To Gogle, Or Not To Gogle?
A while back I was posting an article submitted by one of our regular authors on LilEngine.com and I did it a bit faster than I normally would. I was in a hurry to catch an appointment and was already running late. While posting the article I tripped on something that would change my view on mistakes forever.
In my haste I made a mistake in the article’s title, yes a misspelling, just as I have purposely misspelt Google Search Engine as Gogle Search Engine in the title of this article to clue you in on its content. Weirdly enough the mistake in the title I posted slipped by unnoticed and eventually got pushed off the homepage and into our archives.
If you follow the course of your content pages after posting them they usually go into hiding for a few days and then resurface with varying placement depending on their content and other variables. Every now and again you will have some page on your site that attracts large amounts of traffic compared to some of your other pages. This page inevitably grabs your attention and this is what happened to me.
I noticed a large increase in the daily traffic to http://web.archive.org/web/20040605194628/http://www.webmoves.net/blog// and started analyzing the logs to find the culprit. Now, I describe it as a large increase in traffic as opposed to a large spike in traffic as this traffic gain did not suddenly appear then disappear. It was a stable increase in traffic and was funneled to our site by the Gogle Search Engine :-). It so followed that the page that was responsible for this flood was the same page with the mistake and it was showing up as #1 in Google for this keyword misspelling.
Finding Common Misspellings
It is pretty easy to come up with misspellings for your targeted keywords, however, incorporating them into your content may not be as easy. With a little imagination you can come up with several methods to keep your content legitimate for your users and the search engines.
Using the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google Search Results you can decide which misspellings get the most searches and which are highly competitive hence which ones would be worth your while to optimize for.
Here’s how you do it.
Use the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool to see how many searches there are for the misspelling. If this number is satisfactory for you then do a Gogle Search for the misspelling and see how many results Gogle has for this keyword. If this number is too high then there may be too much competition for this keyword and you might want to try another.
Summary
People will always make mistakes and these will include misspellings. If you can reach out further to your target market by incorporating words that they may misspell to find your site, in a tasteful manner, then gearing pages of your website for misspellings should be considered when optimizing your website.
Author: A Duncan
www.lilengine.com
SEO Defined
The true definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be stated as a highly specialized process of building a successful website. We say successful because if a commercial website cannot be found in the major search engines, it is not successful, it just isn’t doing it’s job. SEO directly addresses the need for a website to attract new and targeted visitors, who in turn will convert into buying customers.
Fact: About 90% of all new visitors to a web site found it using the major search engines such as Google or, search directories such as Yahoo! Now SEO professionals and specialists alike are closely accustomed to acquiring top-level search engine results for all their clients. Priority placement and top rankings is a daily, on-going struggle when you are a professional SEO specialist. The SEO field, as a whole, needs to keep up with ever-changing technology and also has to be familiar with other web site marketing techniques such as banner ads, pay-per-click programs and even some offline advertising options.
After a careful industry study, every survey has taught us that each web site competes in a different, segmented market. You could say that some are probably less competitive and others are surely more competitive. But each and every website targets very different customers in very different markets. Some have a more local scope or orientation, others target either national or global markets. In Rank for $ales’s own experience, “the classic one size fits all promotional packages” are usually termed as a “one size fits none” scenario. We have been involved in the professional Search Engine Optimization field since 1997.
Our initial approach is to custom-design a unique Internet marketing strategy that will work for all our clients’ sales goals, market segments and their advertising budgets. Rank for Sales works as an important team inside our client’s sales operations. We diligently work with every department and all concerned to reach their common goals.
Traditional advertising in the brick-and-mortar version of any business model is a proven method of promotion for any business. It has worked since the roaring twenties and continues to work today. Now the Internet is certainly no exception, but achieving a high return (ROI) for your online advertising dollar can be a very expensive, trial and error proposal if not done correctly. A good SEO professional firm can help you choose the most effective programs for your needs. The best programs that will work in your company.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
Introduction
With the Robots.txt protocol, a webmaster or web site owner can really protect himself if it is done correctly. Today, web domain names are certainly plentiful on the Internet. There exists a multitude of sites on just about any subject anybody can think of. Most sites offer good content that is of value to most people and can certainly help with just about any query. However, like in the real world, what you see is not always what you get.
There are a lot of sites out there that are spamming the engines. Spam is best defined as search engine results that have nothing to do with the keywords or key phrases that were used in the search. Enter any good SEO forum today and most spam topics in daily threads usually point to hidden text, keyword stuffing in the meta tags, doorway pages and cloaking issues. Thanks to newer and more powerful search engine algorithms, these domain networks that spam the engines are increasingly being penalized or banned all together.
The inherent risks of getting a web site banned on the basis of spam increases proportionately if it appears to have duplicate listings or duplicate content. Rank for $ales does not recommend machine-generated pages because such pages have a tendency of generating spam. Most of those so-called ‘page generators’ were not designed to be search engine-friendly and no attention was ever given to engines when they were designed.
