SEO Resource for Webmasters

Нов блог за Интернет реклама и Маркетинг в България

2008-03-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

Здравейте,

Най-накрая реших да направя собствен Български блог за интернет и маркетинг. В него ще пиша всичко което ме вълнува, всичко което ми се случва в моята професия, всичко което знам за интернет рекламата в България. Маркетинг инструменти (банер и текстова реклама). Оптимизация на уеб сайт. Регистрация на уеб сайт в търсачки и портали и др.

Прятно четене и коментиране ;)

The New linking!

2007-11-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

The New linking!
Write articles for newsletters. Actually this isn't that new but it is becoming an increasingly important way to get sites to link to you without the use of the soon-to-be-obsolete link page.

The first thing you will need to do is write an article. Be sure to involve keywords you are optimising your pages for. A perfect example would have been the story about the gentleman from the UK who bet his life savings on one bet of roulette. Fill the story, and HTML, with your keywords. Consider what someone who saw the story on MSN news would type to search for more information and fill your story with these words. The title could read something like "Ashley Revell - British Bettor Bets all on Bouncing Roulette Ball". The advantage of a story like this is the search terms are really up for grabs when it comes to the search engines. You can grab a number one search result spot right away for the keywords "Ashley Revell" if you can get your page indexed quickly. Your number one position may not last long but you will have been number one during the busiest time for these keyword searches.
-Send Your Own Newsletter

Now, ideally you should first put your article in your own newsletter and send that out to your email list. Interesting stories can be very effective to make people want to read your newsletters. The SEO comes when you archive your newsletter on your site. People have reported being amazed at the increases in traffic from Google searches of their newsletter-archive pages. Content really does produce traffic.
-Get Others to Send Your Article.

You now want to offer your story to others who also have newsletters. I can tell you from experience that free, good content is always welcome. It beats writing your own stuff all the time, trust me. The very best is to find someone who archives the old newsletters and there you have your first link back to your site because you have included your URL in your signature. You also have the readership of this other person's email list who will no doubt want to see first hand what brilliant mind (or raving lunatic) wrote this article and will therefore click on your link. Finally you can do the old "To Get the Full Story…" trick with a link back to your page with your full story and your other articles.

How Important is Alexa Ranking?

2007-09-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

Alexa Ranking - A Web Site Monetization Strategy?

All businesses that employ online marketing, strive to improve their conversion rate. Now, there are different ways of attracting targeted traffíc. Some try to achieve a good ranking in the SERPs, while others are satisfied with heavier traffic. Either way, everybody has the goal of achieving financial success.

But, while scoring high with Google may seem to certain business people the only way to make themselves known and thus reach their goal, there are others that think that a good position in the Alexa ranking system might benefit them just as well.

What is Alexa Ranking?

This is a ranking system set by alexa.com (a subsidiary of amazon.com ) that basically audits and makes public the frequency of visits to various Web sites. The algorithm by which Alexa traffíc ranking is calculated, is simple. It is based on the amount of traffic recorded over a period of three months from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed.

This traffíc is based on such parameters as reach and page views. The reach refers to the number of Alexa users who visit a particular site in one day. Page view, as the name indicates, is the number of times a particular page (URL) is viewed by Alexa users. Alexa.com makes it clear though that, if a particular user visits the same URL multiple times on the same day, all those visits will be counted as one.

The first step of the ranking process is calculating the reach and number of page views for all the sites on the Web on a daily basis. Alexa ranking is obtained by performing the geometric mean of reach and page views, averaged over a predefined period of time (three months).

How Alexa Ranking Works

It's quite easy to get started. All you have to do is visit the alexa.com site and download (and install) the Alexa toolbar. This toolbar offers a search function, but it mainly displays the rank (at a global level) of the visited site, as well as the sites that have been visited by Web surfers that are linked in some way to the site being visited.

The Alexa toolbar not only displays information, but it also sends data to the central server. Thus, each time you visit a Web page via a Web browser (be it Internet Explorer or Firefox) that has the toolbar installed, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting. Such data is gathered from all the Web users who have the Alexa toolbar.

With Alexa, the smaller the numerical ranking, the better. Most people say that if you manage to make it in the top 100,000, it is a sign that your site enjoys quite heavy traffíc.

Is Alexa Ranking Worth Anything?

Benefits

Alexa Traffic can be used as a competitive intelligence tool, but you should take into consideration the fact that the audience sample size is fairly small. Just enter your competitor's site in the "Compare Sites" section and measure the results of your web marketing efforts in comparison with your competitors'.

As opposed to Google's PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.

It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the real marketing potential of your Web site. The better your Alexa rank, the higher they may be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.

Personal pages or blogs are also ranked in the same way as ordinary Web sites. They will even get a distinctive mark (*)

Because Alexa ranking helps you with information about your Web site, it is a good instrument for search engine optimization.

Disadvantages

Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking
If you want to boost your Alexa traffíc ranking, you just have to follow some quite simple rules, such as:
Conclusion
As we have seen, there are pros and cons to Alexa ranking. The bottom line is that most people consider it valuable only for direct advertising. Given the fact that Alexa ranking for a site is calculated on the basis of how many visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited that particular site, the results can be inaccurate.
Nevertheless, it may prove useful for sites with very good traffíc that attract highly targetëd leads, since Alexa focuses more on the traffic that Web sites receive rather than on links to it. As a Web site monetization strategy, we can safely say that Alexa ranking might be the right solution.

Building Valuable Backlinks

2007-08-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

Building decent backlinks to your site can be one of the most important strategies in gaining awareness, in relation to sites of your circle, higher rankings and crucially, long term respect from the search engines.

The links you build should be on relevant higher ranking sites and not on link farms or useless directories. Relevant directory listings can definitely be a bonus but don't focus too much on them, though stuff like DMOZ, Yahoo directory listings can be valuable.

So, how do you go about getting backlinks? Well you can either pay for them or ask politely for a free link, simple as that. Just get a list of relevant sites to yours and ones which are at least... PR3 depending on your own pagerank, but then again, a backlink is a backlink, so just get a decent list of relevant sites to begin.

Once you have a good list, go to each of these sites, find the contact page or find another way to find out who owns the site and email the webmaster asking for a link. Just say that you like their site and ask politely if they wouldn't mind linking to you as you're another good resource for that topic.

Now some people don't just give away links willy nilly so you might end up in 1 of 4 scenarios, either

A: You get a response saying that they will link to you... (perfect!).

B: You get a response asking for a reciprocal link.

C: You get a response asking for payment for a placement.

D: You get a straight... no.

So if you get a straight up yes, that's perfect; you've just gotten yourself a free backlink.

If you get a reply asking for a return link... alot of people would say reciprocal links are pointless and cancel each other out... well, I'm not sure they entirely do but even if they do, depending on the traffic to the apposing site - it still may create a tiny bit more awareness / traffic to your site, so I would say it's worth it. It surely can't do any harm, so why not.

If you get a reply stating that he / she / they do not give out free backlinks and it will cost to have a link placed, ask how much, if they haven't said so already.

Then evaluate if it's worth it, go find out what sort of prices links are going for on certain PR's and if it's even worth buying one on this site. Find out the sites traffic, age, rankings etc.

If you get a straight no then try replying back asking why, if they give no reason -maybe they just didn't want to give out a free link, in which case either offer a return link or a payment (if it's worth it).

Also, when asking for backlinks it's important to get good anchor text. It's been proven that anchor text links are pretty valuable long term these days on the web so you should get in there now. You should vary the text in which you ask your link to be named each time, but not so much and so broad that it could be mistaken as spam. Too much of exactly the same text could also be wrongly taken as inerlinking or cheating by the search engines so make sure you get good healthy text links, but not overloaded.

Say for example you own a website about sleeping problems, get a few links with the text Can't Sleep? or something like that, maybe some with the text Sleeping Problems and then one or two with your actual site title.

A good cycle of healthy anchor text links should help remind Google etc that the backlinks are genuine.

3 Top Ways for Perfect Internet Marketing Campaign

2007-07-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows the Internet is growing exponentially and continually evolving. The major players in the continual evolution of the Internet are the major search engines and consumer generated media such as blogs. Because of the continual changes, a well rounded Internet marketing strategy must include a variety of proven marketing options to ensure success. I will outline 3 of the most effective Internet marketing solutíons available and how they relate to your marketing strategy.

SEO Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the first because the frëe advertising afforded by the search engines is partly determined by on-page optimization techniques. With thousands of new Websites being created daily, the competition for a listíng on the first search result page is increasingly saturated for the popular keywords. Statistics show better than 90% of people only look at the first search result page, and a similar percentage only clíck on the top search listing.

In order to compete effectively, a Web page must be designed around a keyword or more effectively, a keyword phrase. The keywords must be included in the page's title, keyword META tag, page's description, the first heading (using the H1 HTML tag), throughout the body of the page and within the last 25 words on the page. These are just a few of the basic SEO on-page options that, although will not guarantëe a first page listing, are definitely required as a starting point in an effective Internet marketing strategy.

