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Social Media Branding tips for an e commerce website

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Your website is about your business,
Facebook promotes your brand,
LinkedIn is about you,
Twitter targets your niche /speciality,
Your blog is your message
YouTube is your voice.

If you aren’t discovering which in social networking channels your customers spend time and include them in your ecommerce marketing mix, you’re probably missing out on building relationships, community and increasing new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.

1. Go Where Your Customers Are

Very few things in life promise endless options – digital and social media marketing being one exception. From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to YouTube, there’s no limit to the number of social networking channels available for your business to leverage. Key to successful social media marketing for ecommerce is choosing the right channels to reach customers.

Find out where your customers are congregating by:

Asking them: Sounds overly simplistic, but sending a formal survey to customers or more informally polling them on your website can provide a wealth of knowledge.

Monitoring social sites: Use a free tool like Social Mention or Tracker. For something far more robust use tools like Radian6 to discover how and where customers are talking about your brand, your competitors or target keywords.

Leveraging the stats: Some sites like Facebook are transparent when it comes to user statistics. Or leverage research conducted by third-party firms like eMarketer.

Review back links, news announcements and keyword rankings of competitors on a regular basis to get a glimpse into their online marketing health.

2. Monitor What Your Competitors Are Doing

Whether your ecommerce business is new to social media marketing, or just need to take your efforts up a notch, competitive intelligence can be very useful. Spend some time by conducting a competitive audit of your top five competitors on the social web. Include:

The social sites in which they are active
The type of content they publish on the social web
The number of followers/fans/views they have on each site
How they promote specific products, programs or events via social media.

3. Promote Exclusive Offers through Social Media

In order for your ecommerce business to gain a following on whatever social channel you choose, entice customers with something they can’t get anywhere else.

For example, promote a contest via social media.

Alternately, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can also offer “breaking news” that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.

4. Don’t Just Push Products and Promotions

The primary goal of your ecommerce site may be to sell products, but your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.

Incorporate some of these ideas into your ecommerce social media marketing strategy:

Share messages or news stories from external sources
Create a blog on your website and feed blog content to your social accounts
Ask questions, participate in discussions or poll your customers via social media
Post pictures from company events or videos from your CEO’s speaking engagements.

5. Sell Products through Social Networks

Many ecommerce sites leverage social channels to make it even simpler for customers to purchase their products. Ecommerce sites large and small can still indirectly sell products through their social profiles. For example, highlight new products or best-sellers and provide a link to the order page on your website. It may not be quite as simple as purchasing directly from the social profile, but it can be just as effective.

6. Find unique places for sharing buttons

Instead of using a generic sharing widget in the same place across all your sites, try putting sharing features in prominent placements in different places in your site’s design.

For example, after a customer creates a review of a product, give them an easy way to share the review with Facebook friends or Twitter followers. They’ve already shown they’re in sharing mood by filling out a review, why not capitalize on the good vibes? You could create a simple link that sends the url of the page to their Twitter account to send, or use a Facebook share button.

Here are some other unique places on your site that you might put sharing links or widgets:

The thank you page, after making the order.
sale confirmation email
mailing list email templates

7. Add product videos

Videos are great sales tools. People like seeing a product in action, so video is an excellent way to improve sales

But aside from the improved sales, adding product videos on YouTube or other video sharing sites adds another social factor. People like sharing videos, and they’re more likely to embed the videos other sites. Videos are a great way to add a viral factor to your product pages.

8. Engage customers

It’s one thing to just create a Facebook page or Twitter account, but it’s another thing to actually engage with followers. Social media takes work, you have to daily interact with followers to be successful. Easy to say, much harder to do.

Figure out who’s talking about your brand (or your competitors) and open a dialog.

Social media is a great tool to help promote products away from your ecommerce site. You can get people to your site with social media, and once they’re on your site you make the sale.

9. Add exclusivity

Make a strong call to action for your visitors as to why they should follow your brand on Twitter, Facebook, or any other network. Include special offers, coupons, tips, and other things that customers wouldn’t get unless they were following you on social media sites.

10. Don’t stay in “sell mode”

Companies often only post things related to selling on their social media profiles. But that doesn’t provide much benefit to your followers, does it? People want more from social media than just a constant stream of sales pitches.

Use your social media profiles to tell customer stories, stats, news, and other things related to your business.

what if you shared one of your competitor’s deals? You’d show that your brand is interested in helping your followers, not just making money from them. It would be insanely useful to your fans, and it would add trust and loyalty to your brand.

11. Integrate your customer service strategy with your social media strategy

People are already talking about your brand on social networks, and odds are a few of them are venting frustration about something. Instead of waiting for them to call or email you, diffuse the situation by reaching out to them.

There are plenty of success stories of major brands reaching out to unhappy customers and diffusing situations quickly with social media.

12. Track what people click on social media sites

Url shorteners like bit.ly give excellent click analytics. When you share links on social networks, you can track and see how many people are actually clicking the link.

Knowing what gets people to actually click a link means that you can tailor your messages to get the most impact from your social media efforts. For example, you might find that your followers click a lot more on links to coupons versus links to product updates.

You could even drill down how effective types of links are across different social media sites. You might find that your Facebook followers like to click on coupons, and your Twitter followers like breaking news.

The more you know about your followers and what they like, the more useful you can be to them.

13. Give back

Giving back creates trust, which is crucial for your brand. Think of ways that you can be useful to your followers. Share news and tips that they’ll find helpful. Ask their opinions. Give them coupons. Interact with them.

The important thing is that you’re openly trying to be helpful to them. The more useful you are to your following, the more loyal they’ll be to your brand.

How to make more twitter followers?

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 05:17:00 +0000

1. Social media channel is a good way of increasing a company’s trustworthiness and goodwill which will definitely give the said company and increased and better branding. When companies are able to have conversations with their customers, the result is going to be a great amount of credibility.

2. The lead generation is also another basis for companies to go for social media marketing. Since the lead generation serves a very important part for a company’s success, then using social media marketing for your campaigns help you reach out your targeted lead generation.

3. Social media channels also make it easier and more flexible for companies to engage with its customers. You have to put this on your top priority list since customer engagement is a very crucial since this will help your company retain your existing customers and of course increase your brand credibility.

4. Social media channels are also responsible for generating a highly powerful traffic for your site. You don’t even have to worry since there’s a lot of social media channels that will be able to help you and would make it easier for you to obtain for your website the relevant and quality traffic that it will need.

5. Aside from that, when you promote your products through social media channels, this will definitely help you so that you can increase your return over investment or ROI. This process will be able to help you in increasing your conversion rate and benefit from a desirable ROI.

6. Your industry is considered to have a backbone if you have total access to customer’s feedback. This is because the feedback actually helps in improving your products based on what your customer’s require. Due to the fact that social media channels aid in making customer engagement possible, then customer feedback will always be available for the company to use as basis for improvement. With this, you can always expect customer reviews and feedback that can help you in making your products or services even better.

7. There is no better way or an even cheaper way than a social media channel when it comes to announcing new products or services for your company. Social media will make it easier for you to spread the news regarding a new product or service. You can even include information such as arrival or release dates.

8. Another importance of social media marketing is the fact that it will allow you to discover your customers’ preferences so that you will be able to act based on what they want. By knowing their preferences, it will be much easier for you to enhance all of your products and plan your marketing campaigns more effectively.

Changing trends in social media

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:24:00 +0000

Social media changes from month to month. Trends come and go quicker than the seasons change. Any other medium than Social Media, which has made such an impact on our lives in such a short period of time. Brands and advertisers are have to quickly adapt to the ever changing dynamics of this medium. The biggest demand for jobs in coming couple of years is going to be that of “Social Media Managers”.