One major drawback of these ‘machines’ is that once a page is ‘optimized’ for a single keyword or key phrase, first-level and at times second-level keywords tend to flood results with listings that will most assuredly look as 100% spam. Stay away from any of those so-called ‘automated page generators’. A good optimization process starts with content that is completely written by a human! That way, you can be certain that each page of your site will end up being absolutely unique.
How Do Search Engines Deal With Duplicate Content?
Modern crawler-based search engines now have sophisticated and powerful algorithms that were specifically designed to catch sites that are spamming the engines, especially the ones that make use of duplicate domains. To be sure, there are perfectly legitimate web sites whose situation can certainly be informative. However, and as the following example will clearly demonstrate, that is not always the case.
We will take this practical example of where there are actually three identical web sites, all owned and operated by the same company, where the use of duplicate content is evident. Google, Alta-Vista and most other crawler-based search engines have noticed and indexed all three domains. In this scenario, the right thing to do is to make use of individual IP addresses and implementing a server re-direct command (a 301 re-direct). An alternative to this would be to at least provide unique folders or sub-directories and using the Robots.txt exclusion protocol to disallow two of the three affected domains.
That way the search engines wouldn’t index the two duplicate sites. In such cases, the Robots.txt exclusion protocol should always be used. It is in fact your best ‘insurance’ against getting your site penalized or banned. In the above example, since that was not done we will look at duplicate content and assess where the risk of getting a penalty is the highest. We will list and describe the indexing of these three sites as being site one which is the main primary domain, site two and finally, site three.
The four major crawler-based engines that were analyzed were Google, Teoma, Fast and Alta-Vista. All three domain names point to the same IP address, which actually made it simpler to use Fast’s Internet Protocol filter to discover that there was really no more than three affected domains in this example. However, all three web sites are directed to the same IP address AND content folder! Such a scenario makes them in fact exact duplicates, raising all the duplicate content flags in all four engines analyzed.
Even if all three sites share the same Robots.txt file, the hosting arrangement and syntax in the Robots.txt file does nothing that is effective to help this duplicate content problem. Major spider-based search engines which rely a lot on hypertext to compute relevancy and importance as most do today, are best at discovering and dealing with sites that delve into duplicate content issues. As a direct result, a webmaster runs a large risk of having duplicate content in these engines because their algorithm makes it such a simple task to analyse, sort out and finally reject these duplicate content web sites.
If a ‘spam technician’ discovers duplicate listings, chances are very good they will take action against such offending sites. The chances actually increase when a person, often a competitor files a spam complaint or that a certain site is ‘spam-dexing’ the engines. To be sure, any page caused by duplicate content can improperly “populate” a search query. The end result is unfairly dominating most search results.
Marketing Analysis And PPC “Landing” Pages
In order to better analyse specific online marketing campaigns or surveys, some companies at certain times have in fact duplicate sites or operate PPC (Pay-per-Click) landing pages. It is important in such cases not to neglect to use the Robots.txt exclusion protocol to manage your duplicate sites. Disallow spiders from crawling duplicate sites by properly editing the right syntax in the Robots.txt file. Your index count will certainly decrease, but that is the right thing to do and you are actually performing the search engines a service. In such a case, a webmaster needs not to worry of impending penalties from the engines.
If these businesses or their marketing departments are in fact running marketing tests or surveys, there is usually more than just one domain that could potentially appear in the actual results pages of the engines. In such cases, I strongly recommend writing or re-writing all content all over and making certain that no real duplicate content gets to be indexed. One way to achieve that is to use some form of meta refresh tag or Java script solution to actually direct visitors to the most recent versions of pages while their webmasters get the Robots.txt exclusion protocol written correctly.
The Java script would effectively indicate where it is intended to redirect, assuring it can put the final document in its proper place. A ‘301 server redirect’ command is always the best thing to use in these cases and constitutes the best insurance against any penalties, as it will inform the search engines that the affected document (s) have in fact moved permanently.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
Content Management Software & SEO
A lot has been said about Content Management Systems (CMS) in the past. Since search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) are now such a growing part of the main marketing objectives for companies of all sizes, extra attention and caution must be used before the purchase of any such CMS software or programs.
When people today are looking to buy a certain product or service or need information on a specific subject, most use the power, speed and flexibility of Internet search engines. However, in the last two years, some companies have been developing their web sites and creating new or additional content with some of those so-called CMS packages. Some of the CMS programs available today may in fact negatively affect the visibility of your web site in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).
The main reason for that is some of them were not designed with search engines in mind. They were designed for what they are supposed to do: to help manage the contents of certain documents! That said, how can a company that has made extensive use of such CMS software reasonably insure itself that their site will do well in the search engines?
Some well-designed CMS solutions that give good attention to search engines when they were designed could possibly contribute to SEO work by standardizing its presentation, labelling of content and to a certain degree, its structure which is crucial to most search engines when evaluating how a particular page or site section should rank in the engines.
If a CMS package was truly designed with search engines in mind, it could be helpful for updating and some maintenance chores of certain dynamic sites, but even with some of these features present, there could be certain areas where it can still negatively affect some of the best SEO strategies. Rank for $ales advises caution in using them in such instances. Some CMS software packages can cost a lot of money, so be careful when shopping around and don’t be afraid to ask pointed questions, especially as it pertains to search engine visibility.
