InternetMedia-Solutions.Com

Designing Sites for Search Engines and Directories

2009-06-02T10:33:00.000+07:00

In terms of layout, many web sites are not designed for optimum search engine and directory visibility. People or companies seem so centered on their corporate or personal images, products, and services that they neglect to design their web sites with search engines and directories in mind.

Search engines and directories vary in the way they rank your web site in a search query. Some search engines place primary emphasis on the text within your title tags. Some search engines place emphasis on the main ideas presented in all of your text on a single web page.

Some directories emphasize the text you submitted in their "Description" field. How and where you place your text, both in the copy your visitors see and within the HTML tags your visitors do not see, will affect your ranking.

Keyword selection
Keyword placement
Keyword frequency
Link and architecture
Site statistics

Keyword selection
Of primary importance is selecting the best keywords for your industry and the keywords you believe your potential customers will use to find you. Selecting the right keywords requires research.

Look at your company's printed materials. What words do you use over and over? When you speak to new and current customers on the phone, what questions do they frequently ask and what words do they use? Ask your current customers how they would find you on the Internet. Then go to the major search engines and directories. Type in the keywords you want to use. Study the source code of the web sites that appeared in the top 20. Look at how your competitors ranked in a search query. Adjust your keyword selection accordingly.

Keyword placement
Of equal importance is keyword placement on individual pages. The text in your title tag is one the most important elements for ranking well in search engines. The text in your titles should be descriptive, using the words and lingo in your industry, and should accurately reflect the contents of each web page.

For optimum search engine positions, your keywords need to appear at the top of your web pages. Thus, before you design your web page, ask yourself if you (or your web designer) have strategically placed your keywords within your title tags, meta-tags, headings, graphic images, and the first paragraph within your body tag. If not, you might need to rethink your site design.

Keyword frequency
What is important to both the search engines and your target audience is keyword frequency and keyword prominence. Designing and coding your site with keywords in the right locations and the right frequency is an art form. Keywords need to appear frequently on your web pages, but if they appear too frequently, your site will be penalized for word stacking (also known as "spamming the index") or could be removed permanently from the index.

Also, some search engines ignore meta-tags. Thus, if you have included your keywords in your meta-tags but have not placed them elsewhere, you have missed a huge target audience, namely AOL users. Sites with frames have problems being indexed well because there is little opportunity otherwise to include additional text with keywords.

Very, very few web sites can get in the Top 10 of all the major search engines (AltaVista, FAST Search, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Teoma) without spamming. We cannot emphasize this enough: if you hire anyone (a submission service, an individual, an online promotion service, etc.) to do the services we just described, they need to have HTML and design experience, online marketing, and excellent copywriting skills.

You do not want your web site to be permanently banned from a search engine or directory due to ignorance or lack of experience. Furthermore, submission services usually do just that: submit. Many do not perform keyword research, the HTML coding, and copywriting necessary to get a site optimally placed within the search engines. Ask a lot of questions before handing over any money.

Link and site architecture
Placing keywords throughout your web pages is useless as a search engine marketing strategy if the search engine spiders are unable to record the text on your web pages. Therefore, always have link architecture on your site that the search engine spiders can follow. Oftentimes, this means having two forms of navigation on your site: one that your target audience prefers, and one for the search engines.

Site statistics
For the first few months after you have your web site submitted to the major search engines and directories, you should see a jump in traffic. If you look at your site reports with your visitor statistics, which should do frequently, you will see when the search engines spider and index your site.

Hopefully, because you have been thoughtful enough to give potential customers a reason to return to your site again and again, people will bookmark your site, and your web statistics will show an increase in a "No Referrer" category under referral URLs. Your site reports should show you where your potential customers are coming from (i.e. which search engine or directory they used to find you) and which keywords they used to find you.

After your site has listed in the search engines and directories for a few months, review your site statistics and determine where the majority of your traffic comes from. Then focus your advertising efforts on those directories and search engines. You get better sales from targeted marketing than from spreading your net too wide.