Changing trends for social media in 2011

1. Location-Based Marketing:
2. Video Platforms:
3. Text Campaigns
4. The Move to Higher Bandwidth (4G)
5. Wordpress-Based Websites
6. Plug-ins:
7. Review Sites:
8. Monitoring Conversations
9. Presentation Platforms:
10. Social media will be integrated to overall marketing activities.
11. Social media ROI will become important
12. Social media will reach behind corporate firewalls.
13. Measuring online activities and their effect on offline sales will become increasingly important.
14. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
15. Social networks chatter will be incorporated into CRM systems.
16. More sales will originate from social media contacts (B2B and B2C)
17. Ads will be more interactive and connected to social networks.
18. Create SEO Profiles.
19. Shopping will be integrated into social networking sites.
20. Branded Content
21. Social business becomes serious play
22. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
23. Consuming most entertainment media is an inherently social experience.

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Thanks to Star Hall For giving great ideas

Importance of Social Media Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:30:00 +0000

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels. Marketing is essential to any business and is generally referred to as the most important aspect of any business strategy.
Any business becomes profitable only if the end product promised by the company or the entrepreneur is really as good as advertised and produces customer satisfaction. There is no sure-shot formula for success using marketing since it only gives more visibility to the business and the end sales depend only on the efficiency of the product. However, social media marketing is an important tool that, when properly used is a highly beneficial and promising enterprise.
Social media marketing includes a lot of things such as blogs, video sharing, community and many more. If you give a look at internet then you will get millions of Social media marketing but you have to choose the top ranked sites in which more visitors are coming. Linkedin, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are the most famous focal point for marketing. Sponsoring your company using these social media sites is a very smart business proposal since they provide a huge amount of constant traffic everyday. In recent days, social networking is really successful and the marketing through these sites are very essential to a trade because millions of people are accessing these sites regularly.

The most important benefit of Social Media Marketing is the fact that – especially considering the number of users of networks such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter – the possibilities for exposure and growth are limitless. Moreover, one cannot ignore the speed and ease with which news is able to spread among users of social networking sites and beyond.
When considering how to first approach a Social Media Marketing strategy, it is of the utmost importance to understand your audience and the kinds of products/services that they are interested in. For instance, if your customers are the type to readily participate in online social networks, it may be beneficial to add a blog to your company website. In addition, you may request that interested employees add information/blog articles to your company site to generate interest – never forgetting to add the company logo and other features which will identify your brand into these entries.

Another way to use the popularity of social networking to the advantage of your corporation is to perhaps join one or more of the most popular social networking sites and begin discussions, groups, etc. around your relevant products and services.

Major Importance OF Social Media Marketing

1) Branding
2) Lead Generation
3) Engage with its customers
4) Generate Relevant Traffic
5) Improve ROI
6) Getting Customer Feedbacks
7) Announcing New products or services
8) Know more About Customer Preferences
9) Influence on Search Engine Rankings
10) Enhance Customer Relationship Management

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Landing Page Optimization Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 04:56:00 +0000

In marketing terms, it's a specialized page that visitors are directed to once they've clicked on a link, usually from an outside source such as a Pay Per Click ad. The page is usually tightly focused on a particular product or service with the aim of getting the visitor to buy or take some form of action rapidly that will ultimately lead to a sale.

A different view on landing pages

Many site owners believe that the way the visit to sale process works is this:

Client arrives on their home page

Client selects an option from a menu or an offer on the page

Client arrives on the page with the offer/product

Client purchases.

The basics of developing landing pages

There a few questions to ask yourself when creating a landing page:

What are you offering?
Who do you wish to appeal to?
Why would they be interested in your offer?
What do they need to do to participate/purchase?

Before Creating a Landing Page you should KNOW…

Business Objectives

The business objective of the campaign and in particular the page. What problem are you trying to solve?

Know Your Audience

Understand the goals and motivations of the users who will be arriving at your landing page. What are the main questions that a potential visitor will have? Knowing this will allow you to design an experience that answers these questions in priority sequence on the page.

Visitor Action

The desired action of the visitor (primary CTA). Sounds simple, but if you don’t have a very specific idea in mind, your page can lose focus.

Entry Points

Take note of all campaign entry points (email, organic, PPC, social media) and any existing collateral materials to ensure you maintain a consistent brand experience and design. If your landing page doesnʼt match the aesthetic of the banner ad then people will often rightfully assume they are in the wrong place and leave.

Technical limitations of your target audience

Are they iPhone users? Are they business people with laptops that still view everything on 1024×780? Or are they designers with big 24” iMacs?

Creative brief

Ideally there will be a well deﬁned concept that ties business and user goals together into a simple and implementable idea. This will help you to design something that doesnʼt stray from the core goals of the campaign. If you are a small business or entrepreneur then this might seem like a bit of a luxury (or an extreme waste of time). If you’ve never used a brief before, try searching for some examples or templates – it can be really useful to go through the process of creating a simple half page brief just to get the idea down on paper before you commit it to digital realm.

Tips For Landing Pge Optimization

Clean & clear headline: Crisp is how the landing page headlines should be. Language used should be exact. This way you keep your visitor oriented and engaged.

Straight forward Call to Action: Tell the visitors what they need to do. Use buttons or well-linked text or you can use both. We can use a minimum of 2 call to action in a short landing page while 3-5 in a long LP (usually long LP is not preferred, but if there’s no way out because of the number of products, need to use them).

Emphasize benefits: Why will someone care about your company/product/service until it benefits him/her. The benefits are to be brought out in the content. This will help the visitor to quickly act accordingly.

Persuasive message: The message conveyed has to be persuasive. The features, products/services & the benefits can always be put forward in an urge manner which helps the visitor to make a decision.

Tight copy: Too much of content is always boring for someone who needs info quickly. Lack of clutter, clear & specific detailed content will help any visitor clicking the ad. Readers will read long landing page copy as long as you keep building a strong, motivating case for him/her to act. However, remember 2 things which are critical with respect to landing page copy.

Mention offers clearly: Keep your body copy in line with the offer. There has to be a logical progression from your headline to the landing page offers.

Highlight key info in bulleted points: Most of the viewers usually browse through & not read the content. Information is needed quickly. Make sure that they get everything required without having them to slow down.

Contact, Certificates & Testimonials check: Ensure that the contact details are mentioned appropriately in the landing page, so that the visitors can reach you easily (either on Phone/ Email). Certificates and testimonials builds trust in the minds of the visitors about your company & services.

The form has to be visible on the upper fold: Ask not for too much but the necessary info to complete the desired action (sale/lead). Be judicious & confidential in the given information. To be placed in the upper fold so that the visitor can access it easily.

Simple clean images: Images are always the eye-catchers. The landing page images used have to be a supportive medium for the content in the landing page. If the offering is a service, then you can show an image which explains the offering.
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SEO Basics:On Page Optimization

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:14:00 +0000

It takes more than just good content to get your website ranked well by search engines. Your site has probably not ranked well enough till now only because your site was not very “understandable” to the search engines. Let’s say there has been a communication gap in between the two. However, it is not an irreversible state… this is a very common problem and can easily be corrected with some ‘On-page Optimization’

1. Start with keyword research
What is keyword research? Keyword research is the practice of finding relevant search terms and phrases that people use in conducting searches online and determining the keywords most suited to your website.
So let’s start with your site, since your website targets used car buyers, what words would they type in the search engine? Note down your keywords. It probably includes ‘Buy used cars’, ‘Used cars on sale’, ‘Price of used cars’ etc.
After compiling a list of probable keywords/phrases that your target audience might use in the search engines, you can go one step further & use some great keyword research tools available online.

2. Website Structure
Every website’s coding structure is divided in to two parts: a Head and a Body. If you are thinking that I am going to teach you coding and programming, I’m not! Rather, I am just going to explain how you can tweak certain elements in each of these sections to your advantage:
The Invisible <HEAD> Portion
The HEAD is like a cover page of a book which gives direct information about its content. The HEAD consists of multiple tags with the Title and Meta tags being the more important ones.
• Title: The title is what appears on the top of your browser, giving brief information about the page. The title is important because the search engines use it to determine the theme & context of the site, the same way we read the title of a book to know what it’s about. For instance, if you had concluded from your keyword research that the terms ‘Used cars’ & ‘Buy used cars’ would be your target terms, your title could perhaps be ‘Buy Used Cars at Low Prices: 1000s of Used Cars for Sale’, rather than an indirect title like ‘We offer the best rides’. However, don’t overuse the keyword, we have used the terms ‘Used cars’ just twice & in proper context. A combination of keywords put together like ‘Used cars, buy cars, sell cars’ could be considered spammy.Another reason why you wouldn’t want to stuff your title with just keywords & make it user friendly is because the title is what is displayed by the search engines when showing your site in the search results.