Whatever CMS software package you are analyzing, make certain that none of them create their own title tags, which are almost always off-topic. A good example to this would be the steel products manufacturer that is trying to use a CMS program that writes title tags such as: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, etc. Such title tags are completely useless to search engines. In this particular example, if the CMS program is well-designed for the engines, it will let YOU write informative and useful title tags such as: steel staircases, steel shelves, steel accessories, etc.
This detail may seem like negligible to some people, but it is very significant information for the engines and will make a drastic improvement in the results. An additional benefit to such standard SEO techniques is it will make the maintenance of the site much easier and faster. One problem with some CMS vendors is they don’t realize all of this as being their concern. Some don’t identify it is as even being a problem. It would be almost effortless for a CMS designer or vendor to make its product search-engine friendly, as all the technology and the proper resources are already there. Some of the actual problem stems from the fact that the real needs are not being communicated effectively by most of the end-users and customers of some of the CMS programs.
PPC And Paid For Search
Today, the PPC and paid for search industry is growing rapidly. It basically offers businesses and companies a results-driven, value-added complement to search engine marketing techniques. PPC (Pay-per-Click) services allow web sites to bid for keywords and key phrases to be posted as sponsored links next to results pages. Companies can also pay to have their sites included in search-engine catalogues. In using such a formula, web sites that are of the dynamic type don’t have to make too many modifications to its basic structure, and can still yield a significant ROI.
As stated previously, there could be some benefit and some advantages to using certain, selected CMS products. However, when it comes to today’s major search engines, make certain you choose a product that will be truly ‘search engine compliant’. Additionally, always remember that some of them might still pose some problems, as far as SEO is concerned. In light of all this, it is clear that CMS vendors, search engines, web site owners and professional search engine optimization companies must work together to make the whole process as rewarding it can be and in the most diligent fashion.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
SEO Tips
Did you know that, before search engine users visit a specific Web site, they already have made four separate and distinct choices:
Choice number one: They choose to use the Internet to find a specific product or service, to research an issue of interest to them or solve a problem, as much in their professional careers as in their personal lives.
Choice number two: They choose one of the five to six major search engines on the Internet to launch their search, the most popular by far being Google.
Choice number three: They choose a particular keyword or phrase as the basis of their search, trying to narrow it down as best they can.
Choice number four: They discriminate among the first ten search results on the same, first page. Then they take their final decision as to wich web site (or company) will get their business.
These are your ultimate targeted site visitors. These web visitors are already fifty to sixty percent of the way toward reaching a final buying decision as a result of having taken the initiative to use a good search engine to investigate or research a specific product or service. This is exactly the visitor that you want to attract to your web site. These are real, serious buyers.
Your Ultimate Strategy
Did you know that, after investing thousands, sometimes hundred of thousands of dollars developing a Web site, businesses often discover that the site is invisible in the major search properties. Failing to take your Web site’s search engine and directory visibility into consideration when making site development decisions is an untimely and very expensive mistake. As a direct consequence, companies must either reinvest in a post-launch redesign of their site, or accept the extremely limited results that they will achieve with their site, if any.
By recognizing both the importance and the need of search engine optimization in the development of your Web site, you hold a significant advantage over your competition. As an example, after making the decision to implement a website positioning strategy, one Rank for Sales client now maintains a sizeable advantage over its competitors. Boasting significantly more and higher rankings in every major search engines including key players such as Google, AltaVista and Yahoo! Because of their decision to implement a website optimization strategy, our client has since closed a number of new business deals through search, including a recent $1.1 million sale that they acquired directly through a targeted search referral.
Users of Internet search engines are on a “mission” to solve a “problem.” How quickly they are able to find an answer to their problem is directly related to customer satisfaction. How quickly they are able to find your website, if they are searching for you by name, is directly related to their opinion of your brand. Where and if your website places itself in a priority position on top of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) is entirely up to your site’s optimization features, or lack thereof. So a lifetime relationship with your brand is very literally at stake every time someone conducts a query via a search engine.
Divide And Conquer
Did you know that, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a very controversial and hotly disputed subject and is actually a discipline finding itself in a constant state of movement. Major search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, AltaVista and the others are relentlessly changing their search engine ranking algorithms and related criteria on which they determine what factors they consider important for delivering the most relevant results to user search queries.
These criterias have an extremely powerful influence on your search engine rankings. What’s more, partnerships change, new search properties emerge, mergers or buyouts happen and others disappear altogether. All of these changes can directly impact your search engine rankings. Fortunately, there are a number of helpful resources where you can learn more about increasing and maintaining your website’s search engine rankings and keep up-to-date on the latest trends and changes in the search engine industry.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
Introduction
Recognizing, identifying and requesting reciprocal links is a bit more complicated than it used to be in the past. Rank for $ales knows that one important ingredient to a successful SEO reciprocal link exchange campaign, particularly in the case of Google and its PageRank algorithm, is increasing the quantity of web sites providing plain-text reciprocal links to your site. Web sites with related and similar content will provide more benefit to your own site’s rankings than will several links from less relevant sources, wich proves again the importance of link and content relevancy.