In most cases, there is too much competition for certain keywords such as "golf clubs". A better strategy would be to use "golf clubs Chicago" or handcrafted golf clubs". The more specific you make your keyword phrase the better. A number of frëe tools are available that will show the popularity of keywords and how often they are used in the search engines on a monthly basis. These will allow you to customize your Web page knowing the keyword phrase's popularity. If you get the first page listing for a keyword with less than 100 searches per month for instance, then it doesn't matter because your traffíc will be very limited.

Link Exchanges

Once the on-page optimizations are complete, the off-page optimization options need to be addressed. Link exchanges are perhaps the best off-page SEO technique available. If you download and install the Google toolbar on your browser, you will see the Google PageRank of each site you visit. Your PageRank is determined by the number of other sites linking to your site, and the QUALITY of the link is a major consideration. Pages are ranked from 1 to 10. The higher the PageRank of the site linking to yours, the better. Sites with a PR7 and above are considered as authority sites and a back link will send Google's spider to your page on a regular basis.

There are a number of ways to get a back link to your site. You can email a request to the Webmaster for a link exchange and if they agree you would return the favor by placing a link to their site on your page. You can also purchase the link. A number of sites offër this service for a monthly fee. So if you want to quickly get your site listed by Google and the major search engines, then paying for a PR8 back link for a month or two might be well worth the ínvestment in the long run, as new sites are placed in a "sand box" by Google for several months until they prove their longevity.

One back link from a PR8 site is worth 1,000 back links from PR2 or less sites. As a matter of fact, numerous links from low ranking sites will actually be detrimental to your site, because each back link is like a vote for your site. If you have too many low ranking sites voting for yours, Google will be reluctant to reward your site with a higher PR. You have to do your research on the site that offers to link to yours because if they were blacklisted by Google, your site will receive the same fate and you probably will nevër recover from this.

A PR 4 or 5 is relatively easy to attain. So your best bet is to limit your back links to PR5 and above for the best results. And by all means avoid link farms. Before Google upgraded its algorithm, just the number of back links was considered. But now the actual PageRank of your back link is considered AND the PageRank of the sites listing to THAT link. Links from link farms are now looked upon as basically sp@m links. You would be better off purchasing a listíng in a major link directory like Yahoo or DMZ. It's definitely worth the ínvestment as these are authority sites and are a major vote for your site!

Blogs

As previously indicated, consumer generated media is a major factor in the evolution of the Internet. Case in point is the enormous effect blogs had on the last Presidential campaign. A very large percentage of most searches will include blogs on the first page listing. Over 50% of purchases, online and offline, are preceded by an online search for more information. And a large percentage of the information is offered by blogs. People are very interested in the opinions of others on their topic of interest.

The major blogs are updated on a daily basis which is very important to Google's algorithm which uses the frequency of updates (daily, hourly and by minute) as a determining factor in the search result ranking. A powerful marketing method used by the major blogs is to submit articles on a particular topic to the major article hubs such as EzineArticles.com. The article hub benefits by having continually updated information (which Google likes) where they can place their monëy makíng AdSense ads. The blogger benefits by having a back link to their blog at the bottom of the article.

As numerous other bloggers and Webmasters access the article hubs for fresh information, the article can be syndicated virally to a number sites on the Internet. This creates a number of back links to your blog or your site generating an enormous amount of pre-qualified frëe traffíc.

In Summary

These are just a few of the most effective online Internet marketing options available. Other options such as auto-responder email, Ezine advertising and pay per clíck advertising should be included in a well rounded Internet marketing strategy. No matter what options you use, you definitely need to start with your on-page SEO techniques. Your listing in the search results will be enhanced by a properly optimized page. Also professional search engine submission service like Addsiteonline.com

Does the PPC budget determine the agency fees?

2007-07-01T03:04:00.000-07:00

This is a question that I often get from direct clients, smaller agencies or larger agencies who are just starting to offer search marketing services. In all three cases, my client (e.g., the agency or the advertiser) is looking to me to help them price out search services.

For agencies, I actually favor a hybrid model of media percentage and flat fees for larger and more complex PPC campaigns. I personally base my fee structure on hours worked, something I provide prospective clients in the form of a 2-3 page estimate after we’ve hammered out the overall scope of work.

Estimating a PPC Job - A Consultant’s Viewpoint

To answer the main question here - I rarely base my estimate on the size of the budget because there’s not much difference between putting together a campaign with a $1000/month budget and a $10,000/month budget (for example). In my opinion, budget should only influence fees when it’s very large – over six figures a month, and that’s mainly because it’s generally indicative of a more complex campaign.

Here are the factors that I think should affect the estimate:

The number of vendors (engines) in the plan – it’s a lot more work to launch campaigns on three engines, monitor, report and optimize them than it is to focus on just one (*cough* Google *cough*) engine
The number of keywords/categories in the campaign– An e-commerce site with 12 categories and thousands of products has many keyword variables to test, while a company that just sells one product or service (e.g., online tax filing) has a limited number of keywords. Keyword expansion and refinement directly impacts the number of hours spent optimizing a campaign, and should be a factor when estimating hours.
The potential for campaign growth. Many campaigns I launch start small and then grow into great monstrous beasts that require a lot more time to manage then when they initially launched. As such, I find it’s important to do three-month trials so the scope of work can be re-evaluated to see if 1) an agency is even needed at all and 2) if the campaign has grown/changed significantly where the number of hours needs to be revisted
The amount of reporting involved. I provide weekly summary reports to most small clients as well as monthly keyword reports. If a client requires more reporting than this (e.g., CPA reports by keyword by week) than I would likely increase the amount of the estimate. Very large campaigns (of the type I manage with the large agencies) often are very complex and have teams of PPC specialists working on them, which justifies the higher cost of retaining these companies to manage a campaign. Well, that and the higher ROI the campaign achieves.

Many of the projects I work on with small agencies or directly with the client amount to about 25-40 hours to launch, and 20-30 hours/month to manage. This doesn’t seem to deviate much for budgets of $50,000 or less, and I’ve begun moving to a flat monthly retainer fee for these types of campaigns.

I’m certainly not sayng that the way I do things is the best way, but so far my clients feel it’s fair and I’m happy with the compensation. I have begun exploring the idea of getting paid for performance with e-commerce or lead-generation campaigns, but I haven’t yet taken that plunge. Still, it’s got some exciting potential.

The Main SEO Secrets

2007-06-01T12:22:00.001-07:00

The most important seo factor is KEYWORDS. Every website has specific keywords. What are your keywords? Keywords are the words that they use to lead visitors to your site. Keywords would generally include your company name, brand name, and any other words specific to your company or product. Keywords should also reflect the mind-set of your custome

read more | digg story

Guide to Traffic From Digg Comments

2007-05-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

Great post from the guys of SEOMOZ!!

Enjoy it!! :)

Rand's post on low referral traffic from Digg inspired me to write about a little-known potential traffic goldmine—Digg comments. I noticed some time ago that first post comments on front page stories can drive some remarkable traffic. Here are two recent examples.

Last week I posted the first comment on "4 Gas Saving Myths" just before it hit the main page and linked to two relevant articles about fuel efficiency and gas prices. This comment generated 1,438 visitors. The first comment on "Is Mythbusters The Best Science Show on the Telly?" about Mythbuster's flawed statistics drove 1,901 visitors. Thousands of visitors for simple comments? Here’s my guide to traffic from Digg comments. Read carefully—go about Digg comments the wrong way and you just might get death threats—I’m not kidding, more about that later.

First, your links must post to quality content. The three articles I linked to above are well-written, well-researched articles. Two of the three articles that I linked to have even been featured on Slashdot (1, 2). Quality, of course, is a relative term. Given the typical Digg banter, the threshold for adding quality content can sometimes quite low. The links, however, cannot point to pages that are clearly blogspam or you are sure to face Digg's wrath.
Must be on topic. This is probably more important than the quality of the link. It may seem obvious, but if your comment/link doesn’t relate to the article, especially if it contains a link, then it will be buried.
First posts comments are going to receive exponentially more traffic than later posts. They can set the tone for the rest of the discussion and can be almost as important as the actual article being linked to. If the Digg article already has a comment then it is usually better to reply to the first comment than submit a new comment. This is true even if your comment isn’t a direct response to the comment you are replying to. Otherwise, the first comment will eventually get dozens of replies, pushing the second comment way down the page where it will not be seen by most. For example, I replied to the first comment on a post about Google searches. The first post was buried with 16 negative votes which effectively gave me the first post. This comment brought 509 visitors. In my opinion, this is a flaw with the Digg comment system where you can only reply to root comments. It provides an incentive for disjointed discussions. I suspect that Digg will redo their comment system at some point in the near future.
If you are looking for traffic from your posts, it does little good to comment on articles that are already on Digg’s front page. There are two reasons for this. First, you no longer have the first post advantage and your comment will be lost among the masses. The second reason is that the highest amount of traffic will come while the post is at the top of main page. Each minute that passes is lost traffic. It’s much better to find future front page stories from the upcoming stories section. This is not hard. Checking the “hot in technology” on the right side of the page will show you which posts are most likely to hit the front page in the next few hours. Of course, you can drill down to other topics besides technology as well. The cloud view and other tools can also be used to predict which stories are most likely to hit the front page.
As with all forums and websites, if you focus solely on promoting your website it will eventually come back to haunt you. All your links and submitted stories should not be to your own sites.
Digg, as a general rule, has a negative bias towards all things SEO and marketing. If you have a name like SEOmoz (sorry), there are some people that aren’t going to give you a fair shake.
Digg does not use the NoFollow tag. However, if you receive a 'thumbs down' from four users your comment will be hidden by default. At some point in the future Digg may follow Wikipedia's lead and move to NoFollow tags. I'd recommend it to prevent link spam but generally the community is quick to bury.
Realize that although you may receive many new visitors they may be less likely to stay around than traffic you receive from other sources. As you can see from the statistics below, the bounce rate was between 74-92%. The average time on site was 20 seconds for the Mythbusters article and just over a minute for the fuel and gas articles. I'm sure that there are ways the site can improve its stickiness (any ideas?), but the point remains the same—Digg visitors are less likely to stick around than traffic from other sources.