• Meta tags:
a. Meta keywords is a tag that is no longer considered as important by the search engines but it is still considered good practice to optimize. It’s a tag which contains a list of your target key terms for that page. E.g.
b. Meta description is a brief snippet about the contents of the page that could be used by the search engine when displaying your site details in the search results. If you do not give a meta description, you have no control over what the search engines will display when showing your results.

The Visible Portion
The BODY in html consists of everything that is visible to people who open your website. Think of it like the actual content of a book with many pages. There are multiple elements in the BODY which you would want to consider tweaking.
• Headings: Heading tags (H1, H2 tags) are used to label your headline and are considered important information by search engines. Search engines assume that headings give an idea about the theme of the page and are thought to be given slightly more importance than the page content itself. It should be carefully chosen and injected with relevant keywords.
• Content: You want to make sure you include the right keywords in the contents of your page. You want to ensure you include similar words and phrases through out the content while ensuring it’s not overdone. Again, if your page targets “used cars”, you might want to distribute the keywords “used cars” through out the page while at the same time also including other similar keywords like “old cars” and “second sale cars”. Using similar keywords through out also helps. Although it’s very important to remember that while writing your content, you want to first focus on writing for your end user and making the content most appealing to them. Only once that objective is achieved, then you can try incorporating these changes in your content to suit the the search engines while ensuring you’re not compromising on the quality of the content.
Some of us also get so caught up in making our site attractive, forgetting that search engines cannot read Flash animations. So if you want to have a Flash based website, you want to make sure you also include a non-flash version for the search engines to read (some of your users as well might prefer viewing a non-flash version).

Optimizing your Internal Linking Structure: Internal linking allows users to navigate to other sections of your website. Internal linking plays a crucial role in page ranking. Use relevant anchor text, with keywords of course, to link to other pages of your website, but only if it’s relevant.
For example, if your website is offering offers on select models, you can include, “More cars for sale” instead of, “To avail offers go to: www.usedcars.com”. Clicking on ‘cars for sale’ will take them directly to the page.
• Do not leave images unattributed: Search engines can read only text, not images. By using alt attribute in your image tags, you can describe images with text, letting search engines detect images which are otherwise left ignored. When an internet user looks for images on search engines like Google image search, only websites that have textual descriptions of images will show up. For example: if you have a picture of an Audi, make sure you enter the name ‘Audi’ for the picture. The search engines might not be able to view the picture, but they will know that you have a picture of an Audi in your site through the tag.
3. Other Things to Consider
• URLs should be informative to search engines: Uniform Resource Locator is the unique address used to locate documents on the World Wide Web. Keywords in page URL helps it to get noticed by search engines. Each page of your site has a different address called URL. For example, the URL for your website may be www.usedcars.com and the URL for its web page can be www.usedcars.com/porche/carrera.html. Avoid using random text and numbers like www.usedcars.com/wrqew11/022vds.html. This doesn’t tell search engines anything about the contents of the page. Short URLs often work best, but if it is not possible, use relevant words separated with hyphens (‘-‘).
• Stop being inactive: Update your website regularly with unique content. Don’t just update content, but keep adding more pages to your website. Search engines are looking for fresh, updated information and changes are being made by the minute on the internet.
Common mistakes you can avoid:
Now, don’t think you know how to do on-page optimization by reading the above mentioned points. You don’t want to be one of the many whose fall is caused by ignorance, no no! There are many mistakes that people make while doing on-page optimization. I have listed them below for your benefit… so that you do not make the same mistakes.
1. No space for copycats: Copying content from other websites is a no-no. It’s not only unethical but search engines can detect content duplication in a jiffy and filter it out, bringing your ranking down. Websites like www.copyscape.com help to track copied content.
2. No cheating: Hiding text using the same color as the background or placing them behind images are old tricks. You can fool visitors but not search engines. Avoid keyword stuffing, as mentioned earlier.
You probably didn’t realize that the changes you would need to make would be this simple. On-page optimization can take you a long way in getting noticed by the search engines. So if you have not implemented these changes already, do it now! You can thank me later when the search engines keep coming back to your site!

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How to Increase Organic (Free) Traffic Of a Website

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 04:15:00 +0000

When you get search traffic naturally from the various search engines it is called organic traffic. This is primarily done by using a technique called SEO. SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization, and there are certain, well-recognized first steps for SEO that will serve to gain you substantial organic traffic from natural searches by humans typing them into the popular engines.

It should be immediately obvious to you why gaining this organic traffic is beneficial to your site. If you want your work recognized or want visitors to your site without having to pay for advertising, the best way and most sustainable method is by the use of the popular search engine optimization steps. They should be put to use in any article, website, or blog you write. If you do not use these methods your success at capturing targeted, organic traffic from the search engines will be limited or nonexistent.

Tips For Getting Organic Traffic

1. Include relevant content, relevant to your page description and Meta keywords.
2. Instead of changing your URL or redirecting from your old URL to your new URL, follow Google's procedure on URL changes to make sure your new site doesn't get skipped, or just avoid URL changes if you can.
3. Don't post duplicate content on your site, so if you quote another page only include a small excerpt and don't repeat your own content on multiple pages.
4. Avoid flash, even though it looks cool, flash and animated banners and intros annoy visitors and search engine bots don't read them.
5. Submit to quality directories.
6. Make sure your robot.txt files are not blocking destination URLs that you do not want blocked.
7. Choose your Meta keywords wisely and include them in your content.
8. Strive to obtain quality links into your site.
9. If you use icon or image links, include a text link.
10. If you operate an affiliate site, make your site a valuable resource, so people chose your site rather than go straight to your affiliate.
11. Add a site map.
12. Don't use link schemes.
13. Write specific content, so searches can find applicable results. Instead of writing "books," write "medical text books" or "organic cookbooks"; be specific.
14. If you include low quality links on your site, block them from being scanned by Googlebot.
15. Don't break up your content too much, like loads of banner ads and so on in the middle or your text, irritates readers and bots.
16. Write unique and compelling content.
17. Don't forget to include your page descriptions.
18. Don't bury text content in images.
19. Look for un-indexed URLs, URL with more than a few parameters or dynamic links, they may be skipped.
20. Stay up-to-date on SEO, your strategies need to constantly evolve.
21. Deliver what you promise, don't drive readers to inapplicable or irrelevant pages.
22. Carefully consider your titles, make sure to include targeted keywords.
23. Don't forget humor or other devices that attract and keep readers.
24. Add text links with anchor links.
25. Keep links out and in up-to-date.
26. Start a blog or forum if it makes sense on your site.
27. Join BBB or your local Chamber of Commerce or other reputable business associations.
28. Submit articles to respectable and active article sites.
29. Add Alt tags to images for people that disable images.
30. Validate and 508 your site for accessibility.
31. Submit your business description to Wikipedia or other popular information sites.
32. Consider adding maps or mashups.
33. Submit to multiple search engines.
34. Consider marketing some of your subpages or articles that have less competition.
35. Don't forget good old-fashion PR.
36. Start a little controversy.
37. Consider adding an RSS feed.
38. Write "top ten" lists, which are popular with article search sites.
39. Build a good site that others want to link to.
40. Eliminate grammar and spelling errors.
41. Publish a privacy policy.
42. Send out press releases when it makes sense.
43. Avoid hidden text and links.
44. Keep your content up-to-date.
45. Don't employ redirects or "cloaking."
46. Don't create pages with bad content, like viruses, trojans, malware and so on.
47. Steer clear of empty, unoriginal affiliate pages.
48. Make sure every page is assessable through at least on static text link.
49. Use text, instead of images to relate important content.
50. Check for broken links.
51. Don't put too many links on one page, even if it is a resource page, keep it well under 100.
52. Test out your site with a text browser.
53. Be leery of badly placed session IDs and arguments.
54. Employ the IF-Modified-Since HTTP header to let Google know if your content has changed.
55. Don't use "&id=" as a URL parameter, they are not indexed.
56. Avoid deceptive or manipulative techniques.
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Important SEO Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 09:07:00 +0000