The unique goals of a search engine optimization professional then lies in the precise task of identifying relevant pages that will link to your site, effectively yielding you quality, inbound links. One must be careful to not fall into the ever-growing quantity of link farms or web sites that offer little, if any content that is of value to your site visitors or to the engines.
How To Start On The Right Foot
Initiate your reciprocal link exchange program by developing a site theme, topic or title that you will use as part of your link-request invitations. Many sites limit the length and syntax of this variable so try to keep it short, ideally less than 25 characters and make it directly relevant to your site’s content. Because most sites use this theme or title to hyperlink to your site, be sure to include the one or two keywords or a short keyphrase that is of the most value to your optimization program.
The exact keywords that link to your site are just as valuable as the link itself when determining the overall impact of a backlink on search engine rankings. When that is done, develop a site description in a manner similar to that above. Try to keep your description under 150 characters as some online submission sites could eliminate some of your most important keywords after that point. When writing your site’s description, try not to make superlative statements and don’t risk sounding spammy by simply listing some keywords placed here and there.
Another important suggestion for your initial preparation phase is to devise a way of recording your requests and submissions. You will soon realize that, like us, an effective reciprocal link exchange program that really works can leave a lot of email trails that can rapidly overwhelm you in a short time. At Rank for $ales, we use a complex spreadsheet system we developed wich is tailored for each of our clients. Our system basically identifies the inbound links and URL’s and the dates on which they were originally submitted. It’s not totally imperative, but accurately recording each link partner will help prevent submitting to the same site more than once, thus reducing any wasted time as well as almost eliminating the potential for upsetting your potential link partners.
Determining Potential Link Partners
Where do you go to find content-related and industry-related web sites that will link with your site? Well, you can start by searching a popular engine such as Google or another, and entering key phrases such as add a site, suggest a site, add link etc. Be certain to request exact search results as these key phrases are often included on small directories and categorized as such on certain link pages. We have found on many occasions that this method will return sites at which you’ll submit your site through an online form itemized by category, title, description and other relevant information.
Next, your research should concentrate on key phrases such as industry links, where the word industry is an important keyword related to your site’s industry or field of interest. You might discover that this search technique returns more results for smaller linked pages that will require you to email the webmaster for possible inclusion. Start writing a list of the sites you find relevant to yours and then you can come back later.
Sparsing And Fine-Tuning Your List
Keep in mind that, of all the web sites you have written on that list, not all might be willing to provide a link to your site. Their reasons or possible objections could be personal or otherwise- whatever the reason, you should not insist or become offended at a refusal. Just remember that a good link exchange program can help you by a large factor in the Google Page Rank algorithm. You should install the Google Toolbar on your browser if it’s not done yet, so that you can view PageRank when visiting any web site. Do not submit your site for inclusion on any page with a PageRank of two or lower as links from these sites might actually have a negative effect on your optimization campaign.
Your next step is to determine whether a search engine crawler (or spider) will be able to discover the link as one going to your site or web page. A true backlink is one that directs from visible text directly to your site. Always keep in mind that a text link is ten times more efficient than any gif or jpg image link. Search engines cannot see or read images like humans can. What they crave on is pure, old-fashioned text. Now many small online directories use scripts to organize their data. So instead of actually providing a link to http://www.yoursite.com/ they effectively format their directory to include a number of links in the form of http://theirsite.com/cgi-bin/links/jump.cgi?12345. Though click through traffic is directed to the same place with both formats, we found on most occasions that the latter provides no real value to your optimization program per se. As a hint, a link that opens as a new page from the referring site is a valid link.
The Actual Link Request Process Or Invitation
On many industry-related web sites and others, most have what is called a links page or partners page, such as our own web site wich you can see at the bottom of any of our pages on this web site. Many links pages of these sites allow you to submit your site’s information to the webmaster through an online form. When completing these forms be sure to provide complete and accurate information. Evaluate your options when confidential contact information such as address, phone number and email address is optional. You don’t want your name or email address put on any solicitation list or spam-related sites. However, providing a valid email address allows means for the webmaster to contact you should they have questions or comments concerning your site. You could also consider creating a temporary email address that you would use for link submissions exclusively.
In the on-going development of your reciprocal link exchange program (RLEP), you’ll come across some links pages that do not display clear instructions for submitting your site. Some of these sites might not be true-to-form link pages but rather lists of personal favorites or similar theme-category web sites with little relevancy to your site. In either case, it doesn’t hurt to ask to have your site reviewed. Just remember that relevancy is the name of the game in RLEP and to that end, write the webmaster a basic letter that includes your site’s URL, title as well as the URL of the page on which you would like inclusion. Many webmasters are in charge of multiple sites and might not know to which site you’re referring too so make certain there are no mistakes or misunderstandings. Be concise yet thorough with the information you provide in that email in order to minimize the effort it takes the targeted webmaster to summarize and consequently list your web site on his or her’s. Begin your email with a friendly greeting and end with a statement inviting the addressee to contact you with any questions concerning your site. A polite and personal message is less likely to be confused with spam-reciprocal-link requests, as most webmasters today are constantly flooded with spam messages.
