the huge pools of traffic interested in your topic, and then you stand underneath the waterfall, and enjoy the cool, refreshing flow of new visitors.
Source From SEO News
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Plan - 4 Steps To A Website Brand
Do you have a plan? Most companies spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and money planning what to do and how to do it.
Let us say you need a website, so you develop a plan, present it to a bunch of website designers, and get quotes or proposals. You are not going to get caught with your pants down like the last time by some nerdy geek, you know the skinny kid with the scraggly beard, whose techno-babble gave you a headache, or the bizarre young lady dressed in gothic chic with the black lipstick and tattoo to match - yikes, no thanks, not this time, this time you got a plan.
Human Motivational Optimization
You read all the blogs on website design, you know all the ins-and-outs of search engine optimization, and Google Adwords. No one is going to pull a fast one on you. You know your business, your market, and your needs. Or do you?
How much do you really know about how real people interact with your website? How much do you really know about what we call Human Motivational Optimization? All the stats, logs, and number crunching analysis that forms the basis of many website development plans does not truly give you the visceral understanding of how to connect to an audience, and is not that what you want your website to do?
So maybe your plan is the wrong plan; it is like planning a trip to Home Depot to buy a cabbage; it just does not make sense. So how about a plan that does make sense, something simple, understandable, easy to implement, that is if you hire the right people to do it. But before we tell you the four steps to creating your very own Website Branding Plan, let us talk about Don LaFontaine.
Every Company Needs A Movie Trailer
Chances are you do not know who the late Don LaFontaine was, but you have heard his voice many, many times. Don was the most famous and influential voice behind thousands of movie and television trailers. He had a distinctive deep, gravely voice, and a writing style that reinvented the entire movie trailer format. But why should you care? Simple. Movie trailers are the ultimate elevator pitch, a short memorable performance that compels you to action, kind of like what a mission statement is suppose to do, but I am getting ahead of myself. Let us start at the beginning, or rather, the end.
Branding Starts With Thinking Backwards
Most people like to start a project at the beginning and work their way through until they reach the end. Makes sense, or does it? If you do not start with where you want to end-up, it is unlikely you will ever get where you want to go. Remember our cabbage? Planning a shopping to trip to Home Depot because they got cool stuff, does not help if what you want is a cabbage.
Branding is no different. If you do not start with how you want your audience to think about you, they will probably never think about you at all. So now that we got that straight let us start our plan where it makes sense, the end.
The 4 Step Web-Branding Plan
1. The Slogan
Your slogan, you know the thing that sits underneath your logo, that simple little phrase somebody in your office came up with that makes you sound important, stuff like "the cool air conditioning company." Most small and medium size companies do not think too hard about this little marketing gem, and as a result they either have something really cheesy, or some meaningless platitude that has no memorable meaning at all, like "the best people for the best job."
Just because you are small and do not have millions of dollars to spend on television ads promoting your pithy little motto, does not mean you should not have one. That catchphrase is who you are, and how you want people to remember you, short, memorable, and to the point. I remember my sons arguing over some complicated bit of business when one of them in frustration finally said, "Enough already. Give it to me in one word or less!" a demand to articulate what was important without all the peripheral issues; a lesson all businesses should pay attention to.
2. The Story Line (Logline)
To my mind, mission statements are a totally dysfunctional marketing element, misused and abused by a bean-counter attitude, born out of trying to squeeze every last drop of information into a statement that will not offend anybody. A wise man once said, "If what you are saying does not offend somebody, maybe you are not saying anything" and most mission statements that are full of meaningless platitudes and toned-down amendments, fall into the category of not saying anything, at least, anything worth hearing. Okay so let us forget about mission statements, after all this is not the military, and we are not planning the next Desert Storm. Instead let us think loglines, or what you can think of as your brand story line.
You know those short statements you find in TV Guide, or your weekend television insert, prompting you to watch the next episode of 'House,' or 'Desperate Bimbos.' They are a short form text version of a trailer, intended to get you to watch the movie or television show. For our purposes, we want people to go to our website, and stay-tuned long enough to get our core marketing message, and not walk out half way through the presentation. So, how do we do that?
The Six Elements of Effective Web Trailers
In order for us to come up with a compelling statement that prompts people to view our website presentation, we need to refer back to our old pal Don LaFontaine. What if Don LaFontaine wrote our website trailer. How would he do it?