By way of full disclosure, the site I linked to, OmniNerd, is not my site. I have no financial relationship with the site and don’t know how their GoogleAds performed, but I suspect that very few visitors from Digg clicked on ads. If AdSense earnings are your primary motivation, Digg is probably not your best option.

Although this is not my site, OmniNerd did let me peek into their Google Analytics for this story. Since the stats used above are from Google Analytics and not the server logs, the actual traffic may be higher than I reported. According to something I read on StumbleUpon, “A large portion of...Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls...caus[ing]...Google Analytics...to not work." If that's true, then the actual traffic from these comments could be higher than recorded. Currently about 50% of OmniNerd's recorded visitors use Firefox. How many are not being counted? Does anyone have experience with Google Analytics not counting all their traffic?

Although Digg comments can be a valuable source of traffic, the reaction to spam can be painful. A couple months ago Chandler Kent learned that the hard way when he submitted a comment with a link to his blog under his name, as is common practice in most forums. It quickly received hundreds of “thumbs down” but didn’t stop there. Someone posted his phone number and he began to receive creepy phone calls and comments such as he "deserves to be hunted down and stalked." Ironically, his recounting of the fallout was widely publicized as “The Most Hated Comment on Digg” and brought him a ton of traffic.

Comments on Digg can bring you some nice traffic if you are willing to risk your life.

Reciprocal Linking Strategy

2007-05-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

If you want to get serious about driving more traffic to your website and improving your search engine rankings you need to develop a linking strategy. There are three primary linking strategies:

1. Reciprocal Linking
2. Purchasing text links
3. Employing a link finding service

This month's issue of BizAtomic Advisor focuses on Reciprocal Linking – How it can help. When a trusted site links to yours, people follow that recommendation.

Reciprocal link means your website links to another website and that website links back to you. Search engines use link popularity to rank websites. Exchanging reciprocal links with other sites will build a great link directory that will motivate visitors to bookmark your website to get access to your link directory.

One of the factors search engines use to determine your relevancy to a search term is the number of websites linking to your website. This is an effective way to increase your search engine rankings.

Three key success factors for a reciprocal linking strategy are:

1. Quality of links should outweigh quantity
2. Link partners must relate to your site content
3. Partners should link to you from pages listing as few links as possible

Linking is what the web is all about. It helps you move from one document to another and from site to site while maintaining your focus on a particular subject. The ideal situation is to have one way links from related sites without you pointing back to them. However, you would have to have a lot of valuable information, tips, tools, articles, resources, etc. in order to motivate people to link to your website. Unfortunately most sites don't fall into this category and reciprocal linking is a requirement.

Step 1 - Get people to want to link to your website. Generating quality inbound links to your website requires a systematic approach and hard work. But the payoff is worth it. To begin with you must have good content on your website. Step one is to analyze the value of your content in relation to competitors. You will also need a page of outbound links on your website that visitors will find valuable.

Step 2 – Research websites that are worth linking to and that will bring relevant traffic to you. You need to identify the portals, directories, news sites, ezines, blogs, and other information sources specific to your industry. You can let your fingers do the walking across the keyboard or you can purchase one of the many software tools on the market designed to locate relevant sites. They also help collect email addresses and even prepare letters requesting that a site add a link to your site. Without making any recommendations you may want to look into the following tools:

Arelis Reciprocal Link Solution

Zeus Internet Marketing Robot

Linking 101 Linking Management Script

Duncan Carver's Link Management System

Hot Links SQL V2.3

LinkMaster Pro

Links Manager

Links4Trade

PowerLinks.com

Make sure you at least visit the sites these tools generate. However, the best way to build long-term link popularity is to offer good content and features providing real value to your visitors. People will discover your website.

Google is a great help with your research because it ensures your partners are properly indexed. Look for sites closely related to you in terms of theme and keywords. Google's ranking algorithm takes into account each link's importance along with other factors like the proximity of your search keywords in the documents. In other words, it's not just about the number of sites that link to a given page, but also the importance of those sites (measured by the links to each of them). Google has given a name to its ranking algorithm for determining a web page's importance; it's called PageRank(TM) .

Human based directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory project have a lot of influence over search results. List your site in the correct category with a good description.

Next, make sure you are linked to and from topic specific and niche directory websites. These are sites that provide information that is an exact match for what you provide.

Don't forget partners and vendors from your business. Since you already have a relationship you are more likely to be able to request and receive a link from their websites.

Step 3 – Implementing your strategy. Like any marketing campaign you need a plan.

Set business benefit objectives for your Linking strategy. Think about what you are trying to achieve and write it down on paper.

Develop a content plan for populating your website with valuable content.

Set linking policies, pages, and linking code you can give to link partners for your site.

Monitor the progress of your linking strategy so that you can see what results have been achieved and adapt or tweak what you are doing to improve results.

Benchmark your site's link popularity against competitors

A Reciprocal Linking Program will require that you manage the following:

1. The name of the site
2. The URL
3. The name and email address of the person who runs the site
4. The date you contact the person who runs the site and the date he or she responds
5. The resulting deal (Some will say yes, some will say no, others will not reply at all, others will want a link back from you, some may want money for links, some will be out of town and take weeks to reply, etc.)
6. The status of the deal
7. Verifying that the link is in place
8. Checking the site periodically for the link (Yes, some folks swap links and then pull yours for odd reasons.)

Remember the most important benefit of a link exchange is the traffic resulting directly from these links. Search engines are highly unpredictable. They keep changing their algorithms every now and then. Your site is on the top 10 results today, but it may not be so tomorrow. Of course, you don't want to exclude search engine optimization but your main concern should be getting traffic from direct links.

Different Ways To Increase Targeted Traffic To Your Website

2007-05-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

When I first started documenting the methods I used for my initial authority site case study I needed to figure out exactly how I could drive traffic to my site. So, I sat down and listed all of the methods I have used (and currently use) to drive traffic to my website. So, here’s a list of how you can increase targeted traffic to your website:

Article Submission

Article Directories
Article Trading
- Trade your articles directly with other webmasters / friends (be sure to include your resource box)
Article Giveaway (to relevant sites)
- Give away your unique articles to top sites in your niche (be sure to include your resource box)

Blogging

Create own network of “feeder” blogs (using free or your own hosted blogs)
Blog Traffic Services (purchase rights to post snippets in blog posts with anchor text links to your page)
Blog Comments (quality comments in relevant blogs – many blogs have nofollow)

Classifieds

Craigslist (short-term strategy)
US Free Ads (short-term strategy)
eBay (short-term strategy)

Linking

Reciprocal Links with Relevant Sites (trade links one for one with webmasters)
Three Way Links (do a three way link exchange with webmasters who own multiple websites)
Link Exchange Services (such as Link Vault or Link Metro)
Purchase Links (from webmasters or a link broker)

Lists

Co-Registration Lists
Joint Venture (other marketer’s email lists)
Opt-in List (requires you to build your own list first…)
Safe Lists

Advertising

Ezine Advertising (advertise in various newsletters)
Pay-Per-Click (such as Google, YPN, MSN Adcenter etc.)
Offline Advertising (flyers, direct mail etc.)

Press Releases

PRWeb (paid service with large distribution)
Free PR Services

Social Media

Social Bookmarking
Social Multi-Media Networks
- Podcasts (publish your own podcasts)
- YouTube
- Google Video
Social Networks
Social Voting
Other
- Forums
- RSS Feeds
- Yahoo Answers
- Wikipedia (if you have an authority site on a subject, list your link as a resource)

Obviously I have only listed a few of the article directories, social media networks and such. I will try to list a more comprehensive list of the ones I use in a later post.

Free search engine submission - Is it true??What are they say about this?

