Web Moves Blog

The Rise and Fall of Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs were once a great source of online revenue, a savvy webmaster with an eye for marketing could easily parley a site into a money making machine with a little luck and effort. However, the evolution and growth of the Internet has hampered the growth of fortune making affiliate programs. Constant search engine algorithm changes, along with the search engine’s clear distaste for sites participating in affiliate programs; have made it a little more difficult to earn a healthy affiliate revenue. An influx in the use of software programs that terminate cookie tracking and privacy programs that prevent webmasters from tracking referrers, have also hindered the affiliate sales channel. While it is still possible to make money through affiliate marketing, other alternatives ought to be considered.

A Healthy Alternative or Supplement
Google’s Adsense program allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google’s pay-per-click Adword results. This has become a popular alternative and an effective revenue sharing program for webmasters. Google’s spider parses the adserving website and serves ads that relate to the website’s content. While the Google’s Adsense program still has some issues, they are making efforts to improve it.

The website maintenance related to Adsense is very easy and requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert javascript into the webpage or website template. The javascript calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads are served each time a visitor goes to the webpage. If the visitor clicks one of the Adsense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral.

The implementation, while simple, has its drawbacks. Google dictates the format of the ads. Webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted text boxes that lack creativity. A recent improvement allows webmasters to modify the ad boxes to resemble the website’s color scheme. Still, a far cry from some of the creative ads webmasters are accustom to.

The example below reflects how the color scheme can be modified to match the look of the website, but the ads physically don’t fit well into the overall website design.

sample modified to match sites color scheme:
http://www.hospital-software.com (scroll to the bottom)

Google determines the content of the ads that are shown. Sometimes the ads are poorly targeted, and of no interest to the website visitors.

sample of poorly targeted ads:
http://www.real-estate-supply.com

Adwords can be a great addition to a website, and when well matched to the content the revenue stream from Google is consistent and effortless.

sample of effective Adsense program:
http://www.police-supplies.com (scroll to the bottom)
http://www.small-business-software.net (scroll to the bottom)

Not that the Google Adsense program is not without its problems.as the reporting provided by Google is lacking. Google has not implemented any way to track multiple sites that serve ads; they simply show the number of ads served, the percentage of clicks received, and the revenue earned each day. Google does not disclose the amount of the revenue they share, what percentage of the revenue they earn and what someone can expect to receive for each click. Webmasters with multiple sites will have difficulty determining which websites are producing the money in the Adsense program.

With affiliate programs many webmasters implement a new browser launch with each click off the site, Adsense removes the visitor from the website and there is not currently an option to launch the visitor into another browser.

Early on Google implemented a filtering system that allowed webmasters to prevent a specific domain’s ads from being served on the website. Ad blocking meant that webmasters could prevent their competitors ads from being dynamically served on their website.

Overall, adwords are great supplements to websites where affiliate programs are either not performing or when affiliate programs don’t exist that target the sites content.

Give it a Try
Implementing and maintaing Google Adsense program on a content site requires very little effort and can often bring a steady stream of additional revenue for webmasters. Consider supplementing content and see what happens.

Author Bio:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net

Google Rankings On A Budget
You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30’s, 50’s, or heaven forbid, the 300’s. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”.

Not necessarily.

If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How?

The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood.

Now there is hope in the form of the following website.
Direct your browser to:

http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php

You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.

So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:

http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/

I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it’s also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it.

Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts.

Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page.

This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details – http://www.gorank.com

Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com – it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done.

Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right?

Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member’s sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days.

Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight- my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5.

So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it’s great new changes.

And yes, there’s an even faster, better way to get Google.com’s search engine spider to re-index that page, but that’s another article, isn’t it?

Author Bio:
Subscribe to Free Traffic Secrets to find out how to get the Googlebot spider sooner at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com to get more time-tested information on getting Free Quality Traffic to Your Site.

Boost Affiliate Sales
The old ways are not always the best ways.

The traditional model of making money from affiliate products was simple. Create an interesting website geared to a specific theme, slap up some banners for affiliate products that were related to your theme, and sit back, hoping that some of the audience your website drew would click on those banners, giving you some sales. If you really wanted to get creative you might have done some email campaigns for specific products on the side.

But email campaigns are mostly ineffective (and God-forbid you should spam anyone). And banner advertisements don’t generally work. And websites take a long time to build, and promote. And even longer to get good ranking in the search engines.

So it was a slow steady process. There were no quick routes' to affiliate gold.

To demonstrate how quick and powerful pay-per-click advertising can be, I'll offer myself as an example. I came into the let’s make money on the Internet’ game late,and when I started I didn’t even have a website, and I barely knew what an affiliate' was.

The first month I cleared $1500 in profits, even though I barely knew what I was doing. For every one dollar I spent on pay-per-click, I got three dollars back in profits. And I was a total newbie, a marketing virgin’. I didn’t have a website, I didn’t know how to conduct an email campaign, and I barely knew what a `tracking URL’ was. Does that wake anybody up to the power of pay-per-click advertising?

However, don’t think it’s all wine and roses in the pay-per-click field. The fact is, almost everyone who tries it fails, at least initially. I failed myself, by the way. The first two days I netted over $50 in losses. And I still maintain those were the most valuable two days of my entire pay-per-click experience, in terms of how much I learned, and how quickly I adapted to the learning curve.