One client did exactly what we recommended, from keyword selection to monitoring site statistics. They found most of their sites referral traffic came from Yahoo queries. They bought banner space from Yahoo for two months. Whenever two of their keywords were typed in a search query, their banner would appear. Their traffic increased over 500%, and their sales reached five figures per month.

Lastly, the saying "Content is King" still rings true. You can increase traffic to your web site, but if (1) people do not like what they see, (2) you do not offer potential customers what they want to buy, or (3) you do not give customers incentive to stay and/or bookmark your site, they will click off of your web site as quickly as they clicked on to it.

Choosing a Domain Name for SEO and Branding

2009-06-02T10:32:00.001+07:00

Where have all the good domain names gone? You may be stumped about what domain name you ought to use for your new website. After all, there are several factors you must consider when choosing a domain such as if it helps to build your brand, if it is easy to remember, and if it has SEO benefits. Prior to brainstorming about a great domain name, you must determine whether your domain is disposable or permanent.

Disposable Domains vs. Permanent Domains
If you’re an affiliate marketer trying to make quick bucks selling acai supplements for weight loss, a domain such as acai-pill-for-weight-loss.com would probably fit the bill. Such a domain is considered a disposable or throwaway domain. You probably aren’t planning to use it for an extended period so making brand-building considerations isn’t really necessary.

If you have a permanent domain name that is an integral part of your larger brand-building efforts, you should use something that is easy to remember, distinctive, and credible-sounding. Your friends and webmasters would probably feel embarrassed linking out to a website with a domain such as acai-pill-for-weight-loss.com. Remember that you will have site visitors coming from several sources, not just search engines. A site domain that doesn’t look trashy is far more likely to get linked to on social media sites and beyond. Moreover, a site domain that is easy to remember will allow you to enjoy the advantages of word of mouth and score more return visitors.

Tips for Choosing a Brand-Worthy Domain Name
Great domain names are becoming scarce these days. That’s why when you get your hands on one it becomes an asset. So what defines brand anyway? A brand consists of experiences and associations that are connected to a person, company, or service. Think of a big brand like Nike for example. What do you associate Nike with? Perhaps you think of athleticism, victory, and self-confidence.

Nike has successfully built a respectable brand image over the years. But what about small businesses who don’t have millions of dollars to spend building brand image? The little guys can come up with a memorable domain name through the soft branding technique, which consists of tweaking a concept already in existence rather than coming up with a completely “meaningless” name to represent your brand.

Hotmail is an example of soft branding since people already understand the concept of “mail.” Google.com is an example of a “meaningless” domain name. People now associate the name Google with innovation, the future, and technology but when Google got its start, its name was little more than gibberish to most.

SEO Considerations when Choosing Domain Names
Some argue that it’s best to use a generic domain name that includes a target keyword because people are more likely to click on a URL that matches their search term. There is evidence which suggests that Google takes this factor into consideration when weighing the value of a website but different SEOs seem to have different opinions on the matter.

It can be difficult to include target keywords in your domain name if you want a brand-worthy domain that is unique and catchy. If you find that adding a target keyword would conflict with your domain name’s brand-building efforts, consider adding a byline. A byline describes what you do and contains your target keywords. Bylines become an important part of your brand as well. For example, if you sell curtains but your domain name is precision123.com, you could add a byline that says, “Window treatments in Philadelphia,” to give more details about your service.

Now that you are armed with this information, explore your options carefully when deciding on a domain name for your website. If you are looking to build a permanent domain that reflects your brand, by all means avoid cringe-worthy, hyphenated URLs and brainstorm to come up with something worthy of building your brand image upon. The key to success is coming up with a domain name that is memorable and distinctive and if possible, a name that hints at what product or service you offer.

Build Your Email List Using Social Media: 8 Surefire Ways

2009-06-02T10:31:00.000+07:00

When you are doing business online, it is important to build a list of targeted subscribers to market your products or services to. You want a responsive list and your job is to provide consistent value to them. Whether you have a blog or a website, you should definitely have an opt-in form to capture a visitor’s name and email address in a prominent location.

Two big components of effective marketing are reach and frequency. Reach refers to the number of people you reach with your message; while frequency refers to the number of times each person is reached on average. Frequency builds trust and drives your particular message home.