Don had a very distinctive style that you have heard a thousand times for a thousand different movies, but they all followed a similar format. Each trailer needs to cover six distinct elements, who, what, where, how, why, and when. All the things businesses should be presenting in their elevator pitch, but with one extra ingredient, personality. Now that is a mission statement; one with a little style, panache, and personality; one that will get you remembered and prompt your audience to action.
3. The Personality
Movies like businesses all fall into certain genres or categories. There is the action movie format that is suitable for sports related businesses, the chick flick style that is ideal for cosmetic or fashion industry businesses, and the family comedy format suitable for entertainment and recreation based companies, and of course the kids movie version perfect for any business selling things for children. The point is that every company and website has to have a personality.
Many hard-nosed business executives scoff at the idea of spending money on such seemingly trivial marketing concepts as company personality, but ignoring your website persona, is a big mistake. You can either invest a little in developing, creating, managing, and promoting this personality or you can let the marketplace decide for itself, or worse, find you completely redundant and irrelevant.
4. The Delivery
You may be asking yourself, this sounds good on paper, but can it really be done, and can it be done for my business, on my website? The answer is damn straight it can. Like most things in life, and in business, it is not grasping the concept that is so hard, it is implementing it.
With a little investment and a willingness to take some chances, you can be the market leader. But if you thought you could simply take your newly created movie trailer style website elevator pitch and slap it onto your website in text form, you would be mistaken. How you deliver the message is as important, and in many cases more important, than what you say.
Whether you sell lipstick, licorice, or lingerie, you probably have lots of competition, so how you deliver your message is what is going to make the difference.
You want your website presentation to motivate people to email or phone. You want to deliver a compelling performance that is more than a sales pitch, a presentation that uses voice, visuals, words, and music to create a website personality, a lasting impression; one that is going to allow you to stand out from the crowd and give you a competitive advantage.
Nothing will convince better than seeing an actual example, and guess what, we just happen to be able to provide you with one: check out SonicPersonality.com and see what an effective website presentation sounds like. If nothing else, you may get a chuckle or two.
Source From SitePro News
Let us say you need a website, so you develop a plan, present it to a bunch of website designers, and get quotes or proposals. You are not going to get caught with your pants down like the last time by some nerdy geek, you know the skinny kid with the scraggly beard, whose techno-babble gave you a headache, or the bizarre young lady dressed in gothic chic with the black lipstick and tattoo to match - yikes, no thanks, not this time, this time you got a plan.
Human Motivational Optimization
You read all the blogs on website design, you know all the ins-and-outs of search engine optimization, and Google Adwords. No one is going to pull a fast one on you. You know your business, your market, and your needs. Or do you?
How much do you really know about how real people interact with your website? How much do you really know about what we call Human Motivational Optimization? All the stats, logs, and number crunching analysis that forms the basis of many website development plans does not truly give you the visceral understanding of how to connect to an audience, and is not that what you want your website to do?
So maybe your plan is the wrong plan; it is like planning a trip to Home Depot to buy a cabbage; it just does not make sense. So how about a plan that does make sense, something simple, understandable, easy to implement, that is if you hire the right people to do it. But before we tell you the four steps to creating your very own Website Branding Plan, let us talk about Don LaFontaine.
Every Company Needs A Movie Trailer
Chances are you do not know who the late Don LaFontaine was, but you have heard his voice many, many times. Don was the most famous and influential voice behind thousands of movie and television trailers. He had a distinctive deep, gravely voice, and a writing style that reinvented the entire movie trailer format. But why should you care? Simple. Movie trailers are the ultimate elevator pitch, a short memorable performance that compels you to action, kind of like what a mission statement is suppose to do, but I am getting ahead of myself. Let us start at the beginning, or rather, the end.
Branding Starts With Thinking Backwards
Most people like to start a project at the beginning and work their way through until they reach the end. Makes sense, or does it? If you do not start with where you want to end-up, it is unlikely you will ever get where you want to go. Remember our cabbage? Planning a shopping to trip to Home Depot because they got cool stuff, does not help if what you want is a cabbage.
Branding is no different. If you do not start with how you want your audience to think about you, they will probably never think about you at all. So now that we got that straight let us start our plan where it makes sense, the end.