So don’t go into it with false expectations. Pay-per-click has a learning curve. But if you’re willing to demonstrate a little stick-to-it-ness, pay-per-click can be wildly profitable, and kick-start your affiliate sales business.

Author Bio:
Daniel Brough is the founder of AdWord Wizards, a free mentoring program designed to teach anyone how to profit from pay-per-click search engines. Want to start a profitable AdWords campaign in less than 30 minutes? Come to http://www.adwordwizard.com and sign up for this free program.

Introduction
Are you an online marketer? Or do you simply promote affiliate programs? Marketing is truly the most misunderstood word in use today on the Internet. Let me see if I can clarify this issue just a bit.

In Marketing 101 at your local university, marketing is actually the process of Product, Place, Price and Promotion.

Product
No business can exist without a product or service to sell.

In a nutshell, entrepreneurs are the people who believe in a product, service or idea, so much that they are willing to invest their lives into the development of their dream.

Historically, every major corporation in the world was started by an entrepreneur with a dream and the drive to make it a reality.

However, there comes a time in the life of every corporation when those who fear the gambling nature of their founder, squash the entrepreneurial drive that made the company a viable concern in the first place. The entrepreneur will either submit to the careful nature of the stockholders, or he will be forced to leave the company he created.

The only entrepreneurs who withstand the pressure to move more carefully are those who have maintained majority control over their companies.

Place
In the offline world, place is defined by location. On the Internet, place is defined by domain name and the web hosting service chosen.

Both online and offline, place can make or break a company without respect to the quality and value of the product, service or idea.

Price
Selecting a price is determined first on a basis of whether the company wants to be seen as a discount or a value company.

Take for example Wal-Mart and Staples.

Wal-Mart is the lead discounter in the marketplace. Staples on the other hand is the specialist in office supplies.

Both sell a significant number of office supplies despite the fact that the lowest price can usually be found at Wal-Mart. As a value dealer, Staples can afford to charge more for their products than Wal-Mart.

So the question for you is whether you want to position your company as a discount or value company.

Testing has shown that products and services can be sold at any number of prices and still reach a significant number of people.

The challenge of selecting the best price for your product or service will require a certain amount of testing.

Understanding the pricing equation
Let’s assume we are selling a product. Let us also assume that we know that the product can be sold for $10 or $50. Let us also assume that if the price dips below $10 or rises above $50, then the product sales fall off significantly.

Our challenge is to determine the best rate at which to sell our product.

Testing has shown us that we can sell 1000 items a week at $10. Testing has also shown that we can sell 500 items per week at $50. And testing has shown that we can sell 650 items per week at $45.

At $10, our projected weekly earnings are $10,000. When we sell the product at $50, we know that we can earn $25,000 per week. Most importantly, we know that we can earn $29,250 when our product is priced at $45.

With the imaginary testing we have done on our imaginary product, we can easily see that selling our product at $45 per item will earn us more money over the long haul.

Thus, when we make the decision for a national rollout of our product, then we will price our product at $45.

Of course, this is a very simplistic analysis of the point I am trying to make. Though simple, I believe this analogy will help you understand the methods of developing a product’s prices.

Promotion
Promotion, on the other hand, is the process of notifying the consumers for your product or service of your availability to serve them.

Methods of promotion vary distinctly and should be arranged to meet very specific goals.

As with product, place and price, promotion should not be left to chance. You should test every ad, every media, and every price point to determine the best bang for your promotional dollars.

Heads up!
If you are an online promoter or marketer, please factor in the most important element concerning the cost of your promotions.

What element is that? Your time!

Value your time at a certain dollar amount, and figure in your time into the cost of your promotional accounting.

I say this because too many online promoters lose sight of this concept and spend 20 hours to generate one sale while using free advertising. Even if you rate your time at the federal minimum wage, then you will have invested $105 of your time for one sale that might only net you a gross sale of $45!

Are you truly a marketer or just a promoter?
Most people who run a business on the Internet call themselves marketers. Yet, most of these same people are really just
promoters wrapped in the label of a marketer.

True marketers do not promote without a lot of advance work. They spend time planning, testing and measuring their actions
and results to get the most out of every dollar spent and earned.

Entrepreneurs finesse the art of marketing as they build their company into a major enterprise.

If you are a promoter who does not keep an eye on the total marketing equation, then you are bound to fail.

If you do call yourself a marketer, then do what a professional marketer does. Make sure that every dollar spent is spent well. Make sure that every dollar earned is put to good use. Market well so that when the people of the next generation look at your life, they will see a fine example of a successful entrepreneur that they will strive to emulate.

Author Bio:
Stone Evans owns the Home Business Resource Directory where you can find everything you`ll ever need to start, run and grow a home based business at: http://www.Home-Business.com

Introduction
Are you confused by the flood of information on how to improve your internet marketing results?

Mastering the search engines, pay-per-click advertising, affiliate marketing, website design, writing articles, and on it goes.

Doesn’t it seem more and more complicated to focus in on what really works and what doesn’t?

After working to build many businesses from the ground up over the last 10 years, it’s more clear than ever that there are 2 main principles that will largely dictate your success in any business. All of the other techniques build on these first two principles.