More people than ever are using social media tools so more of your target market is reachable there today than even just a few short months ago. Take advantage of these top ways to add subscribers when using social media sites so that you can begin communicating regularly with more potential clients and customers.

1) Create an effective profile.
What do I mean by effective? Use a real photo of yourself and your real name. Include your location and a good bio–complete, up-to-date and with all contact information.

2) Offer events.
A great way to add targeted subscribers is to hold an event such as a teleclass. Invite your followers and friends and direct them to a sign-up page specifically for the event. Let them know that in addition to signing up for whatever the event is, they will also receive a complimentary subscription to your e-zine or other valuable information.

3) Join a Ning network or create your own.
Ning is a platform which allows people to create their own social networks online. Anyone can create a network for free around a specific interest. This is a great tool for getting in front of your niche or target market.

4) Sync your newsletter broadcasts with Twitter.
If you use an email list service such as AWeber, you have the option to automatically tweet a link to your newsletter when the broadcast is sent out. Just choose Syndicate and Twitter Update.

5) Place an opt-in box on your Facebook profile.
This is something I explain how to do in detail in my free e-course. The Profile HTML application in Facebook allows you to add your opt-in box for collecting names and emails very easily. This way you can capture new subscribers right from your profile.

6) Use social bookmarking sites.
Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to search, organize and store bookmarks of web pages. Have a way for readers to submit posts they enjoy to bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.) right from your blog. This is a nice way to drive traffic to your site when others come across your bookmarked site.

7) Feed your blog posts to sites automatically.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have tools that will post your latest blog posts on their sites as soon as they are published. This keeps you consistently on others radars.

Be helpful and participate often. The best advice I can give for spending time on social sites is to give, give, give. You do not have to spend exorbitant amounts of time there, but when you do use them, offer suggestions, advice and tips. Create conversation as well as join it. People will get to know you this way and want to seek out more information about you.
Take action on several of these tips as soon as you can. It has never been simpler and more fun to build your list online than it is now!

5 Content Creation Tips For Your Blog

2009-06-02T10:30:00.000+07:00

One of the biggest problems with blogging is to be able to create content consistently that is both useful and helpful. So I am going to share with you some tips for creating content on hot topics your market will find both useful and helpful.

Market Related Forums
Busy forums related to your target market are an absolute gem of a place to find information to write articles on for 2 reasons.

Before I tell you why I must point out the word BUSY, you should be gathering a list of popular forums within your niche anyway because they are useful for so many reasons. Don’t waste your time with forums that aren’t regularly posted to, I would say a free public forum should be updated hourly at the most any longer than that don’t bother.

Back to the 2 reasons, first a popular forum will be full of posts asking How do I …..? or Does anyone know how to….? type questions this tells you what your market wants to know about. Second knowledgable people in your market will make helpful posts and from the feedback/ replies of the other users in the forum you will be able to see what are the hot topics.

If you can’t get article/ post ideas from the popular forums in your market then there is seriously something wrong.

Other Blogs
As I mentioned in the forums section above you should be gathering a list of the top blogs targeting your market. Not just for competitive reasons but also for ideas on what works in your niche.

Other blogs can give you an indication of what is hot in your market. This is especially useful if the niche you’re in, is something you’re not personally interested in, which by the way is something I would advise against for your first blog.

Article Directories
Article directories are another golden source of information for ideas. The thing you should be looking for here is what articles are being read the most. The top directories like ezinearticles.com will tell you the most read and downloaded articles in your category.

This will tell you what topics are hot in your market and they can help you learn how to write a good and informative article.

Google Alerts
Google being the smartest search engine in the world from a marketing/ webmaster point of view has a utility called Google Alerts.

If you’re not taking advantage of this great little tool or worse haven’t even heard of it I suggest you get yourself over to (URL) after reading this article and find out more.

Google alerts will send you an email with links to stories for keywords you specify on a hourly or daily basis, this is so useful because the quicker you react to big news in your market by publishing a post on your blog the more likely your traffic will increase and your visitors will come to you because you’re “in the know” giving you expert status (priceless).

PLR Content
Last we have PLR content or Private Label Rights content. I love PLR because I am not a natural writer, actually I hate writing which can be a big disadvantage on the internet.