2007-05-12T12:38:00.001-07:00

Free search engine submission is something that we use to see everyday on the Internet. But, is it true? What are the seo gurus say about this. Most of the people think this is waste of time, but I think that is this services is done by professional company (like Addsiteonline.com) is very valuable. Because your website always must submit.

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How to Drive Traffic to Your Site with Squidoo!

2007-05-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

Don't laugh, this is not as insignificant as you might think at first glance. Not by a long shot.

Actually, it is quite significant.

Here's why: making any traffic form the web from a free site is quite rare.

At least this has been my experience. Others will no doubt disagree and argue otherwise, but I have found very few free sites worth pursuing. Google's Blogspot is the only other exception that readily comes to mind.

Everybody Loves A Freebie!

I never really started earning any significant online income until I created my own domain and web site. You must create your own virtual real estate. Your own content. Your own domains. Your own sites. It is the correct way to proceed unless...

Unless... you just don't have the funds or resources to create and build your own sites. The next best thing is using a Web 2.0 program like Squidoo.

What Is Squidoo?

Squidoo is a free, easy-to-use service or site that lets anyone post or write a lens (web page) on any subject that they have expertise in.

Squidoo lets you create your own lenses and pick highly valuable keyword phrases in your Squidoo URL. They are still some very worthwhile URLS to be claimed and more being born as new products come online.

Experienced marketers will know to place popular (well searched for) keywords or keyword phrases in their Squidoo URL and then have these keywords in the title of your lens and sprinkled throughout the page. Don't overdo it, but optimize your lens for your chosen keywords. Savvy marketers also know using a long tail keyword phrase often results in more targeted traffic which converts better.

How Is Squidoo Different?

Squidoo is a quality site. It offers highly focused content which often rises to the top of the search engine rankings very quickly. The Squidoo site has a PR7 (Page Rank) in Google. According to Alexa, Squidoo is ranked in the top 1000 sites on the whole web.

Why Is Squidoo Effective?

The main reason Squidoo is effective stems from its vibrant online community constantly creating diverse quality content and links. In the process, this community has made Squidoo a search engine haven. As with Wikipedia, Squidoo can be seen as the ultimate authority site. Besides, it is fun and easy to use because you have all your valuable content and links on one convenient page. It is also community rated so all the cream rises to the top!

How You Can Earn By Using Squidoo?

Every page on Squidoo carries Google AdSense ads which generate funds for the site and you. Also you can display affiliate links from Amazon, eBay and CafePress... Squidoo is more like a co-op where you share in the revenues generated from your lenses. There is also a charity element where you can donate your earnings to a whole host of charity groups.

Keep in mind, Squidoo is completely scalable. As with any marketing venture, once you know how to create that first one dollar profit, all you have to do is scale it up. If you make one dollar with one page, create a hundred pages and you will make...

Why You Should Use Squidoo?

From a purely SEO angle, Squidoo is worth your time, even if you're a professional marketer making 2 or 300 dollars a day from your sites. Squidoo lets you quickly tap into the whole Web 2.0 social media tagging system. It will help you improve your rankings for your other sites if you closely tie-in your links and content.

This is not keyword spamming. You must create unique quality content on Squidoo in order to generate the interest in your lenses. In a community monitored site like Squidoo, quality content does rise to the top. Done properly, Squidoo will easily let you tap into the whole Web 2.0 everyone is talking about.

In addition, Squidoo is an excellent hands-on training field for anyone wishing to learn more about Internet Marketing. It is the perfect place to study affiliate marketing and you can discover how SEO really works without even spending a dime.

More importantly, Squidoo is just plain easy and a whole lot of fun. Besides, if you give it a try, chances are almost 100% certain that you will make more than 1 cents!

Don't forgot to look my Squidoo page - http://www.squidoo.com/addsiteonline/

Addsiteonline.com - Search Engine Submission Company

2007-04-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

Today we start our project - Addsiteonline.com
This is a website, who offer search engine submission services, from free submission to the major search engines to the paid submission in more 512 search engines around the world.
We have many clients, and they are very happy from our services, we also :).
And if somebody need professional search engine submission services, let's call us - Professional Search Engine Submission Services. Submission in more than 512 search engines. Free submission

Cheers!!

Using Blog Search Engines to Build Links

2007-03-30T00:37:00.000-07:00

One of the questions that often pops up when I teach small businesses about link building is where to go to find sites to request links from. While most businesses understand the idea of going to directories and search engines and finding sites that way, many don't yet understand the power of using blog search engines to seek out blogs to target with your link building campaign.

Blog search engines are a great way to find sites that you might want to try to gain links from. One of the blog search engines that I use most often for link building campaigns is Technorati. The advantage of using a blog search engine like Technorati is that it allows you to search for blogs that are talking about topics related to your web site. You can also use Technorati's search tools to learn more about individual blogs in terms of how popular they are, how many incoming links they get and how often they are updated.

To search for relevant blogs on technorati you'll want to:

Visit http://www.technorati.com:

You can then scan these results looking for sites that might be relevant and have reasonable incoming link counts.

When you find a blog that looks promising, you can use Technorati tools to dig a little deeper so that you can decide whether or not this is a blog that you want to add to your link building list.

The great thing about Technorati is that once you've found some blogs related to your site's content, you can really dig down to get some solid data about the quality of the blog.

By running a search for a specific URL and selecting "in blog directory from the drop down box you can get a specialized set of search data that gives you information about that specific blog.

You can find out things like:

The Recent inbound links: this will let you find out what other sites are linking to this blog and how long ago those links were placed. Obviously a blog that has frequent incoming links is going to get more traffic and have more credibility.

You can find the blog's Recent outbound links: this will let you know what other sites the author has linked to (and when those links were placed.) This can give you a good idea of how willing the blogger is to link out as well as letting you know what kind of content they are willing to link to.

You can get an estimate of a blog's Traffic history: This chart will give you an idea of the level of traffic that this blog has received over the last six months.

You can find out how many posts the blogger makes on an average day, which can be a good way to determine how active the blogger is and how quickly you might be able to get coverage of your story.

You can also get General site information: This area makes note of the URL of the blog, the overall rank of the blog in the Technorati index, when the last time the blog was updated, and how many other blogs link in to it and so on.

Use this information to decide which blogs you feel are worth contacting the same way that you would use information about a publication to put together a media list to target. Also remember that as you visit each blog, you may find links to other blogs in their posts, in a blog roll, and so on, and you might want to go back and research those blogs on Technorati as well.

Once you've built a list of blogs you'd like to target, spend a little time reading them to find out if they do product reviews, if they link out to resources and so on.

SEO for Real Estate Company - Sunnyholidaybg.com

2007-03-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

Here you can see my SEO -Search Engine Optimization for Real Estate Company - Sunnuholidaybg.com - Real Estate property for sale in Suuny Beach. Bulgaria property. Real estate in Bulgaria.

I do search engine optimization for this website- Meta tags, Search engine submission in more than 521 search engines and directories, Link exchange program, changes in the html code. The results are great. The traffic is increase with more than 100%, which is perfect. And with that results I proof my work and my contract with them.

What's Wrong With Reciprocal Linking

2007-01-22T06:50:00.000-08:00

When the Internet was new to me, I was fascinated by following links and going to new sites. It was like an adventure. And when I had my own website the first thing that I wanted to do was to place my site's links on other sites. I began reciprocal linking (trading links with other sites) way back then, but 11 years later things have changed and now I dread getting a "reciprocal link request" in my email inbox. I have a few pet peeves with reciprocal linking, as it is practiced today, and here they are:

1. Most of the Requests are Automated

It used to be flattering to get a link request, knowing that someone had visited your site and wanted to exchange a link. These days most of the requests are done with software and it means that no one has really visited your site. Automation in itself is not bad, but it leads to all kinds of abuses, and it prevents you from picking out the good links from the bad. Even if you have an automated directory to handle link requests, which is what I installed, you will still be swamped with tons of link requests.

2. Most Link Requests are of Extremely Low Quality

The original idea of linking was to provide your own visitors with quality sites where they could visit next. The links were provided as a resource. Today, many sites have been set up only to make money from Adsense and other advertising programs. In addition, driven by the need to acquire PageRank many webmasters went into a link gathering frenzy and sent requests to any and all sites whether they were related to their site or not. If a link is to be a resource to visitors of both sites, then the two sites should somehow be related and the sites should be of comparable quality. Most reciprocal link requests fail this test.

3. Links are Buried on Pages Where Human Eyes Will Never See Them

In addition to being a resource to your own visitors, you want to exchange links in hopes of getting some targeted traffic back to your site. It used to be easier; a webmaster would have a site with say ten different pages and one of his pages would be a "links" page. On that page he would display 30 or so links. The link to this page would be prominent in the site's navigation menu. You could be assured of getting some meaningful traffic if your link was placed on this kind of page.

That has all changed. People now build huge directories of hundreds of categories, stuffed with pages and pages of links. It is extremely unlikely that many visitors will drill down through all the pages and find your site in such a directory.