Think of these two main principles as the cement pillars that hold up a bridge – without them, no matter how well you construct the bridge, it will still fall down.

Focus your energies, time and resources around meeting these two key principles – you will immediately see a big difference in your results.

Principle #1
You must have a well positioned product, fulfilling a hot desire within a clearly identifiable and accessible target market.

Let’s break this down.

Making a profit in business is really quite a simple concept, you have to earn more revenue than your cost. Revenue minus cost is your profit.

So where does that cost come from?

The two big sources of costs are: costs associated with creating or finding your product to sell and cost of reaching your market to sell your product

It only makes sense then that identifying a hot desire within a market you know how to reach will mean much lower costs for your businss. Ultimately, this means more profit for you.

Have you ever run against the wind? Tried to swim upstream in a river? Walk one way in a crowd when everyone else was walking the other way?

It’s a very tough lesson to learn.

I’ve been brought it to consult with companies that have burned through millions of dollars before learning this lesson.

You cannot FORCE a low-demand product on a market – no matter how much money you spend on marketing.

You cannot hope to reach enough buyers in the entire marketplace even with a very high-demand product in one segment.

In fact, I’ve seen situations where unknown entrepreneurs enter a market, quickly identify a hot desire, address it with a less than perfect product and in a very short time have created wealth 100X higher than anyone else in that market.

An old mentor of mine used to tell me all the time, “focus on the low lying fruit – there’s far more than enough to go around”

Principle #2
You must reach your market with a clear, empathetic message that instantly catches your readers attention, interest, desire and moves them to see your product as THE answer to their deepest desires.

If you were reading closely, you’ll recognize Principle #2 as the same principles that underly great copywriting.

How do you become a great copywriter and master Principle #2?

1. Research, research and research. I make sure I have a pulse on my target market’s desires, needs, emotional triggers. Focus in on WHY they want a solution to a particular problem. Research takes many forms…

– speak with them
– survey them
– read what they read
– talk to others who do business with your market
– test using articles and special reports to guage the response
– do what they do

By doing this you should have content for 20-30 (at least) different benefits for your product.

Then….

2. Polish your benefit statements. This is where you can use books of action verbs, swap files (samples of great ads, letters and webpages), the services of a copywriter. This is the technical aspect of copywriting which can be learned by reading other great material.

Far too many people go right to #2, as a result their benefit statements seem bland, miss the mark or seem the same as everyone else.

Next time you get distracted by the latest and greatest tip, technique or strategy – know that focusing on these 2 fundamental principles: In-demand product ideas and effective copywriting, will make the most difference to your pocketbook in both today and in the future.

Author Bio:
Discover Little Known Secrets On Profiting From Your Own Information Products. Jeff Smith Shares How Easy It Is To Instantly Create Your Own Hot Selling Online Products With Knowledge You Already Have. Get Information Here: http://www.infoproductcreator.com

Introduction
How often do you visit the search engines looking for the information that you seek? Twice a week? Every day?

According to SearchEngineWatch.com, seven of the top search engines process over 300 million searches a day! Additionally, Search Engine Watch documents an item called the GVU Survey Results from the Georgia Institute of Technology which shows that 85% of all web users admit to regularly using search engines to find the web sites they visit.

The truth is, if you are seeking sales at your website, then you should be looking for traffic too. While sales is your true goal, no sales can take place until traffic occurs.

A lot of people scream to the high heavens that search engines do not work. The fact is that search engines do work. It is just that the people who are shouting do not understand how to make search engines work for them.

Different types of search engines
We will not go into great detail right now about how to make search engines work for you. We will only touch on the differences between the search engines of which there are three types: Pay-Per-Clicks, Directories and Spiders.

Pay-Per-Clicks require that you open cash accounts with them before you will be listed. While there are often ways to get into the PPCSE’s without opening an account, we will not discuss that here.

Directories limit your submissions to page title, link and a short description.

For this discussion, we will be speaking about Spider Search Engines. Spiders are in fact software that visits your site and gathers the data from your website to determine how to tell people about your website.

Content delivers traffic and sales
While some Spiders gather a limited number of words from each website, others gather all of the words listed within your website. This is where we come to our point today.

Spiders gather data from your site to provide a title and description for your readers. Additionally, Spiders gather the words from your website and rank those words to determine which sites to return to their users.

The words they gather from your website are referred to as keywords. Search engine keywords exclude pronouns, prepositions and other very common words. All others provide rich fodder to the Spiders.

To get the best use of Spider search engines, you must feed them what they want — you must feed them lots and lots of keywords. It is important to note that the best use of keywords on your website is using keywords that are relative to your products and services.

Where to find content
When you do not have the time or creativity to provide that information on your own, you could realistically tap into the free-reprint market to attain the content you want and need. To browse what may be available to you in the free-reprint market, you can browse the archives at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles

Here you will find over 7000 articles available for your use.

While some writers are the same, there are other writers that have submitted some 1400 articles to:

http://topica.com/lists/FreeEzineContent

The only drawback of using content created by another for the free-reprint market is that the terms for using these articles is to set up a hyperlink to the website of the author as given in the resource box attached to the article. The resource box serves as a small advertisement for author of the article which must appear with all articles used. This is actually a small price to pay for getting high quality content for you to use on your website without monetary cost attached to them.