PLR is great because you can have pre written articles or ebooks that you can put in your own voice. Granted a lot of PLR is questionable quality BUT I would rather have something to start with rather than a blank notepad file.

You can then put in your own voice and do your research to better the quality which to me is fantastic.

I hope these tips have helped you see how you can get an endless supply of ideas for updating your blog consistenly with quality content your visitors will find both useful and helpful.

Article Marketing and Making Money Online

2009-06-02T10:28:00.000+07:00

Article marketing is an essential part of your strategy if you are intent on making money online. It is especially useful to the newbie who has only a rudimentary knowledge of search engine optimization, and little hope of getting anywhere fast on the search engine scene.

In fact article marketing techniques can be used as your sole advertising medium, although best results are obtained by combining it with other means of attracting visitors to your website. Nevertheless, many people without websites are even now making money using only articles to advertise affiliate products.

Articles Generate Links
Generally, though, articles are used online to generate links back to your website, although there are some article directories on which your articles will be read if they are good enough. The majority of directories do not get read, but there are those that can provide you with a steady supply of visitors, and that can be used as a major source of advertising, if not the only source. The benefit of these back-links is that it boosts the popularity of your website in the eyes of Google, and if there is one thing that Google likes, it is popularity.

In spite of this, most people write articles hoping that enough readers will click on the URL provided in their resource to enable them to make a decent living. Such results rarely happen, and although articles can be used as the prime method of traffic generation, they should not be regarded as the only method.

Construct Your Article Properly
However prominently article marketing is in your sales drive or product promotion strategy, you cannot just write any old article and expect visitors to flock to your website. Your article has to be readable, and has to make the reader want to learn more from you. That means constructing your article in a specific way that is easier to write about than to achieve on paper (or screen).

First, it should be written in short chunks: small paragraphs of four or five sentences, and bulleted where appropriately. Online readers will not read large tracts of text as they would were they reading a book. They want their information in short chunks. In fact most online readers tend to scan, seeking something that catches their eye. So write that way, and try to catch their eye with something good. If you know how to write articles, then you can make them work.

First the Problem - Then the Solution
Present them with a problem and a potential solution, then offer that solution in your resource. Alternatively, write a two part article. Make the first part compellingly interesting, and then offer the second part to them on your website. Then offer it on a squeeze page in exchange for their email address, and once the have done that send them to your sales page for their first view of your product.

People take on average 7 views of a product before reaching the purchase decision, so make sure they get them. You won’t do that without their email address, so write your article with that in mind. You are unlikely to make a sale first time, and if they get away without leaving a contact email address, then you are unlikely to ever see them again.

Write your articles so as to offer a potential benefit. For example a solution to the problem you have just told them that they have, or tell them how to save money or time simply clicking on your link. Offer them a free product in your resource to persuade them to make that all-important click. Making money online often involves giving something away first.

Article Marketing is More than Writing
It’s not the article marketing that makes you money, it’s whether or not people read your articles, and then whether or not they click on your link. Until they do that they might as well be a million miles away because you are not going to sell to anybody that doesn’t click on your article resource link.

That is why article marketing is more than just writing articles: it’s designing them properly to keep people reading, and providing a compelling resource to force that click. Then you might have a chance of making money online.

5 Ways to Make Your Website Mobile (And 1 Reason You Might Not Want To.)

2009-03-12T11:29:00.002+07:00

As of August 2008, mobile handset penetration in Italy was at 140%. You read that right: there are now more mobile devices than people in Italy. According to Engadget, some studies are predicting 100% mobile phone penetration in the United States within 4 years; at present, it’s estimated at around 84%. Some research indicates that as of 2008, as much as 3-10% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
So clearly, if your site is not accessible or easy to read via mobile devices, you’re missing a pretty large potential audience.

So, because I’m a helpful sort of gal, I thought I’d post 5 fast, simple ways to make your website mobile-friendly.