Polish Off And Perfect Your Strategy
The last step is your most important: personally thank all positively responding webmasters who agreed to your reciprocal link invitation. Regardless of any frustration or confusion you may encounter in the process of your link exchange program, always remember that other websites are actually doing you a favor by posting your link, even if you post their’s on your site.
Author Bio:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
The Early Evolution Of A New Online Business
Do you know what is wrong with doing business on the Internet? Oh sure, spam is a real issue for most people, but it only emphasizes the point I would like to share with you today.
See the problem is locating productive methods of advertising.
Most people are of the mind that the website itself is the only form of advertising one actually needs. But when they realize that getting listed in the search engines in a way that will actually drive traffic to their website is much harder than it seems, then people are driven to find a better way to advertise. Herein lies the problem.
If you were to build your website and wait for people to come, the only page views that you would see on your page counter are those that you have made to the site yourself to be sure that it was truly working as designed. Are you going to be buying your own products? Certainly not. You need paying customers to come visit your website so that you can begin to see some sales.
Then you submit your site to the search engines. If you were to wait for a time to see who comes from the search engines, you might notice in your server logs that the search engine spiders came to visit shortly after submitting your site to them. Although you have submitted your site and noticed the spider came to your domain, you may not see your link in the spider’s parent search engine for several more days, weeks or months.
The long and short of it is that although you are working in the real-time environment of the web, your new site may not receive traffic by its own merits until a good six months after you first build it. That is not exactly what you had in mind, is it?
The next thing you might notice is that when your link begins appearing in the search engine results, your search keywords will not present your website in the top 200 results. Bear in mind that appearing in the top 200 results means nothing in the
real world. Few people will click through to see results deeper than the first 20 results.
Separate Yourself From The Masses
Most people will not begin to generate an income from their online endeavors until they have spent some time beating their heads against the brick wall. However, when you know what to do, you can begin to turn a slow profit until you learn enough to begin to earn an actual living online.
The trick is in learning what to do to generate sales and turn a profit.
This is the step in the process that you should begin to depart from the ways of the masses. Most turn to free advertising or non-productive paid advertising.
Advertising should not be free. Oh sure, there is free advertising available, but good advertising is not free!
In the real world of advertising, you can place free ads all day long, but your free ads may generate only one visitor for every 10,000 ad exposures. And then notice that it may take 200 visitors to get one sale. Under this formula, You must be exposed to 2,000,000 people to get one sale! In the free advertising world, those free ads may have cost you 50 labor hours to turn one sale. Unless your profit margin is in the range of $350 to $1000 per sale, then you will not be earning what your online time should be worth to you!
Paid advertising on the other hand is often very different. Paid advertising models that have been around for a while generally produce profits for their customers.
The Lesson About Paid Advertising
If you learn nothing else from this article, let me share with you a very important lesson about paid advertising.
People will not continue to buy advertising in one medium unless that medium continues to produce the sales and profits the advertiser seeks and needs.
By investing some time and research in different advertising mediums, you will begin to notice that certain types of advertisers return to the medium again and again.
News Flash: Advertisers return to an advertising medium over and again because the medium works… the medium continues to generate enough sales to pay the advertising costs and then some.
What Advertising Methods Are Proven
The effectiveness of one advertising medium over another is entirely dependent upon what type of product or service is being sold.
If you were to take a moment to “think outside of the Internet box,” you would soon realize that the advertising medium with the highest long-term performance and proof of concept is any medium that existed in the pre-Internet world, a.k.a. offline advertising.
Magazine and newspaper classifieds have been used by mail-order businesses since the beginning of print advertising. These mediums have proven themselves very successful throughout their long history. When you realize that an Internet business is a lot
like a normal offline mail-order business, you will understand what I am trying to tell you.
While there are a few online advertising mediums that have been proven over the long haul, they are few and far between. There is simply too much misinformation on the web about what advertising medium’s work, to know just where you should spend your online advertising dollar.
My experience has shown that the best place online to place your advertising dollars is in search engine placement, pay-per-click search engines, some ezine advertising, and creating articles for the free-reprint marketplace.
While some companies have seen success with pop-up ads and banner advertising, neither is suitable for my purposes. And unless you are dealing with tangible, inexpensive products, they are probably not suitable to your purposes either.
In Conclusion
You must take time to study what works and what does not. Too many people who own an online business are stuck in the mindset that they must advertise in the online environment only. The truth is that you should consider all forms of advertising —
both online and offline advertising. And most importantly, you should forget free advertising and focus your time and effort on paid advertising that works.