If you feel that printing someone else’s resource box is simply too high of a price to pay in order to provide content to your visitors and keywords for the Spider search engines, then you should strike out on your own to develop your own content in this format.

Generating targeted keywords and keyphrases
However you cut it, any article placed on your website will generate 300 to 500 specialized and targeted keywords and keyword phrases to feed the Spider databases. In turn, as time progresses, you will discover more and more people flocking to your website from the Spider search engines.

That is what you want isn’t it? Traffic that can be turned into sales? Of course it is.

The time has come to start developing your website to take advantage of the power of the Spider search engines.

Author Bio:
Bill Platt owns The Phantom Writers, a company committed to helping people to establish an Internet presence & promote their businesses through the use of Free-Reprint Articles and Press Releases. Articles are distributed to 6,000+ publishers & webmasters as part of the package. http://thePhantomWriters.com Do you write your own articles? Let us distribute them for you.

High Google Rankings: Frequency vs. Positioning
There’s an assumption that the higher a ranking or positioning you have with major search engines; the more people will beat a path to your web doorstep. But based on my experience, that’s simply not true! There’s another factor that is just as important and may actually drive more traffic to your site.

This big secret is frequency: The number of times your name appears when someone enters a key word in a search engine. I believe that the more times you appear in a search, the greater the likelihood of someone actually clicking through to your site.

How do you get frequent listings in search engines? Write quality content articles.

I’m an investment advisor and a while ago I started a second web site (www.successful-investment.com) to promote my weekly mutual fund newsletter, capture potential prospect names and house a library of my published articles.

To get people to the site, I naturally wanted to move up in the search engine food chain. I did the usual meta tag things, but that didn’t cause my rise in the rankings. What did cause it surprised me.

One of my first articles (“Do lifestyle funds provide greater security?”) was submitted to some 30 article banks and web sites. Many of them reprinted it, which increased the number of appearances of my name associated with the topic. Since many of these sites were already ranked high on the search engines, I rode on their success.

Searching Google for “Lifestyle funds” produces over 3 million results. On the first page of results my article is listed four times, on the second page three times and on page three it’s listed three times, and so on. If you were searching this term, with that much presence you would not likely overlook me.

In addition to generating hits on my web site from potential clients, my frequent listing in search engines yielded another benefit: I was invited to CNNfn’s Hollywood studio to discuss my article “How to evaluate load vs. no load mutual funds.” They found me by searching Google for “load vs. no load.” That produced almost 5 million results and on the first page my article appears three times, on the second three times and on the third three time as well-and some included my company listing. I was an authority!

Quatlity content is a key
In the past six months I have written and published 17 articles with the key search terms being part of the title. I pretty much get similar results with all of them. Why? I believe quality content is a key.

My core business is “personal investment management.” If you search that on Google you will get about 11 million results. I currently rank number 8. And that’s among the ‘who’s who’ in investment management, companies that invest big bucks to manipulate getting high rankings on search engines.

Can I improve on that? Probably not by trying to manipulate positioning, but definitely with frequency. And that comes from writing articles.

Now, maybe you like this idea but think you can’t write quality articles. I’m not a writer, but my articles get picked up by e-zines and article banks all the time. How does that happen? It’s actually simpler than you think.

Two aspects to writing
There are two aspects to writing; 1. the actual content and 2. the writing style. If you’ve been in business for any length of time you have a wealth of information that you take for granted but others would love to know about. You should be able to write a 300 to 800 word article about your product or service area. Don’t worry about the style; just write quality content that will be helpful to your potential customers.

Although my writing skills are pretty sharp because I do a lot of writing, I would not consider them to be on the same level as a professional writer. So I have a second secret to success.

One of my clients is an award winning Hollywood writer and he “enhances” my articles. It’s usually not a lot of work, but at times I need a better transition from point A to point B. Since the content is clear and basically organized, he doesn’t have to spend any time researching or “doing the heavy lifting.” He can devote his attention to enhancing the quality of the presentation, and that doesn’t take long or cost much.

[If you need help with writing you may contact Laren Bright (punster@earthlink.net) and tell him I sent you.]

I think you will find that writing articles becomes a lot easier once you have that kind of assistance. It certainly became stress-free for me when I didn’t have to worry about form and could concentrate on my long suit: content.

It’s hard to beat the results that my articles have produced for me in terms of exposure, Google rankings and new clients. Given these facts I propose that frequency beats positioning anytime. Try it and see if it boosts your rankings and your business.

Author Bio:
Ulli Niemann is an investment advisor and has written about methodical approaches to investing for over 10 years. He is stepping out of his comfort zone to write about different areas in which he has gained experience that can assist others. You can reach him at: http://www.successful-investment.com

What to do with Yahoo!
Chances are, if you have a website and were previously paying for an Altavista listing you received something like this:

“AltaVista’s Paid Inclusion Program has changed. A New sign-up is necessary for existing AV express inclusion customers to become Overture Site Match members!

NOTE: YOUR ALTAVISTA MEMBERSHIP DOES NOT TRANSFER OVER TO THE NEW OVERTURE SITE MATCH PROGRAM. YOU MUST SIGN-UP YOUR URLs TO THE NEW OVERTURE SITE MATCH PROGRAM.”

This is an email which was sent to Altavista customers explaining to them that Altavista would no longer be accepting fees for inclusion.