If you want to learn SEO, and actually get good at it, read and use the following resources:

SEO Blogs

SEO Information

SEO Tools

SEO Forums

SEO Conferences

Advantages of SEO Services

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 04:02:00 +0000

Most of people on Internet like to use search engines to search of a specific product or service. You product listing should be on top pages in major search engines. You can take services from SEO service providers to achieve specific target. SEO advantages includes targeting traffic, increase brand visibility, increase in sales etc. Keywords optimization plays significant role in making your best choice. SEO is very much cost effective method of marketing. Other advantages of SEO include best usability, browser compatibility and accessibility. Better SEO services will increase in sales and to increase your business services, affiliate business and credibility. SEO services can also increase your confidence and authority as well. Many search engines list websites for free however some of them extra top listings. SEO service providers can help you to get in top listings. If SEO services are implemented effectively then it can increase target traffic to your site and rank your site for long term basis as well. There are many SEO techniques are there and you can choose one best service from them. Any of these methods can be used to rank your website. However an ongoing SEO campaign must be used to get target result from your website.

Traffic concerned
SEO can increase the number of visitors who seek your service or product actively.
Promotion that doesn 'sleep of T
Imagine to have your own company of sale and promotions working exclusively just for you! One which functions 24 hours over 24,7 days per week, 365 days each year. That 's the advantage of SEO!
Increase the visibility of mark
SEO can give to your mark a high international profile - and for comparatively low expenditure.
High KING
Hammer for book, dollar for the dollar, SEO brings a higher return to you on your investment than any comparable form of marketing.
Higher sales
SEO can mean greater sales of your product or service.
Faster and smaller pages
The correctly validated and optimized files will be smaller and thinner, meaning less requests/overheads for server and faster times of remote loading.
Long-term positioning
Once places from there, a site correctly conceived and optimized remains long-term in the rows compared with the PC where the costs and the expenditure are continuous and unforeseeable.
Profitable
SEO is among the most profitable manners of marketing.
Accessibility
To observe significant procedures of optimization can make your site more accessible to all the users.
Compatibility of Cross-navigator
A site correctly optimized also almost like possible will be validated with the elevated levels. This means that it should function in all the navigators of W3C-compliant, meaning that your site can be looked by the greatest potential number of visitors.
Navigable by the engines
All the bonds should function correctly and all the pages should be accessible to the engines, of this fact making your site easy for the engines to correctly index and classify by category.
Profitability
To observe the basic directives of optimization should mean that the visitors have more pleasant experience of user.
No need to start more
We should be able to work with your existing design.
Fast execution
SEO can start rather because we have access of ftp to your site - or even front if we make a bond campaign.
Short-term results
You should start to see a positive difference in weeks if not.
No need for aesthetic compromise
Your site should maintain its glance distinctive and feel front, during and after optimization.
Integrate with your existing site
The major part of the work of optimization will be in the slides, gained you 'notification of it.

Introduction to digital media

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 04:55:00 +0000

There are six main types of digital media channels or communications tools which marketers should review when developing their online media plans. This document gives a short introduction to each technique with examples.

1. Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) – placing messages on a search engine encouraging clickthrough to a web site when the user types a specific keyword phrase.

The two main disciplines are Search engine optimisation (SEO) to boost a companies position in the natural search listings and Paid search marketing which uses sponsored ads typically on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis.
Search marketing is great for targeting audiences at the moment of intent. It can help create a level playing field where small companies are listed alongside well-known brands to increase their awareness and drive response. That’s if the small companies can get SEO right or afford to compete in paid search.
Ultralase example of SEM.

Definition for Search engine optimisation (SEO): A structured approach used to increase the position of a company or its products in search engine natural or organic results listings for selected keyword phrases. Main techniques involve targeting keyphrases to rank within site copy and through linking strategies. No cost per click!
Definition for Pay Per Click (PPC) search marketing, e.g. Google AdWords A relevant text ad with a link to a company page is displayed when the user of a search engine types in a specific phrase. A fee is charged for every click of each link, with the amount bid for the click and its Quality Score determining its position. Trusted feed is the uploading of product data to a Product Comparison engine such as Google Product Search (Froogle).

2. Online PR

Online PR – Maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or web sites on a range of third party web sites such as media sites, social networks and blogs, which are likely to be visited by your target audience.

Online PR can offer a low-cost route to increase awareness of your brand, it can also help attract visitors and increases backlinks to a site, which is useful for SEO.
Definition for Online PR Maximising favourable mentions of your company, brands, products or web sites on third party web sites which are likely to be visited by your target audience. Includes use of blogs (online diaries, RSS (Really Simple Syndication feeds) and Web 2.0 social media techniques (C2C = Customer to Customer). Also requires managing negative comments about a company within social networks by monitoring and responding as appropriate. Closely related to viral marketing.

3. Online partnerships

Online Partnerships - Creating and managing long term arrangements to promote your online services on third party web site or e-mail communications. Different forms of partnership include link building, affiliate marketing, online sponsorship and co-branding.

Smart online marketers realise the value of partnerships in extending their reach into their audiences via other sites.
Ultralase example of affiliate marketing
This affiliate is a forum discussing laser eye surgery. It is prominent in the natural listings. Ultralase has a banner on every page as shown, helping awareness and driving response.

Definition for Affiliate marketing A commission based arrangement where referring sites (publishers) receive a commission on sales, leads or visits by merchants (retailers)’.

4. Interactive advertising

Interactive advertising - Use of online display ads such as banners, skyscrapers and rich media ads to achieve brand awareness and encourage clickthrough to a target site.

Ultralase example of Online advertising
Ultralase advertises extensively online. They have found that if they reduce spend it reduces awareness resulting in poorer results from natural search.

Definition for Interactive advertising* All types of advertising through the Web, wireless and interactive television. Interactive advertising can include banners, site sponsorships, email ads, PPC search engine ads and classified ads.

Definition for Online sponsorship Linking of a brand with related content or context through sponsored graphical or text links for the purpose of creating brand awareness, favourability and/or response.

5. Email Marketing

Opt-in e-mail – Renting opt-in e-mail lists, placing ads in third-party e-newsletters, making deals with third parties for co-registration or co-branding of e-mails, or building your own in-house e-mail list and sending e-newsletters or email campaigns.

The main aims of email marketing for acquisition is to generate awareness of brands or offerings or direct response to achieve registration or leads.
Definition for Email marketing The use of outbound email marketing to achieve awareness, add value or achieve response

6. Viral marketing

Viral marketing – Viral marketing is effectively online word of mouth – messages are forward to help achieve awareness. The message either contains or has a link to a site containing videos, pictures, games, jokes, information

Definition Online viral marketing Word of mouth, online. Viral marketing uses a powerful offer to be transmitted amongst a network of people via electronic media to reach a large audience cost effectively to generate prospects, build brand awareness and so increase sales

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What is Robots.txt

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 03:57:00 +0000

Robots.txt

It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you'd rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search engines do not index these pages (although in this case the only sure way for not indexing sensitive data is to keep it offline on a separate machine). Additionally, if you want to save some bandwidth by excluding images, stylesheets and javascript from indexing, you also need a way to tell spiders to keep away from these items.

One way to tell search engines which files and folders on your Web site to avoid is with the use of the Robots metatag. But since not all search engines read metatags, the Robots matatag can simply go unnoticed. A better way to inform search engines about your will is to use a robots.txt file.

What Is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from preventing search engines from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of password protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not enter” on an unlocked door – e.g. you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will not open to door and enter. That is why we say that if you have really sen sitive data, it is too naïve to rely on robots.txt to protect it from being indexed and displayed in search results.