Author Bio:
John Calder is the owner and editor of http://www.TheEzine.Net
If you are only going to do one thing today, that should be to subscribe to John’s newsletter! The fact is, Misinformation is killing your chance of becoming successful in an online business. Subscribe Today and get real information YOU can use to help build your online business today! mailto:news@ezinedot.net
Website Traffic – Introduction
Besides using search engine traffic, It is possible to generate a steady stream of website traffic by repackaging existing marketing collateral and content that might be
collecting dust or virtual dust on your desk or hard drive and giving it away free.
If you’re wondering why anyone would want to give away his or her work for free, it’s called viral marketing. Some readers will download your ebooks or reports and then send them to friends, family and associates, especially if you invite them to. Client By Design has successfully used this method of traffic generation to pull thousands of
visitors to our site and our client’s sites.
Just think of it as distributing your business card or catalog to targeted visitors and then getting others to give you referrals at no cost. This can lead to enormous amounts of visitor traffic, phone calls and orders.
Finding Content
You might be sitting on a goldmine of information that your site visitors need. Whether it’s unused or just some older information in digital form (word docs, text files, notes,
power points, etc or unwritten work) you probably have a lot of shareable info that you can repackage to either sell or give away.
If you took time in the past to write or compose it, it probably has greater value than you realize. So revisit your “my documents” folder or sift through some of your old files and look for original info: old newsletters, articles, research reports, product catalogs, etc that you feel would still have relevance to web site visitors today. Ebooks and reports can have a few pages, as little as one to five or as much as 200 or more pages of info depending on the message delivered.
Distribution Formats & Readying Documents For Distribution
Method 1: The self-executable ebook route:
Self-executable ebooks are compiled software applications that readers can use without meeting any additional requirements. A reader can simply launch (open) an ebook of this type and begin enjoying it right away without needing to download anything else.
These ebooks are popular because of their interactive capabilities, compact file size and ease of distribution. You can compile a full color ebook of magazine quality, with full color photos, compress it and end up with a file small enough to be sent by email.
Be advised, though, that it’s not a good idea to send exe files through email, unless they’re zipped since anti-virus programs and even some ISPs will block or delete them. In fact, it’s probably best to send the user a link where they can download the file themselves, until anti-virus and blockers become more sophisticated.
If you know how to make web pages, you can just use your favorite html editor to create web pages with useful interactive content. Once created, save the files on your
hard- drive. Be sure to include an introduction, table of contents, graphics and links to your web site (if you have one)and contact information so your readers can
contact you for more info, interviews or more ebooks.
Once your pages are complete, you will need to compile your files into standalone format with an ebook compiler. While there are quite a few compilers on the market, I have found
two to be extremely useful. I use Ebook Generator or Ebook Creator to generate ebooks or reports.
One neat branding feature, both share, is the ability to create splash-screens that come up, once your files have been opened. These screens can hold a special thank you
message, logo or some other notification that you want readers to see.
Ebook compilers are powerful tools that will help you get your ideas or info distributed online in a short time. Visit: http://www.clientbydesign.com/ecovers.html to learn more about these products
Method 2: The PDF Route
If you don’t know anything about html or creating web pages, you can type your documents with a word processor or desktop publisher, add some nice graphics and then convert your documents to PDF files. PDF stands for portable document format and is a widely accepted standard for content distribution. PDFs are easy to distribute via download or email, depending on size and look great, if you create your original documents the right way.
To open and view PDFs, your readers will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on their systems. Acrobat reader is free and available for download on the web. It also
comes pre-installed on most new PCs or comes distributed with just about any commercial software purchased these days. In other words, it would be rare for anyone to not-have acrobat installed on his or her system.
I use Win2PDF (www.win2pdf.com) to handle my PDF conversions. It’s real easy to use, since all I have to do is select it as my printer and print to it when I’m ready
to create my file. It converts my document into a PDF and saves them to my hard drive ready for distribution. There are also more expensive and even some free software that
you can use to create your own PDFs, including Adobe Acrobat (a PDF creation tool) www.adobe.com
–Tip It’s a great idea, to include your web site address or product/service links in your PDF (perhaps as a footer on every page) so readers can contact you for more
information, order products or to download more ebooks/reports. Your readers will be able to click on your links from directly within your document and, if they are
on the Internet they can visit your web site(s) to view more resources or to buy more products.
What To Include
Regardless of the method you choose to publish with, you should:
1. Include copyright information (example: C 2002-2003 Richard Bailey).
2. Include information regarding permission or NOT to reprint or redistribute your materials.
3. Include a table of contents for long documents.
4. Include your contact information (email, web site url, phone, etc).
5. Give credit where credit is due for any materials that you include in your ebooks, if you didn’t write the materials yourself.
6. Never break copyright laws – theft of other people’s work is downright wrong and can lead to severe legal penalties. If you are in doubt, just contact the author to get
permission to quote or use their material.
Promote And Distribute Your Ebook
Now that you’re ready to get your ebook out to the public, you will need a way to promote and distribute it.
The best method is to setup a web page that collects the user’s contact info and then, once they submit the form, you can take them to a download page or you can send an email download link via auto-responder.