Further to this, you’ve probably also noticed lots of press about Overture’s new Site Match program in which they say that you can pay to be included into the new Yahoo! database. In fact the above notice makes it seem that you must invest in Overture site match to remain in Altavista. You may also have heard that you need to pay for Site Match to get into Yahoo!

Also, just to mix things up a little more, you may have heard about the free Yahoo! submission option. While not a guarantee of if or when your site will be indexed, it is still a way into the index.

So the question I’m sure many people have is this: What the heck is the best way to get into Yahoo! (and by extension, Altavista and Alltheweb) and get found? Is it worth $29-$49 per URL plus 15-30 cents per click to be found in the index? The simple answer is it depends.

Before we get into that, let’s outline the various options currently there to help a website get listed in Yahoo!

The Options
Right now, there are multiple ways to have your pages listed in Yahoo! and most of them cost money.

From the top of a search results page down, let’s look at what the different listings mean.

Along the top and right of the screen are Overture sponsored listings. These are PPC listings in which the highest bids win the top spots. These are the easiest to identify and the simplest to explain.

Once you get into the “Web Results” however, it starts to get a little more convoluted.

Within web results you will find 3 or 4 different types of included results, depending on the competitiveness of the search. In this mass of results you will find Yahoo! directory listings, Yahoo! free listings via the Yahoo! Slurp crawler, Overture Site Match, and Overture Xchange. So what’s the difference?

Well, the Yahoo! directory hasn’t changed since the update last week; it’s still a US$300 submission fee with no guarantee of inclusion. And even if you are included there is no guarantee of rankings. Free listings are just that, listings gathered by either submitting via Yahoo! free submit, or having Yahoo! Slurp find your site another way (i.e. a link from another site).

Overture Site Match is a paid program whereby you pay a URL submission fee to get indexed followed by a cost per click on top of that for every click on your listing. Again, with no guarantee of ranking, only a guarantee of indexing.

Finally, is Overture’s Xchange which is an XML feed similar to the Inktomi XML feed. You have to request a rep from Overture to help you set this up. There is also no guarantee of listings, only a guarantee of indexing.

So, what is the best way to get into Yahoo!?
It depends on the current state of your site in Yahoo! among other things. Is your site currently indexed in the engine? And if so, how many pages are there? So let us start there.

Go to Yahoo! and do a search for your site. You may have to try a couple times to see your site. Try the search with and without the “www” but make sure you have the “.com” or “.ca” (or whatever) extension you have. If your site is indexed in Yahoo! then you should see your listing come up. It may also work with just the main domain, without the “www” and extension.

Now to see how many pages currently indexed for you site you should see a “More pages from this site” link near the bottom right of your listing. Click on this to see how many site pages are indexed. Again, this may take some experimenting with, to see how many pages are indexed. When I initially did a search for “searchengineposition.com”, it only showed one page, however a search for “searchengineposition” then clicking on the “more pages” link returned in excess of 1500. So be patient and experiment.

Chances are good that your site has already been indexed in Yahoo! which leads to the question (which I’m hoping you already know the answer to) “should I pay for Overture’s Site Match program?”

My recommendation is probably not. If you are already in Yahoo! as a result of the free crawl, then why pay for listings? In this case, if most (or all) of your site is indexed then paying for listings won’t influence the rankings.

However, if you find that there are many pages that aren’t indexed, but you feel should be, then perhaps you could consider paying for these pages to be listed. But not until you read on.

What if some (or all) of your site isn’t in Yahoo?
So let us now say that your site isn’t in Yahoo! or pages which you feel are really good aren’t getting indexed. What then? Should you pay for listings in Yahoo! or will it even help?

Again, I’d have to say probably not.

Before rushing out to pay more money, first take a look at some possible reasons on why your site may not be getting picked up by the Yahoo! crawler.

Check your log files to see if the crawler has been visiting your site. If you use a program like Webtrends you can create a custom profile which will analyze your logs specifically for spiders, or if you like, you can narrow the analysis down to just the Yahoo! Slurp crawler. This specific profile might be handy for my next point.

If the spider has visited, and you have the profile specific to this spider, take a look at what pages it has been requesting. Also, look at the paths through the site. Is the spider going deep enough into the site to get to your really important content? Or is it simply requesting one page at a time and not going any deeper than 2 or 3 clicks in? Is it merely requesting the index page over and over, or is it trying to crawl the whole site? Try and see if you can figure out what barriers (if any) the spider is coming up against. Remember that just because other spiders can crawl your site completely doesn’t mean that this one can.

Check your robots.txt file. Sometimes this is a huge barrier if it’s not coded properly. A good indicator of this will be your log analysis report. Is this file the only one being requested, or is the spider requesting a page, then the robots and stopping there? If this is the case, chances are the spider has somehow been excluded from indexing the site.

If you think there is a barrier, work towards fixing it and this may help getting your site re-crawled and re-indexed by Yahoo!

Talk to your hosting provider to see if perhaps they have banned any IP’s from accessing the server. Sometimes, if a hosting provider sees a spike in traffic from a particular IP or range of IP’s they will exclude it from accessing the server for security reasons. Perhaps they inadvertently banned Yahoo!s Slurp from accessing your site.