4. Many of the Link Requests are for "Three Way Links"

I find three-way links "creepy." They work like this, if I link to site A, then they will give a link to my site originating from site B. This is done because Google is supposed to value one-way links more than reciprocal links. I can understand this. If someone links to you without asking you and doesn't request a reciprocal link it means that your site is really good and this is why Google values true one-way links. However, the three-way links proposed by many people are just an attempt to trick the search engines; they are not true one-way links. Sooner or later Google will get wise to such schemes and this kind of effort will yield little benefit to the linking websites.

In addition, I dislike this kind of linking arrangement because you first have to check out who you are linking to, and then you are faced with checking another site that is going to link to you. Usually the site where the link to you will be placed is some kind of strange directory, a link-farm.

This is the state of reciprocal linking today. I delete most requests coming into my inbox, and do mass deleting on my automated systems as well. Now I don't want to end on a negative note so here are a few suggestions on how to get quality incoming links without adding another reciprocal link request to the flood that is already out there:

1. Make Your Site so Cool that People Will Link to You Without Asking

People come to the Internet to solve a problem, find a solution and get information. If you can make your website a true resource and a great place where visitors can get the information that they need, then it will not go unnoticed. Even if you have a commercial e-commerce site, it is possible to add reviews, articles and information. This additional information will help your own customers and will be a resource for the entire web. Who knows? Maybe one day you will check your referrer logs and see that Wikipedia is linking to you. This is the goal, but it will take some work to achieve it.

2. Get Involved in Blogs and Forums that are Related to Your Field of Expertise

You can learn something from forums and blogs and you can contribute something as well. You can usually leave your url when you make a comment or a posting. If you offer solid advice, you will get a good online reputation and become known as an expert in your field. This newfound recognition as an expert, combined with links from these blogs and forums will be worth much more than low quality reciprocal links.

3. Get into Article Marketing

Article marketing means that you will write articles about your field of interest and distribute them for publication on other websites, blogs and ezines with a link back to your site. Each time your article is published on a website you get a one-way link to your site. As with most good things, this method has been pounced upon by Internet marketers and the net is flooded with a lot of low-quality articles. However, if you produce meaningful articles, you can still get a lot of benefit by distributing your articles.

4. Do Judicious Reciprocal Linking

There is nothing wrong with the idea of websites trading links. However, if you are going to do it, then only link to a site that you think is a good one or has some value for your web visitors. Make sure that your link will be placed on a page that has the potential of sending you some traffic. Make your request with an email that clearly shows that you are a living and breathing human being and not a robot.

So, instead of adding to the spam-like flood of reciprocal link requests, go about building your own content and start using more reliable methods of increasing the number of incoming links to your site.

Anatomy of a Web-Advertising Campaign

2006-12-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

In The Beginning There Was Marketing

Anyone in business who has any interest in using the Web to further his or her business is well aware of "search engine optimization." Not a day goes by that my email in-box isn't loaded with information on how to get the best search engine results, and not a week goes by that a client or potential client doesn't request that their website be not just search friendly but search engine fanatical.

For some time we have been preaching the importance of delivering the marketing message and that your message should not be corrupted or distorted by techniques aimed at attracting search engine robots while driving away real people who may actually be potential customers.

Now I realize that in many circles this attitude is considered outright heresy, but hopefully there are a few marketing types around that understand websites have to deliver more than miscellaneous random eyeballs; websites have to deliver a message that is memorable, understandable, useable, and if you're really good at your job, information that can be incorporated into your audiences' belief system.

With that in mind we were pleasantly surprised when Google the primary target of this SEO obsessive compulsive frenzy of technical slight-of-hand announced that they were instituting Google Video Ads and to add a little icing on the cake, they purchased YouTube adding to their already considerable investment in Google Video. Somebody at the big "G" thinks video is a viable Web-medium even if the purveyors of search engine fool's gold would have you believe otherwise.

The list of companies, including Forbes, Amazon, Wyeth, and Ford, delivering Web-audio and Web-video grows daily and we are not just talking about major corporations. Small companies are using multimedia to get the edge on their larger competitors who still have their heads buried in the search engine optimization sand.

Acknowledging All The Issues

In developing our campaign to promote the use of Web-audio and Web-video as an effective method of delivering marketing messages over the Web, we identified four key issues that would have to be addressed:

(a) We had to demonstrate that website design was about delivering the marketing message and not just search engine optimization.

(b) We had to demonstrate that even small and medium-sized companies could afford professional Web-audio and Web-video and that it wasn't cost prohibitive.

(c) We had to demonstrate that professional Web-audio and Web-video required more than just the ability to use a video camera and that professional multimedia story-telling required a unique set of creative skills and technical ability not often found in-house in most businesses.

(d) We had to demonstrate that the development and production of creative multimedia marketing and professional webmedia content had to do with talent and experience, not size. These were the challenges that informed all our subsequent decisions.

The Concept

In order to make people pay attention to what we had to say we needed a concept that was both familiar and edgy. Sure we were sticking a finger in the eye of all the search engine optimizers but you can't be afraid to make a strong statement if you want people to sit-up and take notice, especially if you are fighting a tidal wave of misconception.

The fact that we were telling people that delivering your marketing message on the Web using multimedia was more important than search engine optimization was enough to make what we were doing controversial, but we also needed a vehicle that allowed us to present the opposing point of view. What we needed was a recognizable style that demonstrated our ability to deliver a memorable, comprehensible, useable, belief-altering message in the medium we were promoting.

Since we primarily use Macintosh computers for all our work and only use PCs to check for compatibility, we thought we would pay homage to the brilliant Mac commercials running on television. The format worked for us because it allowed us to create two characters of our own that would present opposing points of view over a series of videos that would comprise the campaign. We knew that some people would react unfavorably to our using such a familiar format but we figured it would demonstrate how even small but talented production companies can deliver high quality multimedia Web-based marketing on tight budgets. A Market Primed and Ready

Our efforts in advocating the power of using the human voice and image to deliver marketing stories over the Web was finally getting through to companies who were fed-up with the cost and ineffectiveness of continually chasing the holy grail of search engine optimization. Company presidents and marketing managers were starting to listen, starting to realize there was another way. This campaign was aimed at pushing these business executives to act on what they already knew: good marketing is about delivering the message, not keyword density.

Preproduction, Production, and Post Production

We wanted to make sure we had a distinctive sound by composing our own signature theme music and creating our own cast of characters with a distinctive message promoting the concept of multimedia. In fact these planned web-commercials really don't sell anything, all they do is make people aware that search engine optimization is not the only thing they should be thinking about when they are developing a website or webmedia campaign. In short, the medium was the message.

The use of Web-audio and Web-video is the best way to implement this kind of marketing presentation. We sat down and started to write and before we knew it we had eighteen scripts each featuring a different issue in the search engine optimization versus multimedia controversy.

The next step was finding the right actors to play the part. Whereas Web-audio allows us to draw upon a vast number of voice talents across North American, video is much more limiting, especially if we wanted to keep the cost down to a reasonable amount. Even if we were prepared to blow the budget on actors, we knew our clients wouldn't, so it was important to demonstrate that we could get the job cast at a sensible cost. The casting proved to be an interesting exercise of frustration and humor. We had all types of applicants ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous to the outright bizarre, but ultimately we were able to find two fine young actors who understood exactly what we were doing and who took to the parts as if they were written specifically for them.

One of our greatest assets as a firm is that we do everything from concept to implementation, including writing, videoing, editing, graphic, motion, and website design; but if you want to produce a campaign at a sensible price you still have to be careful you don't write overly elaborate scripts that require multiple sets, locations or hard to acquire props. That said we still had to find a cute dog we could trust on set, links of various kinds of sausages, a hard to put together toy, and best of all a real straightjacket from an interesting website that specialized in rather strange items of clothing.

The shoot itself went extremely smoothly and we ended up shooting all eighteen videos in less than two days. We assumed some of the videos that looked good on paper just wouldn't translate to the screen, but to our surprise every one of the scripts worked. We knew what we wanted to say and weren't afraid to say it, even though we were flying in the face of conventional wisdom.

Bgwebmast-The Bulgaria SEO Competition

2006-12-11T05:02:00.000-08:00

Top 10 Ways to Earn with Google Adsense without Creating Your Own Site

2006-12-05T05:21:00.000-08:00

List of websites where you can display your Google AdSense ads
If you don’t have a blog or website to use adsense ads and earn revenue , no need to build one. There are many services that share 100% adsense earnings with users.This is a list of sites where AdSense publisher can use their own AdSense IDs to earn money.

1. Simpy

Simpy is a social bookmarking site.

Simpy has support for Google AdSense as a third party. Each Simpy member has his/her main page on Simpy (e.g. jaleel77 ). Every Simpy member can now enter his/her Google AdSense Id into Simpy, and his/her page will immediately start showing ads with his/her Id. All earnings from such ads go to members, as their Ids are used to display ads .

2. Digital Point Forums

Digital Point Forums is a forum site for webmasters.