The location of robots.txt is very important. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory (i.e. http://mydomain.com/robots.txt) and if they don't find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore they index everything they find along the way. So, if you don't put robots.txt in the right place, do not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

The concept and structure of robots.txt has been developed more than a decade ago and if you are interested to learn more about it, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/ or you can go straight to the Standard for Robot Exclusion because in this article we will deal only with the most important aspects of a robots.txt file. Next we will continue with the structure a robots.txt file.
Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

User-agent:

Disallow:

“User-agent” are search engines' crawlers and disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded from indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at the beginning of the line:

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/
The Traps of a Robots.txt File

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to find but in some cases validation tools help.

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except the /temp directory. Up to here it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user agents (including Googlebot itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ - including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made easily.

Tools to Generate and Validate a Robots.txt File

Having in mind the simple syntax of a robots.txt file, you can always read it to see if everything is OK but it is much easier to use a validator, like this one: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml. These tools report about common mistakes like missing slashes or colons, which if not detected compromise your efforts. For instance, if you have typed:

User agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

this is wrong because there is no slash between “user” and “agent” and the syntax is incorrect.

In those cases, when you have a complex robots.txt file – i.e. you give different instructions to different user agents or you have a long list of directories and subdirectories to exclude, writing the file manually can be a real pain. But do not worry – there are tools that will generate the file for you. What is more, there are visual tools that allow to point and select which files and folders are to be excluded. But even if you do not feel like buying a graphical tool for robots.txt generation, there are online tools to assist you. For instance, the Server-Side Robots Generator offers a dropdown list of user agents and a text box for you to list the files you don't want indexed. Honestly, it is not much of a help, unless you want to set specific rules for different search engines because in any case it is up to you to type the list of directories but is more than nothing.
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Important Tips For Creating a Seo friendly website

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:50:00 +0000

Step 1. Website analysis - analyse your website thoroughly before publishing it.

Step 2. Keyword Research - use Google Adwords to find good keywords with low competition.

Step 3. Google Webmaster Tools account - setup & monitor progress.

Step 4. Add Emphasis with Header Tags - try to use h1-h5 header tags to make content stand out.

Step 5. Bold font - make important things stand out by making them bold.

Step 6. Canonicalization - avoid duplicate content using Google's new meta tag.

Step 7. Competition Analysis - check out what your competition has.

Step 8. CSS Validation - make sure your CSS is perfect before publishing.

Step 9. HTML Code Clean Up & Optimization - make it perfect!

Step 10. Image & Hyper link Optimization - very important that your hyper links are accurate and descriptive.

Step 11. Link Validation - validate every internal link on your site!

Step 12. Meta Description Tag Optimization - make your description short, informative and to the point.

Step 13. Meta Keywords Tags Optimization - Google do not actually use the meta keywords tag what so ever so save yourself some time and don't make one!

Step 14. Navigation & Design Optimization - if your navigation is faulty, people won't use your site.

Step 15. PR Sculpting - PR is really not that important if you don't care about link juice.

Step 16. Robots.txt Optimization - use Google web master tools if you don't know how to make a robots.txt

Step 17. Title Tag Optimization - remember that the title is what Google will display for your search results!

Step 18. URL Rewrite - use important keywords in the links itself!

Step 19. W3C Validation - validate your sites content!

Step 20. Link Development - develop backlinks to improve your own PR and ranking.
Post on forums such as this one, Digital Point and V7N to receive easy backlinks.

Step 21. Check Broken Links - ensure that you don't have broken links (dead links)!

Step 22. Directory Submissions - submit your site to directories for easy backlinks!

Step 23. Internal Link Structuring - use a hierarchical structure for your folders if you don't know otherwise!

Step 24. Manual Link Request to Related Sites - swap links with your competition!

Step 25. One way links - purchase one way links from PR4 sites or greater.
Directories - Easy to find, easy to buy links on!

Step 26. Count Backlinks - ensure your backlinks are steadily increasing using a backlink checker.

Step 27. Local Search Engine Optimization - make sure that Google list your site locally if you are a local business!

Step 28. Website Usability & Conversion - calculate your conversion rate, then improve it.
Number of visitors divided by the number of sales eg. 100 visitors and 5 sales = 100/5 = 5% conversion rate.

Step 29. Installing Usability Tools on Website - easier it is, the more likely users will return!

Step 30. Monthly Website Conversion Tracking - ensure your website is working and profitable!
Number of visitors divided by of sales eg 50 visitors and 5 sales = 50/5 = 10% conversion rate.

Step 31. Optimization for Multiple Browsers - it may look good in your browser but not in others.

Step 32. Article Submission - submit articles containing your link to article directories!

Step 33. Blog Comment on Relevant Blogs - high PR blogs are a great source of backlinks.

Step 34. Blog Designing for the website - create a blog about your website and fill it with content.

Step 35. Blog Submission - submit your blog to directories and ping it ever once and a while.

Step 36. Classified submission - submit your site to free classified ads!

Step 37. Create Promotional pages on hub pages - quick and easy!

Step 38. Social Network Marketing - take advantage of groups catered to your niche.

Step 39. Paid Submission - pay someone to submit your site to directories for you!

Step 40. Press Release - create a press release and submit it.

Step 41. RSS Feeds - submit RSS feeds!

Step 42. Social Bookmarking - Pligg sites are a great way to get quick backlinks for free.

Step 43. Video Submission - use videos on sites such as youtube to promote your site or product!

Step 44. Content Writing & Optimization - optimize your content for your keywords/niche.

Step 45. Blog Writing - fill your blog with quality information.

Step 46. Content Modification - if someone else's is better, beat them with better content.

Step 47. Website Spell Check - this is crucial, never publish without a spell check first!

Step 48. XML Site Map Creation & Submission - create a sitemap and upload if to your site then submit it to the search engines!

Step 49. Check server headers - make sure people can access your site without errors.

Step 50. Check Search Engine Road Blocks - web master tools will inform you of crawling errors.

Step 51. Check PR of site to see how you are doing!

10 Important Web Design Tips For a SEO Friendly Website

1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website. If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to read by search engines.
2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines. To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.
3. Every page should contain the "title" and "description" tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.
4. Try not to use Flash when possible. Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and makes people run away
5. Think twice on how to use graphics. Make them relevant to your content and use an Alt tag containing the relevant keyword(s).
6. Do not only use images to link out. You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.
7. Avoid using frames. Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.
8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.
9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster. It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.
10. Use standard HTML. Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than it needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that can't be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or not index the whole web page. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html.

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10 Ways to Get Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 07:04:00 +0000

Getting traffic is one of the most important tasks for any web master. What is more, you can't get traffic once and then just reap the benefits. Getting traffic is an ongoing task and you must be constantly doing it, if you want to get traffic and keep it. Here are some of the ways to get traffic for free:

1 Optimize your site for search engines.

Search engines have always been a major way to get traffic for free. That is why you need to do your homework and optimize your site so that it ranks well for the keywords you target. SEO is still the most powerful way to get traffic for free and you really need to invest some time and efforts in the optimization of your site. SEO is not that difficult and if you want to get familiar with it in a nutshell, check our SEO Tutorial. If you are too busy for that, you can start with the 15 Minute SEO article.

2
Frequently update the contents of your site. .

If you expected some shocking secrets revealed, you might be a bit disappointed. One of the first steps in getting traffic for free is trivial but vital – get great content and frequently update it. In terms of SEO, content is king. If your content is good and frequently updated you will not only build a loyal audience of recurring visitors, who will often come to see what is new, but search engines will also love your site.

3 Take advantage of social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking sites (especially the most popular among them) are another powerful way to get traffic for free. If you want to learn how to do it, check the How to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking sites article, where we have explained what to do if you want to get free traffic from sites such as Digg, Delicious, etc.

4 Use your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Social networks are also a way to get traffic for free. If you are popular on networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, the traffic you get from there can easily surpass the traffic from Google and the other search engines. It is true that building a large network of targeted followers on Twitter and supporters on Facebook takes a lot of time and effort but generally the result is worth.