So what now?
If after your analysis you can’t see any reason why you may not be indexed in Yahoo! then perhaps performing a free submission is all you need to do. Try the free submit and see what happens. With searchengineposition for example, the site is re-cached every couple days, so you should see Slurp visiting your site fairly soon after submission. I know Yahoo! says that they can’t guarantee if or when your site will get crawled, but my gut tells me that it won’t be any longer than a free submit to Google. After all, their crosshairs are set on Google, so they want to at least maintain the same level of service as them.

Summary
I guess what I’m trying to say here is be sure that there isn’t some physical barrier to accessing the site before rushing out to pay for an Overture Inclusion. Because even if you do pay for inclusion, but you still have barriers to indexing, your site still won’t get indexed and you will be out $29-$49 per URL.

So before going out and spending a ton of money and assuming that that will get you in Yahoo! be sure that your site can be indexed. And if it is indexed in Yahoo! then paying won’t help influence your rankings anyways, so save your money and try other proper optimization efforts to positively influence your rankings.

Also remember that in the coming weeks your Yahoo! listing should translate to equivalent Altavista and Alltheweb listings (and to a lesser extent, a way into MSN), so even if you do disappear from Altavista or Alltheweb, be patient as you should come back relatively soon. Remember that these engines need an index to survive, and if the index is a centralized Yahoo! index all the better. In other words, you shouldn’t be in just Altavista and not Yahoo! (or vice versa).

On a more positive note, previously a site owner had to pay for an Inktomi inclusion to get into MSN. Now with the free submit into Yahoo! you should be able to get into MSN for a lot less money. Sure you are still at the mercy of MSN’s ranking algorithms, but there is a good chance that if you are already in Yahoo! that you will be in MSN as well, whether you’ve paid the listing fee or not.

Also, while I haven’t touched on it here, Overture is offering click tracking tools on their paid inclusion listings, including the Site Match. Therefore there may be benefit in paying for clicks if you think that the data collected is worth while. We are still analyzing the click tracking data, so are unable to say at this point how worthwhile it is, but we will keep you posted.

Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists

In the beginning…
Create your website. If you don’t know how, there are many free templates offered on the Internet. Search on “free website templates” to find one that appeals to you.

If you’d like to learn how to design your own website using HTML there are several tutorials out there:

Boogie Jack’s Dennis Gaskill has an excellent website with tutorials to get you started, along with many “tricks of the trade”. An excellent resource! http://www.boogiejack.com/html_tutorials.html

Also, Joe Burns has a very informative and helpful website for all new and seasoned website designers; with HTML tutorials, primers and loads of “goodies” to add to your web pages http://www.htmlgoodies.com

1000-Calorie Content
Fill your website with keyword-rich content. Write a description of your product or service and create your keywords to match the content in your description. For example, if you sell stuffed animals the keywords by which you’d want to be found in the search engines could be “stuffed toys, stuffed animals, plush animals, stuffed dogs, plush pets”, etc.

Search Engine Buffet
Submit your site to search engines and directories, whether manually submitting through each or using a free multiple submission service that will submit your site automatically to search engines and directories of your choosing or theirs, depending upon the submission site you use. One such site is http://www.submitexpress.com

Chain Links
Exchange links with similar and complementary websites, but not your competitors – I don’t think you’ll hear from them! Email the site’s owner and ask for a reciprocal link. If they agree to add your link, return the favor and add their link on your site. You can create a special page for your favorite links or if you have only a few, simply add them to your main page or any other page on your site.

Snappy Sig-File
Create an interesting signature file to be automatically included at the end of your emails. A small, descriptive “blurb” about what you do along with your website address will do it!

Newsworthy
Write an ezine, or online newsletter. You can find interesting articles on any subject on the Internet that you can publish in your ezine (search on “free content”) or even write some of your own (see #12). Decide whether your ezine will be produced monthly, biweekly, weekly or even daily if you have enough time and info to share! Always be sure to give the author proper credit! Include his byline at the end of his article and email him a copy of your ezine when it’s ready.

This site has a good article on how to write an ezine:
http://www.thewritemarket.com/ezine.shtml

Extra! Extra!
Offer a gift for new subscribers. It can be a report that you wrote on a subject of interest that the new reader can download; or a small sample of your product, or even a coupon for 10% off your products or service.

What’s Behind Door #2?
Run a contest to name your ezine. Create a special page with a subscription form on your site. Explain the details and prizes. List your contest on as many contest announcement sites that you can find or publish your contest on discussion groups and forums (see #10 and #11) and other newsletters.

Some contest announcement sites are:

http://www.theprizefinder.com/asp/addacompetition.asp
http://www.loquax.co.uk

The prizes you offer should be related to your business. You should have a deadline, say a month or so, and be sure to indicate the date on your contest page.

Example ad for contest:

** We need you! **
Get creative…Win prizes!
Our newsletter needs a name;
If we use yours, you win!
http://www.whimsies-online.com/ezineform.htm

Publish the winners on your website and in your next ezine – newly-named, of course!

All in the Family
Submit your ezine to ezine lists such as http://www.list-a-day.com. They may even feature your ezine as their daily pick!