This forum displays one advertisement in the upper right area as well is inline when viewing a thread. We use Google AdSense to automatically serve relevant ads for the content on the page. Google pays AdSense publishers on a per click basis as well as per impression.

If a user has an AdSense account, they have the ability to credit their account with the ads served on threads they start or participate in.

3. ArticleMuse

Articlemuse.com is a news article directory.

Sharing Ads Position: The Google Ads beside the main content of the article.
Sharing Ratio: Your ads will be displayed in any articles you have submitted 100% of the time till the end of 2006!

4. XpressIdeas

Xpress Ideas is an article directory.

If you have a Google Adsense ID, you can enter that ID when you register on the site. The Google Ads in the middle of the article will have YOUR Google Adsense ID in, meaning that if anybody who clicks on those ads, even on OUR site, YOU get the revenue!

5. Cybersist

Cybersist is place to share your photos and blog, free webmail, file storage and more.

Your Google ads will be displayed in 7 different locations on your public blog and photo pages. Those ads are specifically optimized to allow better penetration of the ads. Any click on those ads will generate a revenue for you through AdSense.

6. TagTooga

TagTooga is a free directory that anyone can edit.

It is easy to use TagTooga.com to earn advertising revenue. There are two ways to do it:

(1) Link to TagTooga.com. Traffic sent from your link will display Google Ads using your Adsense ID.

(2) Create your own category/tag pages.

7. ForuMatrix

ForuMatrix is a news posting site.

The posts you will make, will display 100% your Adsense Banner. No time limits or banner rotations. It’s simple, your Posts with your banners always

8. Flixya

Flixya is a video sharing site.

Start sharing your videos from Youtube, Google Video, Daily Motion, and other video sharing sites. Our revenue share program is split 50-50. You will make 50% of the Google Adsense revenue generated by the videos you submit. The more traffic your video drives, the more ads will be displayed, and the more money you will make.

9. Swicki

Swicki is a site that allows you to create custom searches

After you have saved your ad program preferences, ads will immediately begin appearing on your swicki’s results pages.
For each active ad program on your swicki, you’ll be credited with 50% of the ad impressions and clicks. The balance will be credited to Eurekster.

10. Senserly

Senserly.com is a content hosting website

Senserely.com is to provide a place for honest Google AdSense publishers to legitimately increase their daily earnings. As soon as you register, this basically becomes your website, with your AdSense blocks displayed next to your content, and you'll be able to write articles, reviews, and stories about your knowledge and experience with AdSense or any topic you feel confortable with, as well as read, ask questions, and exchange information with other AdSense publishers.

The Spam Sites of the Social Web

2006-12-05T04:39:00.000-08:00

Blogs and other social media tools have changed the publishing landscape over the past few years, making it easier than ever to share information with the world. The ease of use and focused attention of the medium has also helped create new opportunities for spammers to automatically generate content, buy links, and get noticed by search engines and other points of aggregation. In this post I will break down the operations of one spam network utilizing social media technologies such as WordPress, Digg, del.icio.us, and more to climb the search results and generate revenue through ads and affiliate programs.

Last weekend I noticed a Digg submission about weight loss tips had climbed the site's front page, earning a covetous position in the top 5 technology stories of the moment. The 13 sure-fire tips were authored by "Dental Geek" and posted to the "Discount Dental Plan" category on his WordPress blog. Scanning the sidebar links and adjacent content it was obvious this content was out of place on a page optimized for dental insurance. The webmaster of i-dentalresources.com had inserted some Digg bait, seeded a few social bookmarking services, and waited for links and page views to roll in, creating a new node in a spam farm fueled by high-paying affiliate programs and identity collection for resale.

The spammer's domain is managed by eBizzSol, a company with fake domain registration information including the address block of a Christian church in Fullerton, California. The dental site is registered to an address in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Based on the broken English I've found on the network's sites an offshore base of operations would not surprise me. eBizzSol mentions about 200 sites in its portfolio, including real estate, mortgage, casinos, and more. They even advertise a content generation service for SEOs offering six blog posts a month for $75 optimized for specific keywords, including guarantees for blog directory and ping submissions. There are other sources of content generation available for hire online, creating a flow of content republished across a target category optimized for specific terms.

Follow the money
Why would someone want to create a site optimized for dental services? A search engine such as Google or Yahoo! discovers the site, indexes its pages, and starts including its content in search results for targeted keywords. Web searchers associate search engine rank with authority on a subject such as lowering an insurance premium or mortgage and generate a large amount of money per action. This particular site is collecting $40 or more per dental plan sold through a dental plan reseller and targeting specific keywords of value and boasts search engine index inclusion of "just a few hours" on its pages.

The dental terms targeted cost up to $18 a click, offering incentives for top organic search conversion. Below is a price estimate from Google for keyword targeting in the United States.
Google AdWords
pricing Search term CPC ($)
teeth whitening 18.66
sedation dentistry 12.80
cosmetic dentistry 12.76
dental plans 9.78
dental implant 6.85
pediatric dentist 6.77
discount dental plans 5.93
oral surgery 4.95
braces 3.39
cavity 1.88

Yahoo! directory pricing

This webmaster bought links from the Yahoo! directory, the Microsoft Small Business Directory, Business.com, and a few others, placing a link to their site within targeted categories. They are cheaper than the $1000 links purchased on sites such as the W3C, but these listings are often just as spammy.

Virality

The article link was submitted to Digg by a user who joined Digg last month yet is already ranked in the top 150. The story received over 900 Diggs and is currently buried. A newly minted user posted to Reddit, posted to Newsvine, and posted to del.icio.us using the same name on each service. Seeding and voting up the content worked, as the blog post made its way to the top story listings on each social news service.

As of this evening the spam site has 353 inlinks from 212 external pages, mostly due to its viral marketing efforts on social networks. Some social bookmarking users include their bookmarked links in their blog sidebar, creating additional direct links throughout their entire site in addition to the original bookmarking service location. The spam network had successfully spread a piece of content throughout multiple user communities, and onto individual blogs in the process.

Summary
Certain topics are especially well suited for baiting the technology-oriented crowds of social news and bookmarking sites. Stories focused on Apple, Firefox, Google, Nintendo, history of computers, top X lists, or the target social site itself are common baiting practices used to attract attention and place a new content node on the map. Opportunists will continue to jump into new networks of influence and promote their own sites, gathering search engine juice even when the brief blip of attention has passed and the crowd moves on to another story of the moment.
World of Warcraft female human with shovel

I believe social media accounts are currently available for rent or for sale, rewarding active users with paid placements or account resells in much the same way as a World of Warcraft character might be resold on eBay. Social media sites and search engines need to stay on top of this new form of content creation, continually analyzing data and scrubbing out the dirt. Sites overrun with web spam quickly lose their utility and might be banned from search engines.

Social media sites continue to change the way we interact with data but expect more activity and content shaping in the future from marketers targeting the social media space for a quick link injection.

Search Engine Positioning for the Weary

2006-12-04T23:39:00.000-08:00

Do you want to get your site from page five to page one in Google? Here are a few tips to boost you on your way.

1. Clean Up Your HTML.

Keep a beady eye on Dreamweaver and avoid CMS software.

What, Dreamweaver, beloved program of pro webmasters everywhere?

Yes!

Dreamweaver adds lots of extra blank space to HTML code, and breaks lines. This is especially irritating in meta tags. Use EditPad's 'Find and Replace' function to get rid of newlines and double blank spaces in your pages.

Content Management Systems are a great time saver. An amateur can set up a professional-looking site in a few hours. The problem is they contain lots of code that's irrelevant to search engines. The top of a CMS page may contain only a few words relevant to its subject matter.

Then there's the duplicate content problem.

* Blogs have duplicate copies of their own content; sometimes exact, sometimes excerpts.
* Thousands of people are using the same CMS as you.
* A search engine spider sees the same header, sidebar and footer content in every page in your site.

Result? Your page is down the SERPs for any competitive keyword. Assuming it's indexed at all.

These programs are written by geeks. Their primary aim is to eliminate code errors and add features. Your marketing comes a very poor second. They're also posting security updates every few months. More hassle. For you.

Drastic solution:

1. Type your documents in a text editor like Editpad, then
2. Use a Text to HTML converter, then
3. (Use Dreamweaver to add formatting, then)
4. Use a index generator to make a HTML list of those pages, then
5. FTP them to your web site.

Benefits:

* Search engine spiders get to the 'meat' of your page immediately;
* You have more control over how the page looks;
* You have more control over what an SE 'bot 'sees';
* You're not relying on a MySQL database to maintain your site;
* Hackers won't be able to deface your site easily.

A clever webmaster would look into Conditional Server Side Includes. You can use them to 'program' your web pages, while still presenting clean HTML to search engine 'bots.

And as for Microsoft FrontPage, I wish all my competitors were using it.
2. Get Lots of Links to Your Site.