5 Get links with other sites in your niche.

Another way to get traffic for free is from other sites in your niche. Getting links with other sites in your niche is also good for SEO, especially if you manage to get links without the famous nofollow attribute. But even if the links are nofollow (i.e. they are useless for SEO), they still help to get traffic to your site. If you manage to put your link in a visible place on a site with high volumes of traffic, you can get thousands of hits from this link alone. If you need list of sites within your niche where you could get backlinks from, check the Backlink Builder tool. However, be careful if you exchange links because linking to bad neighbors can do you a lot of harm.

6 Use any chance to promote your site for free.

Free promotion is always welcome, so don't neglect it. There are many ways to promote your site for free and some of the most popular ones include free classified ads, submissions to directories, inclusion in various listings, etc. It is true that not all free ways to promote your site work well but if you select the right places to promote your site for free, this can also result in tons of traffic.

7 Create a free product or service.

Content drives most traffic when you offer something useful. There are many types of useful content you can create and they largely depend on the niche of your site. You can have articles with tons of advice, or short tips but one of the most powerful ways to get traffic is to create a free product or service. When this product or service gets popular and people start visiting your site, chances are that they will visit the other sections of the site as well.

8 Use viral content.

Free products and services are great for getting free traffic to your site and one of the best varieties in this aspect is viral content. Viral content is called so because it distributes like a virus – i.e. when users like your content, they send it to their friends, post it on various sites, and promote it for free in many different ways. Viral content distributes on its own and your only task is to create it and submit it to a couple of popular sites. After that users pick it and distribute it for you. Viral content can be a hot video or a presentation but it can also be a good old article or an image.

9 Use offline promotion.

Offline promotion is frequently forgotten but it is also a way to get traffic for free. Yes, computers are everywhere and many people spend more time online than offline but still life hasn't moved completely on the Web. Offline promotion is also very powerful and if you know how to use it, this can also bring you many visitors. Some of the traditional offline ways to promote your site include printing its URL on your company's business cards and souvenirs or sticking it on your company vehicles. You can also start selling T-shirts and other merchandise with your logo and this way make your brand more popular.

10 Include your URL in your signature.

URLs in forum signatures are also a way to get traffic for free. There are forums, which get millions of visitors a day and if you are a popular user on such a forum, you can use this to get traffic to your site. When you post on forums and people like your posts, they tend to click the link to your site on your signature to learn more about you. In rare cases you might be able to post a deep link (i.e. a link to an internal page of the site) rather than a link to your homepage and this is also a way to focus attention to a particular page. Unfortunately, deep links are rarely allowed.

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How to Build Backlinks

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 06:42:00 +0000

It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.

You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.
While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs

Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.
Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid

One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.

Improve Business With Online Strategies

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:55:00 +0000

There’s an old saying that nothing happens until someone sells something. It is still true
For any business.

In today’s computer-savvy world, the internet has become a very resourceful tool for both business owners, (who can use the internet as a platform to advertise their products and services) and shoppers (who enjoy an exceptional online shopping experience).

It is no wonder many businesses utilize different online strategies to impel customers to their websites.Small businesses depend on these promotional tactics as an effective online marketing tool, and this helps to balance the competition between themselves and much larger corporations. In the same respect, new business owners resort to these different online strategies, so they are able to compete with worldwide companies without having to expand their advertising and marketing budgets. When done correctly, traffic can be easily generated to a company’s website, and a fast and promising return on investment can be made.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements.

Search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing are two important online strategies used by many businesses when persuading potential customers to their website. In the search engine optimization approach, business owners research and select effective targeted keywords or “title tags” that can be used when prospective customers conduct search results. SEO can also help improve the ranking of a company during such search; therefore, more traffic to a particular website can mean more potential company revenue.

Pay-per-click advertisements can be used in conjunction with SEO, whereby advertisers pay a company a fixed amount of money when an advertisement is clicked to visit the advertiser’s website. PPC advertisements are a great way for companies to raise their profile and the profile of their affiliates, since both parties are advertised on multiple sites. For example, a popular travel website that sells competitive airline tickets and vacation packages can post hotel advertisements on their website. Depending on the contractual price and number of visitors who clicked on the advertisement, the travel company can make money from the hotel and vice versa.

2. Social shopping

Social shopping is a new online phenomenon that has become extremely successful in the past few years. It combines two very popular online pastimes: social networking and bargain shopping. Entrepreneur marketing on social shopping sites have overtaken other forms of marketing, including direct marketing promotions. Many new business owners are finding more advantages to social shopping as a cheap and effective means of advertising when compared to the costs and process of traditional marketing.

3. Post marketing advertisements in blogs

Another way in which companies can improve their online business is through the use of blogs. Retailers can easily advertise their company by linking photos and detailed information about their products and services when they post a blog. In return, readers can write comments and feedback about their own experience with the company’s products. Not only do blog advertisements raise the profile of a new business, but they can also increase the company’s rank during a search result.

4. Website maintenance-
Many consumers are proven to become repeat customers if they encounter a positive online shopping experience. Their positive online transactions can simply attract new customers by word of mouth. In order to properly produce a delightful online shopping experience for new and existing patrons, business owners must have an effective, professional-looking website detailing their products and services. The website interface should be user-friendly in order to assist with a good shopping experience and easy checkout.

5. Web metric analysis-

Another way to improve online marketing strategy for new companies is the implementation of web metric analysis. Through this approach, the number of sales, user origin, and site visit duration can all be tracked. Depending on the findings, the company may want to adjust their marketing campaign accordingly. For example, a florist may use web metric analysis to find out why his/her online sales had dropped in the previous month. Through this metric approach, s/he discovered that visitors remained on his/her site only briefly. After determining the advertisements on the website may not have been created effectively, s/he decided to change the advertisement completely. Upon that modification, the company was able to successfully make up for their losses in the following month.

6.Improve online business through social networking sites

In today’s high speed society, social networking is a hot topic in internet circles. It attracts people who have similar interests and opinions. Social networking sites are not only a place to have a fun or keep in touch with friends and family, but also one of the great places to get the word out about your business. Companies from Coca-Cola to McDonald’s and even major television stations are now using social networking sites to reach people globally and promote their business in new ways.
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7 Simple SEO Tasks to Complete for a New Site

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 05:42:00 +0000

I have assisted countless websites in launching a new or redesigned website. Regardless of the business or the industry, there are a number of tasks you should perform to make sure your SEO gets off on the right foot. The good thing is, these tasks can take no more than 30-60 minutes to complete and are well worth it.

1. Setup Webmaster Tools

Using a service like Google Analytics is great, but you really should verify your site with each of the search engines webmaster tools. These services allow you to diagnose and analyze things on your site, that a website analytics solution can not. Submit sitemaps, find error pages, diagnose slow loading pages, and tons of other neat tools are provided by the webmaster tools.

    * Google Webmaster Tools
    * Yahoo Webmaster Tools
    * Bing Webmaster Tools

2. Install Analytics, Setup Your Goals

There is no reason why you should not be tracking your website visitors. Google Analytics is free, easy to install and provides a wealth of information about your website and your customers. Sign-Up for a free account and install or pay someone to install the javascript code on your website.

Also go the extra mile and track key actions on your websites. Things like contact form submissions, downloads, video plays, and purchases should be getting tracked to understand your conversion funnel better and improve your conversion rates.

3. Fix Canonical URL Issues

Something that I would say 90% of all websites never do, it fix the www vs non-www duplicate content issue. This is such a quick fix, but so many websites overlook it. Going with either the www or the non-www, will solve the issue of having multiple URLs for the same web page. Also make sure your internal links are going to the / and on index.html or similar.

PHP Sites: Add to .htaccess file

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]

ASP Sites: Done through IIS
4. Add Your Robots.txt File

Go through your web files and identify directories that you don’t want the search engines to index. Things like your administration files or miscellaneous files found on your server, restrict them from being indexed.

Upload robots.txt file with below text. Make sure you replace “/folder name/ with the folder(s) you want to restrict.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder name/
5. Submit XML Sitemap

Once your website is 100% completed, use an XML sitemap generation tool to crawl your entire site and create an XML sitemap that you can submit to the search engines. Each search engine allows you to submit your sitemap right from within Webmaster Tools. This will help get your new site crawled faster and make the search engines better able to find ALL of the pages on your site.