Other lists are:

http://www.cumuli.com/ezines/submit.html
http://ezine-universe.com/search/getlisted.html

Group Therapy
Join Yahoo groups and other similar newsgroups/discussion lists. Subscribe to similar ezines and then exchange ads with ezine owners. List your contest with group owners. Submit your articles too!

http://groups.yahoo.com
http://www.topica.com

The Gift of Gab
Participate in discussions on various online forums and message boards, of course using your signature file!

Bank on this!
Write articles and submit them to article banks such as http://www.goarticles.com (search on Free Content) and groups (see #10). You can basically write about anything you know, write short stories about experiences you’ve had, helpful articles, your view on a subject you’re comfortable with, for example. Make sure you include your byline or writer’s resource box at the end of your article or story. This can be a short description of your business, a link to your website and a link to your subscription page.

How to write an article:
http://www.freesticky.com/stickyweb/articles/write_article_profit_strategy.asp
And: http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/archive/write.html

Please release me!
Write a press release about your business, your contest, an organization you’re sponsoring or anything you think is newsworthy. Send it to your local newspapers, to magazines and online press release services (see http://www.whimsies-online.com/newsrelease2.htm for an example)

Here’s an excellent article on how to write a press release:
http://www.lunareclipse.net/pressrelease.htm

You can post your press release at
http://www.prweb.com/

The Paper chase
If you get featured in your local paper or in a magazine, mention the story in ALL of your promotional materials. Scan it and add to your website or link to the original article if it’s available online.

Pick a card – any card!
Distribute your business cards EVERYWHERE. Print a money-saving coupon on the back. Voila! A double-duty card!

Fashion Plate
Wear your ads! No, put away that spray paint – it’ll clog your pores! I have t-shirts that I printed on using my color printer and t-shirt transfer paper. Print your logo and/or business name and website address, and wear your creation everywhere (but I’d rethink that black tie event, if I were you!)

For a low-cost logo, visit these guys: http://www.GotLogos.com.
They designed my logo for their flat rate of $25 and it is top-notch. I’d recommend them to anyone. Check out the logo they designed for me here:

http://www.whimsies-online.com – it’s at the very top of the page.

Nifty Gifty
Send an inexpensive but useful gift with each order. Helps your customer remember you and they might re-order from you at a later date. It can even be a coupon for 10% off their next purchase. One of my gifts is a laminated bookmark personalized with the customer’s name. It also shows a miniature edition of the cartoon they just ordered! Everyone loves personalized items. Another idea would be a personalized coaster using CD’s you no longer need, or the freebies you get in your mailbox (the metal mailbox outside your house, not the virtual kind!). See how to here:
http://www.whimsies-online.com/cdcoasters.htm

Mention “gift with purchase” on your website and include the approximate value if they were to purchase it separately.

Mug Shot
Another idea would be to use your logo or a catchy phrase and your website address to print on mugs, mouse pads, and other items. Cafe Press prints the design you upload onto any articles you choose from their vast selection. They do the production, shipping, collecting the funds, and will send you your commission cheque. When you create your online store with them (they have a free version as well as an upgrade to a Premium Shop) be sure to include a link to your own website.
Here’s an example:
http://www.cafeshops.com/animal_house which links to http://www.whimsies-online.com/whimsieswear.htm

The Cafe Press website is http://www.cafepress.com

Happy Campers
Always ask for testimonials. Ask your customers and subscribers for a word or two about your product. If a customer has emailed you to thank you for the handy widget/thing-a-magig/whatchamacallit you sent them, ask if you can use their comments in your next ezine and your “testimonials” web page.

Analyze this!
Send samples of your product to influential people for a testimonial or for a small write-up in their publication or website.

Ad-Vantage
There are many ezines and online companies that offer free ad submissions. Check out Bob Osgoodby’s website. He offers a free ad service (he also has three very informative ezines!). You can check out his site at http://www.adv-marketing.com/business/

These are just a bunch of creative ways to promote your online presence. Try some or all, and when you get the hang of it you’ll probably dream up some more. Have fun with them and see what works for you!

Author Bio:
Heather Diodati is the owner of Whimsies! By DDesign featuring Personalized Cartoon Designs for all occasions. Heather is also the creator/distributor of the Pet Computer Virus, a novelty designed for the computer user; as well as other unique computer novelties. Sign up for our free ezine, On A Whim, for your free time management gifts; and if you looooove ballroom dancing be sure to subscribe to Dancing On Air ezine, for your free gift, The Dancer’s Notebook! http://www.whimsies-online.com

Introduction
Back in November, when the Google Dance began, Barry Lloyd of makemetop.co.uk wrote an article entitled “Been Gazumped by Google?” GAZUMPED! What a wonderfully descriptive term. In fact, it succinctly describes what happened to us when our website went from #1 to oblivion a few months ago.

We were gazumped, swindled, cheated out of what was rightfully ours. Okay, who’s to say what search engine position rightfully belongs to anyone. I mean, let’s face it, getting to the top of the search engines for coveted keywords is really just a crap shoot, isn’t it?

Or is it?

The SEO Cycle
We’ve been at this internet game for a long time, a decade, in fact. Dinosaur days! We don’t pretend to be search engine experts, it’s not our forte. Nevertheless, we have been around long enough to see some patterns emerge.

Here’s a recurring pattern we’ve observed in Search Engine Optimization:

1) The SEO experts research and make claims of what works to get a website to the top of the search engines.

2) It works for a time, and websites implementing their tactics move up the ranks.