* Submit articles to article websites;
* Pay freelancers to make software for you, and give it away free;
* Submit to the top directories, like Yahoo and DMOZ, but don't spend much time or monëy. Only half a dozen are worth a damn for SEO;
* Post in popular forums and blogs, if they will let you use straight hyperlinks in your signature;
* Be controversial - assault a few sacred cows;
* Do a press release, and think beforehand about how you can make it interesting to journalists;
* Make a better, faster, cheaper version of a popular product.

That should get you a few decent links. With millíons of cheapo, 'me too', linkless sites out there, yours will stand out like a snowdrop on a dungheap.

3. Offer Something People Really Want.

You like fuschia leg warmers. You think other people do too. You make a website selling them.

Cue sad disillusion.

People want monëy, sëx, friendship, human contact, cars, drugs, health and happiness. They know what they want (not need, want). You've got to figure out a better way to satisfy that want, for a fat net profit.

Simple, ain't it?

Actually, yes it is.

Save time. Pick a very profitable, popular industry. Think up a way to give people a better product. Or faster. Or cheaper. Or all three! Research costs little. Thinking costs nothing.

Or just go off half-cocked. Employ a cheap, angry webmaster. Half-finish the site for a product you're not 100% sure there's a demand for. Then sit back and wait for traffic.

Then give up, go down to the pub and gripe to your pals: "The internet's sh*t, innit?".

Funny thing about offering a popular good with a new twist; you get links without cadging them.

4. Be First With a New, Popular Good (or a smarter second).

MySpace wasn't the first social networking site, but they did it better. They designed it to be viral. Members could compete to get 'friends', and everyone wants new friends, right? Users could put anything they wanted online, even if it looked cr*ppy. Censorship was minimal. Result: Huge popularity, without needing the search engines.

Not easily done, but again, research costs little. Thinking costs nothing.

Stop the daily slog. Go for a walk. Have a long bath. Play a game of street-hockey. And see what pops into your head.

If you feel good about it the next day, it may be a good idea. Test it before committing to it. If it still makes you excited a month later, you may be onto a winner.

If complete strangers start feeling the same, you definitely are!

7 Characteristics of a Great Webpage

2006-11-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

What makes for a great webpage?

Wouldn't you like to know the main ingredients for creating a superior webpage? What basic elements you must have if you want a solidly designed webpage? A webpage that will stand out and be noticed by your visitors. One that will keep those visitors returning to your site, again and again. An effective webpage that is 95% better than most of the other pages on the Net.

Follow these simple design features when creating your next webpage and you will have the answer:

1. Good Keywords

The nucleus. The conception. Good keywords are the very first building blocks you must consider before your webpage even becomes a dim notion in your head. Picking the right keyword or keyword phrase is the ultimate factor that will determine the success or failure of your webpage. You must do major research on the keyword or keyword phrases that will be the focal point and drawing card for your webpage.

You must get this right. It is vital. It is the single most important element of a webpage. You can use keyword research software and sites such as GoodKeywords, Wordtracker.com, Nichebot.com, or superior keyword research software such as Brad Callen's Keyword Elite.

Regardless of what process you favor, you must choose your keywords very carefully. You must check the competition for your chosen keywords or phrase. You must check the number of searches made each month for your keyword. You must also check the keyword density of your page to see if it will register in the search engines. You may have to adjust or fine-tune your keyword density at a later date.

Make sure you place your keyword in the title of your page. Place it in the first Headline on the page and many marketers also place their keyword or phrase in the url. For example: www.yourdomain.com/keyword.html This will help the search engines and surfers to find your page quicker.

2. Simple Design

Keep it simple. You must keep your webpage simple and direct. Keep it professional. Make sure it is readable and clear to all your visitors. Do a spell check. Do a grammar check. You may also want to check how your webpage looks in all types of browsers (www.anybrowser.com). Better safe than sorry.

Keep your visitors in mind at all times when designing your webpage. Keep it on topic, keep it related to your keywords. Most marketing studies show that's it's best not to confuse your visitors with too many options. If you're selling a product or products, limit the number on each page to one product if you can.

If you have a comparison page, limit the number to three or four. Studies also show that if you present too many options or products, the conversion rate goes down, not up. Keep all your products related. If you have a page on laptops, don't start discussing the benefits of owning a SUV.

Keep your sentences short and the number of words on a page down to 200 to 300. Many sites break up longer articles into multi-pages, this will be of some inconvenience for your visitors but you will have more room for advertising - your call.

3. Optimized

Let's face it, the average webpage will get most of its traffic from the search engines, mainly Google, although MSN and Yahoo are also worth considering. Optimize your page for Google. Use a simple hierarchy, keep your pages no more than three clicks away from the main page. Linking all your pages to your index page is a good practice, always do this. The search engines will find your page faster if it is linked directly from the main index page of your site.

Using blogging software/structure that comes with such free blogging software as Wordpress will optimize your pages for you. Blogging systems have a linking hierarchy (categories, archives, etc.) that are very search engine friendly. It's almost impossible not to optimize your pages if you're using a blogging system. Plus, you have an RSS feed that will syndicate your content and place it into the search engines very quickly.

Check factors such as Mega Tags, title description and content. Use a robots text file for the search engine robots.

If you're new to building webpages, you may want to check out Google's Webpage Creator, you can create your pages and have it hosted free by Google and they will be indexed immediately in Google. Big Plus!

4. Easy Navigation

A great webpage will have easy and simple navigation. Link your page to and from your main index page if you can. Make sure you link to it from your sitemap page. Many webmasters put all the main links on their site at the top or the bottom of all their webpages, so that a visitor can freely move around and find what they're looking for. Keep your visitors' comfort level in mind at all times.

Double check to see all links on your webpage work! You may be surprised how many don't work, especially if you link out to other sites. The search engines don't like broken links, neither will your visitors.

Also double check to see if all images on your page display properly. Nothing will bring down the quality of your page faster than images that don't load.

5. Fresh Content

A great webpage will always have fresh content. Make sure you update your webpage often. Our world's technology changes rapidly, make sure your material is current and still revelant.

Remember, 9 times out of 10, the only reason a visitor is on your page is for information. Make sure you deliver. Make sure that information is recent and accurate. Besides, there is nothing like fresh content to keep your visitors interested and coming back for more.

6. Bookmarkable

A great webpage will always be bookmarkable. Your visitor will want to bookmark your page and return to it for more information. Make sure you make it easy for your visitor to bookmark your page. Use a bookmark script. Make sure you have a favicon, this is a small logo you place on your site and it will be automatically picked up and displayed in your visitor's bookmarks, drawing attention to your page. Consider a bookmark and favicon like bread crumbs, all leading the visitor back to your page.

7. Cool

Every great webpage should have a WOW factor! Try to make your page stand out from the crowd. Try to make it unique, try to make it cool. Just remember, a simple professional webpage with valuable information is always cool. And remember there is nothing like a little good 'word of mouth' to get some traffic drawing PR for your page. Great buzz about your webpage is worth its worth in gold.

So the next time you're designing a webpage, go all out and try to create your webpage with all of the characteristics listed above. Start with your keywords, keep it simple, proof-read and test for coding errors, create good navigation and optimize for the search engines, make sure you provide valuable fresh content and information. Last but not least, try your hardest to make your webpage memorable and bookmarkable. Make it a professional webpage that will be superior to the majority of other pages on the web.

Aim high and you will reap the rewards.

Five Tools for Spying on Your Competition

2006-11-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

Did you know that an ancient Chinese military document unlocks many of the secrets to your online success? This book is called "The Art of War" and was written during the 6th century by Sun Tzu. This famous document is one of the oldest and most famous studies of strategy and has had a huge influence on military planning as well as business tactics.

Sun Tzu wrote about the importance of knowing your competitors before competing. This wisdom is crucial to your online success. Here are some quotes that verify this truth in the art of war as well as business.

"If you know yourself, but not your enemy, for every battle won, you will suffer a loss."

"If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win every battle."

Before you create your own marketing strategies, you must first know your competitors. By understanding your competitor's strategies, you can always stay a step ahead of them.

The key is knowing how to obtain all of this vital information without having to hire a PR firm, an FBI agent, or an undercover spy. Luckily for us, all we need are a few online tools to find out exactly how are competitors are running the show.

1. SpyFu.com

The first tool you should add to your arsenal can be found at SpyFu.com.

SpyFu.com is the long-awaited sequel to Googspy.com, a free competitive research tool that allows you to research your competitors marketing campaigns. SpyFu.com, however, stands head and shoulders above its predecessor, providing over twenty times more data.

This website monitors nearly 4.5 million domains, showing you exactly how much your competitors are paying for search advertising on a daily basis, the total number of clicks they are receiving, and their average ad position. SpyFu also reveals the exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for in organic search and who their top 100 competitors are.

2. Internet Archive

The next spy tool will enable you to explore a website's history and how it has changed over time. You can find all of this information at http://www.archive.org.

Many of you have probably heard of the Internet Archive. However, you may not realize that it is an extremely powerful tool for spying on your competition. Using this free and simple tool you can discover:

* How often a website has changed their copy?