6. Setup Your Local Business Listings

As you may know, Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have local business centers that allow you to add a free business listing that has the chance to show up in the local results when a user performs a local query in one of the search engines.

I would suggest going to GetListed to help manage all of your local business listings. This free service will help you manage and check to make sure you are properly submitting and verifying your local business listings in Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, BOTW and Hotfrog.

GetListed will cover the main local business directories you should submit to, but a service call Universal Business Listing will help you syndicate your listing to all of those 2nd tier local directories like InfoUSA, YellowPages.com CitySearch and Superpages.com. Instead of manually submitting your listing to lots of other local directories, pay $30 and have UBL submit your listing for you.

7. Add 301 Redirects

If you are redesigning a website, try to keep the same URL structure if possible. This way you will reduce the risk of losing any organic search engine rankings and traffic. However if for whatever reason the URL structure needs to change, identify the key pages that are ranking well and gaining traffic and 301 redirect them to the most relevant page on the new site.

If a client has purchased multiple domains and has mirror sites up, direct those sites over to the main site. There is no point in risking a duplicate content penalty for having multiple sites with the same content.

ASP Sites – 301 Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.example.com/keyword.asp”
%>

PHP Sites – 301 Redirect

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

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Yahoo Launches Advertising Solutions Portal

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 10:25:00 +0000

Everyone seems to be cleaning up their interfaces today. Hot on the heels of Google New, Yahoo's B2B division launched the imaginitively named, Yahoo! Advertising Solutions portal. However unlike the aforementioned competitor, this project was not created from a 20% employee time allocation, and instead took months of "brainstorming, researching, designing, engineering, writing, reworking, user testing, and collecting focus-group insights."
To be fair, it looks like the time has paid off as the portal is great looking for a B2B landing page, which are usually extremely boring, and has a fantastically 'aspirational' feel. In fact it's so modern and upbeat that it makes the Microsoft Advertising Community look like it was built on Ning.

However, the latter shouldn't feel too overshadowed as Yahoo have clearly borrowed a lot of ideas from them:
"Most importantly, the portal intends to foster a water-cooler environment for marketers, ad creatives, producers, publishers, and other advertising execs to be educated and inspired by Yahoo!-specific and industry-related content. Together with award-winning advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Yahoo!'s engineering, UED, and B2B teams worked hard to construct a content-rich experience within a modern visual design."
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5 Steps to Increase your Google Page

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 05:40:00 +0000

Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it's not, but if it's related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.

Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.

2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.

Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be

3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine's will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).

4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.

5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.

To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine... say Google... and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.

You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail's from people requesting links because they don't see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.

Important note: When looking for link partners don't just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn't look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.

So if Google one day decided to link to a website that was just created and this website has a page rank of 0 and has a domain that goes something like this: mywebsite.geocities.com it's page rank wouldn't increase even though Google's page rank is 10, it's rank would still be zero because it would only have that one back link.

Article By:Charles Nixon
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Why Brand and Reputation Management SEO are the Way Forwards?

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 05:31:00 +0000

If I were to sit in a meeting with a big client now and tell them to slash a little of their traditional SEO budget and instead spend more time optimising the top 30 SERP’s for variations of their brand names, they would literally laugh me out of the room.

People and big companies have only these last few years got their heads around SEO, they now know that in order to get more traffic, more sales and more revenue, you need to optimise your site and make its targeted keywords appear as high as possible in all the major search engines.

But moving forwards more and more independent SEO’s are going to be jumping onto the scene, as well as this more and more SEO companies opening up shop. So with even more SEO’s and more companies competing for the same term(s) every sector is going to be a battle field, but there are a few options:

1.    Optimise for long tail terms and drive traffic through with ranking for quantity terms rather than the quality ones. (Again this will start receiving huge amounts of competition).

2.    Optimise for local terms and then slowly optimise for all the locations that you cover, you will have a lot less competition, but will the search volume and customers be there?

3.    Finally and this is what I see expanding rapidly in the next few years, especially for mid sized companies and large companies that are already advertising by other means and already get a lot of direct traffic.

If you look at some of your client’s analytics data you will see that, some of the terms that actually bring the most visitors are their brand terms. As an example, do you know how many people actually go to Google and type in Facebook rather than just typing it in the browser?……. 1,680,000,000 that’s how many!

Now that is not even including mis spellings, so now imagine your client getting a fraction of brand searches, or for the rich and famous reputation searches. Currently there are not many SEO’s concentrating on this factor, but let’s just think about what happens if you do not own the rest of the sites, in the Top 5 or the Top 10? You are basically going to be losing traffic that you could have easily grabbed and converted. But what is even worse is imagine that Top 10 for your branded term had 3-4 bad experiences or false negatives about your clients company or image, you could potentially be missing out on lots of click throughs even though you are number one for your brand term, because people are seeing the negatives about you.



Brand and reputation searches are on the increase, just take a look at the above graph, this is persistent with most brand terms.

Over the next few years Brand management SEO and reputation management SEO will literally have to be offered as a separate service to clients, because although you may be number 1 for your brand. Is that really enough? What do you think?
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Social Media Marketing Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:51:00 +0000

Social media marketing is a relatively new marketing concept that involves increased social interaction on websites and has gained enormous popularity over the last year or two. There are a number of different types of social media sites but all of these have in common that their users can participate on the website by sharing comments, posting their own content or making friends online. If you are still new to social media and need a few marketing tips, read on:

Use as Many Social Media Marketing Tools as Possible

The first tip is to use as many social media marketing tools as possible. There are many different types of social media and within this there are also many different websites. Registering for as many of these as possible and then using them correctly is a great way to boost your website traffic.

Some of these social networking and social media websites that allow you to interact with others online include Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter, as well as social content sites such as HubPages and YouTube. All these websites allow you to either create contacts through their website or else add content of your own to the website (such as articles to HubPages or videos to YouTube).

Link Your Social Media Accounts

If registering for many different social media websites seems overwhelming at first, don’t worry. A great way to reduce the amount of time you need to spend on each of these websites is to link many of them together. For example, many social networks allow you to integrate with Twitter so that when you update your Twitter status it is also shown on your social network accounts or when you update your social networks you can perhaps send this to Twitter.

Social Content and Social Bookmarking

Many business owners have used article marketing to promote their business, but have you used social content? Social content holds a number of benefits over article marketing while still being a similar concept. Put up a social content page on Squidoo or Hub Pages and then bookmark these with Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.

Social content websites are like the old article marketing websites in that you can add articles you have written but differ in that you can also add other elements such as graphics, YouTube videos, and interactive elements such as polls, comments, etc. that allow your readers to interact with your article. They also allow people who like your articles to ‘follow’ you which shows that they are interested in the articles you post and they can also subscribe to them.

Social bookmarking allows you to save a list of your favorite websites on another website where people can see them as well. These websites also allow you to make friends with people who find the websites you are listing interesting and want to know when you add other websites.

Automate What Can be Automated

Fortunately some aspects of social media marketing, such as updating your Twitter status, can be automated so that you set it up once and can then forget about it (at least for a while). Make use of this, especially if you are short of time, as it will greatly reduce the amount of time you need to allocate to social media marketing.

Encourage Visitors to Use Social Media

Another way you can use social media marketing is by encouraging visitors to your website to use it. Put up share buttons on your website pages that allow visitors to quickly and easily bookmark your pages on their social bookmarking accounts. Connect your website to Facebook and Twitter so that people can share links from your website on their Facebook or Twitter accounts, update their statuses through your website, etc.

Make Lots of Friends

Another important social media marketing tip is to make as many friends or followers on these websites as possible.
The more connections you have, the more people will see your updates and marketing messages.

Use Social Media Marketing Tools

Since the increase in popularity of social media a number of websites have come out that are not social media sites themselves but that give you the tools you need to use the social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, more effectively.