The 4 Step Web-Branding Plan
1. The Slogan
Your slogan, you know the thing that sits underneath your logo, that simple little phrase somebody in your office came up with that makes you sound important, stuff like "the cool air conditioning company." Most small and medium size companies do not think too hard about this little marketing gem, and as a result they either have something really cheesy, or some meaningless platitude that has no memorable meaning at all, like "the best people for the best job."
Just because you are small and do not have millions of dollars to spend on television ads promoting your pithy little motto, does not mean you should not have one. That catchphrase is who you are, and how you want people to remember you, short, memorable, and to the point. I remember my sons arguing over some complicated bit of business when one of them in frustration finally said, "Enough already. Give it to me in one word or less!" a demand to articulate what was important without all the peripheral issues; a lesson all businesses should pay attention to.
2. The Story Line (Logline)
To my mind, mission statements are a totally dysfunctional marketing element, misused and abused by a bean-counter attitude, born out of trying to squeeze every last drop of information into a statement that will not offend anybody. A wise man once said, "If what you are saying does not offend somebody, maybe you are not saying anything" and most mission statements that are full of meaningless platitudes and toned-down amendments, fall into the category of not saying anything, at least, anything worth hearing. Okay so let us forget about mission statements, after all this is not the military, and we are not planning the next Desert Storm. Instead let us think loglines, or what you can think of as your brand story line.
You know those short statements you find in TV Guide, or your weekend television insert, prompting you to watch the next episode of 'House,' or 'Desperate Bimbos.' They are a short form text version of a trailer, intended to get you to watch the movie or television show. For our purposes, we want people to go to our website, and stay-tuned long enough to get our core marketing message, and not walk out half way through the presentation. So, how do we do that?
The Six Elements of Effective Web Trailers
In order for us to come up with a compelling statement that prompts people to view our website presentation, we need to refer back to our old pal Don LaFontaine. What if Don LaFontaine wrote our website trailer. How would he do it?
Don had a very distinctive style that you have heard a thousand times for a thousand different movies, but they all followed a similar format. Each trailer needs to cover six distinct elements, who, what, where, how, why, and when. All the things businesses should be presenting in their elevator pitch, but with one extra ingredient, personality. Now that is a mission statement; one with a little style, panache, and personality; one that will get you remembered and prompt your audience to action.
3. The Personality
Movies like businesses all fall into certain genres or categories. There is the action movie format that is suitable for sports related businesses, the chick flick style that is ideal for cosmetic or fashion industry businesses, and the family comedy format suitable for entertainment and recreation based companies, and of course the kids movie version perfect for any business selling things for children. The point is that every company and website has to have a personality.
Many hard-nosed business executives scoff at the idea of spending money on such seemingly trivial marketing concepts as company personality, but ignoring your website persona, is a big mistake. You can either invest a little in developing, creating, managing, and promoting this personality or you can let the marketplace decide for itself, or worse, find you completely redundant and irrelevant.
4. The Delivery
You may be asking yourself, this sounds good on paper, but can it really be done, and can it be done for my business, on my website? The answer is damn straight it can. Like most things in life, and in business, it is not grasping the concept that is so hard, it is implementing it.
With a little investment and a willingness to take some chances, you can be the market leader. But if you thought you could simply take your newly created movie trailer style website elevator pitch and slap it onto your website in text form, you would be mistaken. How you deliver the message is as important, and in many cases more important, than what you say.
Whether you sell lipstick, licorice, or lingerie, you probably have lots of competition, so how you deliver your message is what is going to make the difference.
You want your website presentation to motivate people to email or phone. You want to deliver a compelling performance that is more than a sales pitch, a presentation that uses voice, visuals, words, and music to create a website personality, a lasting impression; one that is going to allow you to stand out from the crowd and give you a competitive advantage.
Nothing will convince better than seeing an actual example, and guess what, we just happen to be able to provide you with one: check out SonicPersonality.com and see what an effective website presentation sounds like. If nothing else, you may get a chuckle or two.
Source From SitePro News
Saturday, August 1, 2009
How to Pitch Media Members for Free Publicity
After optimizing your site for search engines and pursuing other marketing efforts, it is time to use the power of the press to boost sales, awareness and credibility cost-effectively. But how do you pitch your story to a reporter?