* Whether or not a website is split testing? (This alone could show you years of data on what type of copy works best. Testing your own website copy is extremely important, but you should also be checking to see what your competitors are doing as well. You can learn volumes just by looking at what their sales page looks like over time.)

* Find out if your competitors have made any big changes in their offer, including price, bonuses, guarantees, etc.

If you're just looking to have a little fun, then look up Google in the Internet Archive and see what their site looked like in 1998. You see, competitive intelligence can informative as well as amusing!

Next up is one of my favorite search tools.

3. Search Status

Search Status is one of the best SEO tools around. It is a plug-in for the Firefox browser so it comes completely free of charge.

You can use this tool to:

* Highlight no-follow links

* View any page in Archive.org

* Show all Whois information. This is especially useful if you want to find out who the owner of a website is. (great for setting up a joint venture)

* Show robots.txt file. This feature will show you exactly which pages and directories a website does not want listed because they want to keep them private. (can be quite informative.)

* Show Indexed Pages. Find out exactly how many pages a website has listed in all 3 major search engines.

* Show Backward Links. This feature will show you exactly which sites are linking to the current page or website that you are visiting. This is especially useful for finding link partners and affiliates.

The next tool will allow you to find out which web host a company is using. This information can be found at:

4. WhoIs.sc

Once you arrive at this site, you simply enter the domain name into the search box. You will then be taken to a page that will give you a wide variety of information on that domain. Scroll down to where it says "name servers". In this column you will often find the exact URL for the web hosting company they use.

Our final spy tool comes straight from Google, allowing you to keep full-time tabs on the Internet without the hours of research it would normally require.

For many years, companies paid lots of money to PR firms to provide news items and updates on their competitors, often referred to as a "clipping service". With the onset of the Internet, these tools are now automated and free.

One such tool is:

5. Google Alerts

Using Google Alerts, you can easily monitor what is being said online about you, your company, your products, and your competition.

Google alerts shows results from the Web, Google News, and Google Blog search. All of this competitive intelligence can then be sent directly to your email inbox.

Simply enter the terms you want to track and Google will scour the Internet on a daily basis to keep you updated on your particular industry.

These alerts can notify you of when new links start pointing to your website, when someone uses one of your articles, or when the blogosphere mentions your name.

If you want to keep up with your competitor, simply enter the company name or their product and you can begin tracking what people are saying online about them.

Google Alerts is an indispensable tool for market research. Start creating your own Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts.

Keep in mind, however, that these are only tools. Some of the most powerful competitive intelligence comes from actually surfing around your marketplace, visiting the forums, and buying your competitors' products. This is the only way to get a complete picture of what is happening in your industry.

If you want to win in your marketplace, it's time you go undercover.

Web Standards, Browsers and Designing For The Future

2006-10-07T04:00:00.000-07:00

At present, a vast majority of webmasters are designing for IE (Internet Explorer) 6, which is not as W3C standards compliant as is FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Opera.

The importance of a designer being cognizant of the fact that web browser standards are not yet fully harmonized - a web page that looks great in Internet Explorer (6) might look hideous in a Mozilla based browser like FireFox or Netscape.
I also noted that with the explosion of devices with which to serve Internet applications, compliance with W3C standards has become critical.

When the final release for IE 7 for Windows XP, Server 2003 & Vista is launched, hopefully before the end of 2006, the tables will be turned, so to speak.

Internet Explorer 7 will be more standards compliant and your HTML code will be subject to much more rigorous interpretation than is the case with IE 6, consequently some web pages that look fine in IE 6 might not look the same IE 7.

In IE 7 Microsoft has made a solemn effort to fix the browsers acquiescence to W3C standards and CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) compatibility. CSS interpretation as recommended by W3C has been improved tremendously giving designers and developers more leverage in functionality for cross-browser design.

Microsoft asserts that they are taking W3C compatibility issues seriously.

Concisely what this means is that IE 7 will tend to interpret your web page code more scrupulously than before.

Therefore, if you have been designing your pages and have not bothered to check how they render in W3C Standards Compliant browsers like FireFox, you may be in for a rude shock when IE 7 finally rolls out.
If you have not been incorporating W3C Web standards in your design strategy you may need to re-design for IE 7.

How should you go about it?

Design for "strict" browsers like FireFox first. Not only is FireFox a more standards-compliant browser but it is also the primary competitor to Internet Explorer. A contender backed by Google's marketing machine -- and therefore, is not likely do "a Netscape" on designers.

Prior and up to IE 4.x, Netscape was the leading browser in the market with almost 80% of the market, but in a bid to force the issue culminating with proprietary goofs by AOL to whom Netscape sold out, they screwed up big time with versions 4 up to 6. A bitter war of attrition with Microsoft in the late nineties did not help either.

Microsoft grabbed the opportunity and gobbled the Browser market overnight.

With version 7+ Netscape has been revived. How well it will compete with IE and FireFox remains to be seen.

I will be the first to admit that most the web pages I have built in the last several years are not always standards compliant... and so are ninety five percent of other web pages -- as I stated in my previous article, "if strict W3C standards were to be enforced in browsers, most websites would go out of business."

To design for FireFox a designer needs to combine Valid CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for "look and feel" and W3C compliant HTML for web page structure.
The combination of these two design strategies is powerful in that it elicits tremendous flexibility, ease of maintenance and opens up extensive possibilities in website design. The benefits are rewarding, and every webmaster should attempt to utilize this two pronged scheme in their design routine.

Making changes to and/or styling a site designed with CSS is much easier and more elegant than messing around with a traditional table-based design.

CSS may look intimidating to a first-timer but once you familiarize yourself with the basics you can progressively harness the power of CSS to your full benefit. In addition, most web page design tools such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage have built-in modules with which you can automatically generate CSS code, which you can then view in a plain text editor for study purposes.

To aid you in your CSS endeavor you need the following developer tools: Web Developer Extension for FireFox and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Great time-saving tools for creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages.
As a matter of fact, by installing some of the 1,500+ available FireFox extensions you can eliminate the need for quite a chunk of standalone desktop applications.

After designing your Web page remember to use a MarkUp Validation Service to check whether your Web page conforms to W3C recommendations. If there are errors, the validator will notify you of them and suggest corrections.

Also, remember that when designing using W3C standards guidelines a lot of code(tags) that were very valid in the "Pre-Standards" era have completely depreciated and will be ignored completely by browsers. If you ignore these errors during validation, your web pages might not render correctly.

In many instances, you may never be able to achieve 100% HTML or XHTML validation. In such cases you may want put the following DOCTYPE declaration in your document -- at the top of your web page before the tag:

DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN

A "Document Type Definition" or DTD supplies Web browsers with information about which (X)HTML specification your web page is built upon, which instructs the Browser how to render the page for viewing.

In the example captioned above a standards compliant browser will interpret your web page as an HTML 4.01 document, and because it is marked as "Transitional," it will display it in "quirks mode," meaning that the browser will forgo the strict standards mode, and display your page like it would be displayed in older "non-strict" browsers, while still supporting any tags developed after IE 4, Netscape 4 and others.

On the contrary, the following DOCTYPE declaration tells the standards compliant browsers that your web page should be displayed in strict compliance with the DOCTYPE declaration.

DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN

A complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website.

If you leave the DOCTYPE out, the browsers automatically switch to "quirks mode," therefore, it is important to include the DOCTYPE declaration on every web page that you build in order for it to be rendered correctly.

If your Web pages render well in FireFox at present you probably will not encounter any major problems in IE 7 other than minor adjustments here and there. However, I think a realistic designer should at least make a meaningful attempt to follow W3C guidelines for it is the correct way forward.

Do it now so that you will be ready for the future...re-designs and total overhauls are a time consuming and painful process. A process, which becomes much easier if your initial design incorporated structurally clean and modular (X)HTML with CSS compliance.

Blog Services Pinging Tools

2006-10-06T07:08:00.000-07:00

So here are the Blog Services Pingback Tools

* Pingomatic - the most popular. Pings several popular services and specialized services. Create a bookmark for each ping url.
* Pingoat - Pings a huge collection of 52 blogging services, including special services and non english tracking services. You can easily select all services by selecting the category.
* King Ping - Pings multiple services - 18 in all. Easy to check and uncheck boxes. And you can also create a bookmark with your settings.
* Blogflux Pinger - Pings 32 services, including several specialized services and language specific services too.
* Feedshark - Ping, submit, & promote your blog, feed, or podcast for free to multiple services.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/blogomatic.aspx - Just enter the rss url and it submits to all the 12 listed services. You do not need to select each service.
* BlogBlip - Just enter the blog url and it will submit to 15 popular blog tracking services.
* Ping.ws - pings 16 popular services. 3 are ticked, rest you have to select.
* PingQueue - Pings 16 preselected popular services in one click.
* Pong - is a free desktop ping application that notifies blog tracking web services about updated blogs and feeds. It currently supports XML-RPC protocol pings for up to fourteen services at a time.
* Ping The Empire - Pings 18 common blog tracking services.