Social media marketing should be a part of every internet marketer’s arsenal of tools. Use as many of these websites as you can and link them together and encourage your visitors to use them too; automate the process and use other tools to help you become more effective at social media marketing.
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Twitter As A Sales Tool – Tweak Your Sales through Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 05:48:00 +0000

With the advent of Web 2.0, the virtual world took a turn to the best. Yet, when it comes to employing Web 2.0 in internet marketing, nothing can be as effective as social media. However, despite the many options available for e-Marketers, Twitter proves itself to be one of the best solutions to get promotional messages across consumers all over the world.

This is where you, the internet marketer, come in. By tapping into any of these sources, you can easily provide a lot of exposure to your products. However, of these methods, social media, especially Twitter, is the best way to shine the limelight on what you have to offer.

Why Twitter

Here are some statistics that will help you understand why Twitter is the tool for you:

* Twitter has more than a 100 million registered users.
* The social media website is growing by 300,000 users per day on average.
* Aside from Twitter’s users, about 180 million unique visitors hit the site on a monthly basis.

These numbers sure do make your mouth water, don’t they? Just picture at least 1% of Twitter’s users heading in your direction i.e. 100,000 users. Of these, even if 1% of that amount (100 users) buys what you are selling, you will be able to have a considerable amount of profits by the end of the month.

Besides that, managing and using twitter is a simple process. All you will need to do is tweet your promotional message whenever you want to. Compare this to writing long blogs and having to put your writing skills to the test – tweets surely take a load off your mind, don’t they? Besides, you won’t need to pay a single dime! You can message the whole world and pay nothing at all!

How Twitter Can Increase Your Sales

There are so many ways that Twitter can boost your sales. One of the first ways Twitter does that is by providing traffic to your website. Imagine tweeting a message with a link to your website, and then having at least a hundred followers re-tweet it onto their profiles. Your URL will spread online like a rocket ship at take off. In addition, with many people visiting your website, your search engine ranking will increase. Thus, you will be visible to those who aren’t using Twitter. Two birds with one stone!

Another way of increasing your website’s traffic (which in return leads to sales) is by tempting your followers. Everyone loves free things and will do anything to get them. By tweeting a competition or a sale, you will have many users try to fight their way through the online crowd to get to your website before everyone else.

You can also boost your sales by getting feedback from your followers. From time to time, you will have devoted followers provide you with constructive feedback. By using that, you will be able to assess your product’s weaknesses and strengths. Hence, you will be able create a solution to solve the weak points and focus on improving the strong points. This can ensure you of having more people like your product and eventually buy it.

There are also so many other ways such as following other Internet marketers in order to promote one another, and finding people who can help join your network to advertise your product. Regardless of what you choose, you can rest assured that you will have a thick wad of cash enter your pockets in a very short time.

So, if you’re interested in simplifying the already easy process of network marketing, all you will need is a Twitter account and a few effective promotional messages. After getting these, simply let the blue birdie take care of the rest.

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SEO Freelance Works,Online SEO Training

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 06:22:00 +0000

Once SEO was not a separate profession - Web masters performed some basic SEO for the sites they managed and that was all. But as sites began to grow and make money, it became more reasonable to hire a dedicated SEO specialist than to have the Web master do it. The demand for good SEO experts is high and is constantly on the rise.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

I have 2.8 year experience in SEO services.I am doing the seo freelance works and seo online training.If you have any seo work please contact me.I will give 100%guarantee in my works.

Contact Me:

Phone:+919846332383

E-mail:dheeraj.sukumar@gmail.com,dheerajsukumar@hotmail.com,dheerajsukumar2005@yahoo.co.in

skype:dheerajkochi

Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/dheerajsukumar

twitter:http://www.twitter.com/dheerajsukumar
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How to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking sites

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 04:46:00 +0000

Sites like digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com etc can bring you a LOT of traffic. How about getting 20,000 and more visitors a day when your listing hits the front page?
Getting to the front page of these sites is not as difficult as it seems. I have been successful with digg and del.icio.us (and not so much with Reddit though the same steps should apply to it as well) multiple times and have thus compiled a list of steps that have helped me succeed:

1 Pay attention to your Headlines

Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don't make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small.
Here are some examples to start with :-

Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence

Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse

Here is a good blog post that should help you with your headlines.

2 Write a meaningful & short description

The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based.

You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you'd better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.

3 Have a great first paragraph

This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User's Attraction game, don't let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.

4 Content is king

However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users' attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don't count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.
5Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site
It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages.
Here is a link that should help you add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to your pages.

6 Know when to submit

The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You'd better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.

7 Submit to the right category

Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don't submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.

8 Build a top-profile

Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.

9 Cooperate with other social bookmarkers

The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.

10 Submit in English

Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don't understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong. Check this link for a list of non-English sites.

11 Never submit old news

Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday's news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.

12 Check your facts

You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven't got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts - or your readers will do it.

13 Check you spelling
Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.

14 Not all topics do well
But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don't sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories - about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can't know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.

15 Have Related Articles / Popular Articles
Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.

16 RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing

RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.

17 Do not use automated submitters

After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn't. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don't care about the fate of your profile and don't mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.

18 Respond to comments on your stories
Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.

19 Prepare your server for the expected traffic
This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally!
I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally.
Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you'd better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!

20 The snowball effect

But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.
An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update.

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The Importance of Backlinks

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 04:28:00 +0000

If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are "backlinks"? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL's). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine's algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking. Let's talk about reciprocal linking for a moment.

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

We must be careful with our reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple. We could begin preparing for this future change in the search engine algorithm by being choosier with which we exchange links right now. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don't have tons of outbound links on a page, or sites that don't practice black-hat SEO techniques, we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won't be discounted.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain: interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.

There are a few things to consider when beginning your backlink building campaign. It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks, to know which sites are linking back to you, and how the anchor text of the backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site. A tool to help you keep track of your backlinks is the Domain Stats Tool. This tool displays the backlinks of a domain in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It will also tell you a few other details about your website, like your listings in the Open Directory, or DMOZ, from which Google regards backlinks highly important; Alexa traffic rank, and how many pages from your site that have been indexed, to name just a few.

Another tool to help you with your link building campaign is the Backlink Builder Tool. It is not enough just to have a large number of inbound links pointing to your site. Rather, you need to have a large number of QUALITY inbound links. This tool searches for websites that have a related theme to your website which are likely to add your link to their website. You specify a particular keyword or keyword phrase, and then the tool seeks out related sites for you. This helps to simplify your backlink building efforts by helping you create quality, relevant backlinks to your site, and making the job easier in the process.

There is another way to gain quality backlinks to your site, in addition to related site themes: anchor text. When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this quality anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the under-estimated resources a webmaster has. Instead of using words like "click here" which probably won't relate in any way to your website, using the words "Please visit our tips page for how to nurse an orphaned kitten" is a far better way to utilize a hyperlink. A good tool for helping you find your backlinks and what text is being used to link to your site is the Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something incorporating relevant keywords. This will also help boost your quality backlinks score.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.
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Tour Destinations,Tour Destinations In India,Best Holiday Company

noreply@blogger.com (Dheeraj V Sukumar) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 05:32:00 +0000

Munnar is the most famous honeymoon destination in South India. Its called The Queen Of Hill Station and it is blessed with beautiful weather.Honeymoon in munnar is offering the best and cheap tour packages in India.

"Tourmark Indus" is an Indian Holiday Company managed by a group of tourism professionals with profound experience in Tourism business, engaged with the hospitality industry for last one decade and more. We rightly claim, that we could cater to all your needs in every segment of the Tourism and Travel industry, which we sure all our guest would truly approve to.

"Tourmark Indus" is rightly located in the State of Kerala - INDIA, also known world wide as " God's Own Country ". Our head office is situated in Cochin - also known as "Queen of Arabian Sea", with well-furnished office, quality fleet of transport and trained staffs'.

For Details please contact:

Door # 38/2096 on plot # 87 ,

Gandhi Nagar ,Giri Nagar North Extention,

Ernakulam 682020

Email : mailbox@honeymooninmunnar.com

Mobile: +919946072925

Visit: http://www.honeymooninmunnar.com
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