Note: The auto-responder method is my method of choice since some spam (unsolicited email) weary site visitors and also a few frauds will type phony email addresses to get your free download. With auto-responders they won’t get anything unless they give a valid address. Plus, as an added bonus, you will have their contact info to follow-up with after they have downloaded your ebook. Use this info to invite them to subscribe to your newsletter or to get more products. Just be reasonable, not pushy and don’t sell or give away your visitor’s info, that’s the fastest way to a bad reputation, so always give explicit instructions on how to cancel (opt-out of) future email notices from you.
Be sure to encourage readers to forward your download link or a copy of your ebook or report to everyone they know or anyone interested in the same topic. Just tell them not to send to strangers.
Imagine selling products this way via free referral marketing. Or imagine putting just the first chapter of your ebook or document in a free download and having hundreds or thousands of people requesting to see the rest of your work or to learn more about your products or services all because of one free download. It could happen.
Be sure to promote links to download your ebook or report in your search engine, banner ad and other marketing efforts
As you have read in this article, you can reuse, repackage and publish your content and then give it away.
Author: Richard Bailey
To learn more about going the extra route of distributing and selling ebooks and reports online and also how to create audio ebooks in minutes–instead of weeks, please send email to esdinfo@clientbydesign.com or visit www.clientbydesign.com/instant-audio.html
Press Release SEO – Media Kit Linking Campaigns
Search Engine Optimization requires strategizing as well as optimizing for SEO firms seeking online visibility for their clients. Last month a client of our firm sought
counsel on their web strategy for an already optimized site. We had tightened up their keywords, focused their content and appropriately titled each well crafted page.
The only thing lacking was a linking campaign and extra keyword focused content beyond their product-centered, but limited text. What more could we do for them?
The single line item NOT accepted from among a list of recommendations made was a link campaign, early in the SEO sales process. We had discovered later in the beginning
phase of optimization that the CEO believed a linking campaign meant begging industry web sites for a link. He had refused that concept without discussion due to a preconcieved notion of link-building as panhandling.
Once discovered, the panhandling concern was easily overcome with a simple request made of the CEO.
SEO Press Kit
May we have a copy of your press kit?
Press releases very often contain important industry buzz words, highly relevant, keyword-rich text and an ideal word count for optimized web page content. Press
releases are tightly focused on single themes and can be easily plugged into themed sections. Ideal for SEO.
We had discovered that the client had a media kit that was widely distributed at trade shows. This kit offered press releases which trumpeted a stellar Fortune 500 client list. Curiously, the slickly printed, beautiful media kit listed an access URL for a password protected area of their web site where members of the press could download Word.doc and PDF files of this same press kit.
Essentially our client was hiding this content from the public due to concerns that the in-house PR staff would be inundated with emails and phone calls from NON-media
types and-[gasp!]-customers abusing published contact information from press releases. Maybe, but they were also hiding valuable content, customer testimonials, and that stellar client list from everyone but very determined media professionals willing to request site access passwords to download hidden offline documents.
The Complete Solution
That press kit held the complete solution to our link popularity conundrum. By posting those documents online in HTML format and carefully structuring the page title and headline of each page, then linking those press releases to relevant sections of the company website, we dramatically improved search engine visibility for this client by putting it all in publicly accessible pages. The search engines indexed it all quickly while expanding the content and increasing site relevance.
Their Fortune 500 clients have now linked to a vendor that they had no reason to link to before because the releases were posted on those client sites with live links back to their site. Links from well respected and visible companies increases pagerank dramatically.
Press releases emphasizing business relationships with product-centered events featuring small businesses and larger corporations can focus on news hooks that will attract search engine visitors. Visitors that would not have otherwise known about the business relationship or products offered may suddenly find themselves customers.
Small Companies
Small companies doing business with larger corporations should widely distribute their press releases announcing marketing partnerships and sales to those companies. The
big players will often find ways to make news with public relations involving smaller partners and will sometimes use those press releases on their own site for publicity.
With innovative PR professionals working in concert with small businesses, they may even get the corporate client to use their much greater resources to distribute those press releases through giant corporate distribution channels (far beyond the miniscule reach of small businesses). This will gain them press coverage and help establish their brand while linking them to the image of larger corporate clients in the mind of their customers.
A word to the wise though, make your press releases professional and concise with complete contact info and links to relevant data. Include short, single sentence “About Us” company information and DON’T FORGET A URL! That web address included at the foot of all releases is your key to link popularity. Link from your release to the corporate client site you reference in partner- ship announcements and choose headlines that contain keywords relevant to your site and your business.
PR Tutorial
For an excellent tutorial on creating an online press room and case studies on effective online PR strategies, visit the newsletter of PR Diva, BL Ochman at:
http://www.whatsnextonline.com/wno/newsletter28.html
She recommends that companies replace that paper press kit with a CD containing all those documents for that trade show distribution, but the kit belongs online too.
Search Engine Optimization professionals recognize the value of online press rooms as exceptional opportunities to present highly relevant, keyword focused content that encourages linking from well known corporations while exposing that existing content to the search engines. If those press releases also gain media coverage for your business as intended, your linking campaign has struck gold.