Here are some quick tips to help you through the media process:
1. Know Your Targeted Media Members.
Before you even reach out to a reporter, you should know what that person writes about and what he or she will be interested in discussing. Do your homework before contacting a specific reporter, and you will have a much better understanding of what you should say (and the topics to avoid).
2. Have Talking Points Ready.
With point #1 in mind above, write down all of the benefits your business has to offer. Know why a reporter will be interested in what you have to say, and practice giving your unique story angle. Then, when the time is right, you will be ready. (You may even want to have your talking points written on an index card by your phone.)
3. Be Newsworthy.
Try to think of a way that your business fits in with current news and industry events. Develop a story angle related to something newsworthy and current. Then, approach a reporter with your idea.
4. Be Unique.
Media members want fresh, interesting stories. Try to stand out from the crowd and provide your opinion about a current topic, unique statistic or story angle that no one else can offer. By conducting some research and offering something different, you will get much farther with your publicity efforts.
5. Be Succinct.
Reporters are on deadline. Get to the point fast. Practice what you are going to say in advance. Then, speak clearly and succinctly. Mention the most important benefits of your story-angle first. Reporters will appreciate your sense of urgency and respect for their time.
6. Know Your Industry.
Become an expert in your field and know the most current news, events and activities within your industry. Share your news with reporters. And soon, they will come to you for the latest industry updates.
7. Offer Expert Advice.
Without pitching your own products and services, introduce yourself as an expert to targeted media members. Comment on a current news item, provide a special report and offer your help with a future article. Reporters will appreciate the fact that you are willing to provide assistance and may add you to their list of resources.
8. Follow-up Accordingly.
Media members are busy people, and you will probably need to make an effort to stay in touch with them. If you are waiting for a pending story or a call back and have not heard anything for a few days, feel free to contact the media member directly. Try not to be a pest, but conduct the appropriate follow-up when necessary. This is essential to obtaining clips and maintaining professional, media relationships.
Hopefully, these tips will help you pitch your story to media members and get results. By "thinking like a reporter" and offering beneficial information in a timely fashion, you will definitely increase your chances of obtaining some good media coverage that will make a difference on the bottom line.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
Here are some quick tips to help you through the media process:
1. Know Your Targeted Media Members.
Before you even reach out to a reporter, you should know what that person writes about and what he or she will be interested in discussing. Do your homework before contacting a specific reporter, and you will have a much better understanding of what you should say (and the topics to avoid).
2. Have Talking Points Ready.
With point #1 in mind above, write down all of the benefits your business has to offer. Know why a reporter will be interested in what you have to say, and practice giving your unique story angle. Then, when the time is right, you will be ready. (You may even want to have your talking points written on an index card by your phone.)
3. Be Newsworthy.
Try to think of a way that your business fits in with current news and industry events. Develop a story angle related to something newsworthy and current. Then, approach a reporter with your idea.
4. Be Unique.
Media members want fresh, interesting stories. Try to stand out from the crowd and provide your opinion about a current topic, unique statistic or story angle that no one else can offer. By conducting some research and offering something different, you will get much farther with your publicity efforts.
5. Be Succinct.
Reporters are on deadline. Get to the point fast. Practice what you are going to say in advance. Then, speak clearly and succinctly. Mention the most important benefits of your story-angle first. Reporters will appreciate your sense of urgency and respect for their time.
6. Know Your Industry.
Become an expert in your field and know the most current news, events and activities within your industry. Share your news with reporters. And soon, they will come to you for the latest industry updates.
7. Offer Expert Advice.
Without pitching your own products and services, introduce yourself as an expert to targeted media members. Comment on a current news item, provide a special report and offer your help with a future article. Reporters will appreciate the fact that you are willing to provide assistance and may add you to their list of resources.
8. Follow-up Accordingly.
Media members are busy people, and you will probably need to make an effort to stay in touch with them. If you are waiting for a pending story or a call back and have not heard anything for a few days, feel free to contact the media member directly. Try not to be a pest, but conduct the appropriate follow-up when necessary. This is essential to obtaining clips and maintaining professional, media relationships.
Hopefully, these tips will help you pitch your story to media members and get results. By "thinking like a reporter" and offering beneficial information in a timely fashion, you will definitely increase your chances of obtaining some good media coverage that will make a difference on the bottom line.
Source From Entireweb Newsletter
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