3) Eventually, the algorithms change, and websites gain or lose rankings.

4) SEO experts make adjustments, then back to step one in the cycle again.

Around and around we go like mice on the optimization exercise wheel. Furthermore, we do not foresee any chance of stepping off of the optimization wheel for years to come. From our experience, as long as search engines exist, the algorithms will always change, and the SEO experts will always have a job.

But, is Search Engine Optimization really necessary?

To Optimize or Not
If you’ve set up a flow of traffic to your website outside of search engines, there really is no need to optimize. However, if you want search engine traffic, you’ll need to step onto the wheel. Furthermore, you need to know there’s some pretty fierce competition riding the same wheel. But, be forewarned. Once you step onto the wheel, it will become part of your regular marketing exercise.

Is search engine traffic worth stepping onto the endless wheel?

Marketing experts tell us all the reasons why search engine traffic is targeted. But, let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about real-world experience for a minute. In the past 10 years, our websites have received traffic from every imaginable source. But, you want to know about search engine traffic, right? We’ll give it to you straight.

Search engines have sent us some of our best customers. A significant number have stayed with us for years, and a surprising number have made purchases on their first visit – direct from the search engines.

Now, with this is mind, perhaps you can understand why we have felt gazumped after losing a significant amount of search engine traffic.

So, what exactly happened to us?

Dancing With Google
For years, we have been building a professional community where home-based entrepreneurs can network with one another and find the resources they need. As a clearinghouse of information, it has been a real task to organize the thousands of pages of information and make it user-friendly.

We had been #1 on Google for years for the coveted term “home business,” among other terms. As such, we enjoyed traffic that brought us a significant number of customers and subscribers. Traffic and sales grew consistently for those years. Our Alexa rating showed the continued growth by going from a ranking of 30,000 to almost 15,000 in a year.

Enter the ‘Florida’ Update.

In November, we were still #1 on Google. Traffic and sales were good.

In December, it appeared the Update was good for us. We remained #1 and sales were at an all-time high. “We’re getting through this just fine,” we gloated. Nothing to worry about.

But, then things began to change – drastically!

Gazump #1
Around January 3rd, our traffic plummeted to an all-time, two-year low
( http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.homebusinessonline.com/ ).

After a quick perusal of our traffic logs, it became obvious Google was playing with our rankings. You know, playing the dance floor. Google may have come to the dance with us as her date, but she left with a different partner.

A little research confirmed that not only had we dropped in our rankings for our coveted search term, but we were nowhere to be found in even the top 1,000. What? From #1 to oblivion? How could that be? The date was over… Gazumped by Google!

Gazump #2
Some weeks later, typing ‘link:www.ourURL’ in the Google toolbar brought another startling revelation. While our inbound links before the dance were around 800
(http://www.linkpopularity.com/linkpop.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.homebusinessonline.com),
Google now listed only 69. Now, that doesn’t even make sense after almost a decade online, especially when typing in our URL returns 2,620 links
(http://www.google.com/search?q=%22homebusinessonline.com%22).
Gazumped by Google!

Gazump #3
But, why stop there? Let’s add a little salt to the wound, shall we? It also appeared that Google was only spidering a few, select parts of our website. No more deep crawls where all the meaty content can be found. Gazumped by Google!

So, where from here?

Lessons Learned
After two months of a substantial drop in traffic and sales, we are not out of business. Why not? For one, we have not counted on Google as our sole source of traffic. We are still receiving decent traffic, but we could be doing better. I’m afraid we had been gliding on the coattails of Google for too long. Sometimes you just need a good kick in the pants. This wake-up call has been good for us. Like multiple streams of income, we will up the anti on multiple streams of traffic. That way, when one traffic source dries up, it will not effect us significantly.

It’s time to make some well-needed changes to our website. It could be better. A lot better. We’re going to stop talking about them, hunker down, and make those changes.

We believe this dance is not over yet and Google may decide to return to the dance floor. Considering ‘Gazump #2’ above, it only makes sense that there are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out.

We’ll get our traffic back and in a big way. If not through Google, certainly through other traffic sources. There’s more than one way to reach the summit.

The Very Best Strategy
The fact is you could spend hours upon hours in search engine optimization, and while we believe that optimizing your website is important, it shouldn’t be the main focus. We’re of the opinion that websites should first be built for customers and prospective customers, and second for search engines. Take a look at your website from your customer’s perspective. Does it do what you want it to do?

Go ahead and hop on the optimization wheel. Get it turning, but don’t become obsessed with it. If you have the resources for it, consider hiring an SEO specialist to help. Be sure you have plenty of traffic sources, don’t rely on just one or two.

Finally, anything online, including the search engines, are driven by the market’s opinion. When the dance is over, if Google doesn’t provide the very best search results, the market will go elsewhere. For this reason, no matter what might happen to us personally through the Google Dance, the end result will be better search results – if not Google, then another search engine.

Either way, the market will determine who wins in the end.

Author Bio:
Seasoned entrepreneurs, Dave and Heidi Perry have developed half a dozen businesses and are founders of HomeBusinessOnline.com and PrettyGreat.com. Known for their unique insights and straight-shooter style, Heidi and Dave are editors of HomeBizBytes. Receive a free issue at http://www.HomeBusinessOnline.com/nsl.htm?sya