Author Bio:
Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization specialist practicing ethical small business SEO Search Engine Placement, Optimization, Marketing.
Understanding The WWW.
I came to the web with an itch to build content, and I needed to understand the technology utilized to build the Internet.
Early on, I confronted the question about whether it was necessary to use the www. in my website URL. It really began to be a concern to me when I began to advertise my domain and I was limited to a certain number of lines and characters in my advertising. Although the www. only comprised four characters, those four characters sometimes made a significant difference in allowing me to have enough space to say what I wanted to say.
Most every website on the planet advertises their website with the www. included in the URL. I wondered if dropping the www. would create a problem with people finding my site. The answer is that it depends on your web server configuration.
What Makes A Web Server Different From Your PC.
Putting it in simple terms, a web server is put together in the same fashion as your own computer. Both have a set of directories, subdirectories and files which let you remain
somewhat organized. The only difference between your computer and a webserver is the type of software that is loaded onto the webserver.
The Purpose Of The WWW_ Designation In Folder Names
A webserver simply consists of software designed to allow external users to access the computer through a specific doorway in the system called a *port*.
The webserver software handles all requests coming into the computer for information.
All folders that represent different domains on the webserver are generally marked off with the www_ in the name of the folder. This reminds the system administrator that the folder is directly accessible from the Internet.
The www_ designation is not needed by the webserver — it is needed by the human operators.
Domain Pointers
Domain pointers are like shortcuts on your desktop. They are only files which point to another location on your computer. Clicking those shortcuts start new programs without your having to search for the actual program.
Most webservers are set up to utilize these pointers to allow someone to direct access another folder on the webserver.
For example, on my server I have a folder called *double-eagles* which is the home for another one of my domains. If you click the link http://double-eagles.com , that is actually a domain pointer directing your browser to open the folder http://thePhantomWriters.com/double-eagles
The same process applies to the use of subdomains, such as URL’s that utilize the www. For example, the URL http://archives.thePhantomWriters.com points to a directory on
my server called http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content
If you cannot access your domain name without using the www. prefix, then you should contact your webhost to get this feature enabled. The choice of using the www. or not should be made by your visitors, not your webhosting provider.
The Advantage Of Your Web Server Recognizing Both
All day long when I surf, I type in the URL name without the www. included in the URL. I am often still surprised to see top name domains from whom you cannot access the non-www. presentation of their website!
Can you imagine what would happen if someone put yourdomain.com into their browser and they received a Cannot Find Server error?
*Bye-bye visitor… Wish we could have been introduced.*
What About Search Engine Spamming
Search engine spiders are known to frown upon websites who introduce the exact same content under two different domain names. The search engine administrators generally view this as an attempt to gain an unfair advantage in their results. In fact, at one time I had read on the Google website that providing mirror websites could lead to your site being banned from their database.
The common knowledge has always been that the search engines generally count only the www_ version or the non-www_ version of a website. They do not list both in their results as they understand that both versions are the same website.
So, for the last two years I have made available the www_ version for my visitors, but only advertised the non-www_ version of the site.
The Google PageRank Surprise
About one week ago, I installed two new tracking tools on my system to help me to guage the success of my advertising. Those two tools are:
– Google PageRank Toolbar –
http://toolbar.google.com/
– Alexa Toolbar –
http://toolbar.thePhantomWriters.com
Both require using a Windows operating system and Internet Explorer 5.0 or better for a browser, but both are exceptional tools if you are a webmaster who cares about tracking your traffic results.
My Big Surprise
Somehow, I managed to hit my domain with both the www_ prefix and without. The first time I did this, I simply assumed that my Google PageRank was bouncing from day to day with wide swings. The second time I had done it, I realized that Google was seeing the two URL’s as two websites!
The PageRank for the URL I advertise (non-www.) is currently a 5/10, and the PageRank for the URL I do not advertise (www.) holds a value of 2/10!
The Alexa toolbar sees both as the same page and records the data for my domain the same in both cases.
The difference between the two rankings is that the www. version has no links pointing to it. The non-www. version has 30 Google links pointing to it.
It is important to note here that under the current guidelines of Google, a website must have a PageRank of at least 4/10 in order to be listed in Google’s search results. Therefore, although there are hundreds of websites pointing to my website, only those with a PageRank of at least 4/10 will actually show up in the calculations for both Google PageRank and the Alexa results — which utilizes the Google search results in their own rating systems.
What I Have Learned From This Experience
I need to make sure that I can get my URL on more sites with at least a 4/10 Google PageRank.
The number of links pointing to a website do make a significant difference in the PageRank of the website.
If my only goal is to build my own PageRank or to get better results in Google, I don’t need to submit my information to a website that does not have a PageRank of 4/10 or higher.
Putting my URL in my resource box and attaching it to a free-reprint article really can get my URL into hundreds of websites, some of whom will have a good Google PageRank.
And finally, I hope that people who use the Google toolbar who visit my website come through to the non-www. version of my website — or else they might just think that my website has no real value in the eyes of Google.
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. Do you write your own articles? Let us distribute them for you.