1. Mofuse. Assuming your site is a blog, or at least has an RSS feed of some sort, you can create a mobile version of it lickety-split with Mofuse. Create an account, plug in your feed URL, settle on a subdomain (like http://socialmediaexplorer.mofuse.com) and then pick a way to integrate the mobile version with your regular site. You can either create an SMS widget, automatically detect and redirect mobile users to the mobile site, or add a “mobile version” badge to your site.

Mofuse allows you to do some styling and customization of your site, as well as add a custom domain. It also offers analytics, so you can keep tabs on your mobile visitors separately. You can also add a mobile-only homepage, as well as other mobile-only pages and links, including a Click 2 Call link. Click 2 Call allows folks to call a telephone number directly from your site (I could see this being pretty handy for a site that was primarily a lead-generation tool.) Publishers can opt-in to 50/50 revenue sharing advertising by agreeing to include ads from either AdMob or Google AdSense.

2. Mippin is another option, if Mofuse sounds a little more complicated than you’re interested in right now. Mippin is extremely similar to Mofuse, allowing you to quickly set up a mobile version of any RSS-driven site, customize the look of it a bit, and also has the nice added feature of automatically generating some searchable tags for your site based on its content (you can also add tags manually). Advertising (which publishers share revenues on) is optional on Mippin, and offered through AdMob’s ad network. Mippin also has some analytics reporting available, called “Reports.”

3. Got no RSS? No problem. Site.mobi has a free tool that will allow you to build a mobile site from scratch, customize the pages, and drop in whatever content you so desire, using one of several basic templates.

4. Let’s say you’re seriously over creating new accounts with free services. You just want a way to make your site visible to mobile users. You can use Google’s mobile version tool to strip the images and styling and create a mobile/WAP version of your site in seconds. Take the following string, and place your URL in it where indicated: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2F{YOUR URL}&hl=en&mrestrict=xhtml.

For example, you could go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.socialmediaexplorer.com&hl=en&mrestrict=xhtml Pretty nifty, eh? (Hat tip to Jerry Ong for this method)
Or you could just go here, and plug in your URL: http://www.google.com/gwt/n
Now, I know what you’re thinking. That’s a heck of a long URL to remember. Which is why there are at least two steps to this process. One option (the easy/free one) would be to use your favorite URL shortener (TinyUrl, urltea, is.gd, bit.ly, etc.), plug in the lengthy URL string above, and you’re good to go. A slightly more complicated version would be to redirect a mobile-specific domain to that URL. For example, if your hosting company lets you set up subdomains, you could set up http://m.yoururlhere.com to redirect to the URL string from Google Mobile Sites.

The downside to this method is that your site will be framed at top and bottom with a Google header and footer. And Google could discontinue this service at any time. But it’s simple, free, and fast.

5. Let’s say you’re a bit of a control freak. You don’t want your mobile site sitting on someone else’s service or domain or hosting or whatever. This method requires some light PHP coding skill, and the ability to set up subdomains and redirects, but it’s still fairly simple. Rather than copying the whole thing here, I will just encourage you to check out the original article, courtesy Mike Davidson.

An alternate “I don’t do no stinking PHP!” version for Wordpress users would be to either select a Wordpress theme that has a mobile stylesheet, or if you’ve got a designer whose done a custom theme for you, ask for a mobile stylesheet and the javascript code to detect mobile devices and apply that stylesheet. If you’re going this route, check out Alex King’s Wordpress Mobile Edition plug-in which auto-detects mobile devices, as well as the MobilePress plug-in, as it will also alert Google and Yahoo mobile bots to your site.

Okay, now that I’ve shown you a number of fast, easy ways to create a mobile version of your website or blog, it’s time for the caveat: You may not want to use any of these.
Remember way back in the day, when the web itself was brand-spanking new, and internet access boasted penetration numbers similar to what mobile web access has today? Back in the days before the dot.com bubble burst, lots of businesses approached the web with the same attitude that I’m seeing frequently today in relation to the mobile channel.

“Potential customers are there, I want to be there. Content? Well, I’ve got this great print brochure/catalog. Can’t you just put that up there?”

Content strategy is markedly different on the mobile web. If your mobile strategy consists entirely of “strip out all the images and styling from my regular web site,” then you haven’t thought it through sufficiently yet. Is the content on your regular website even of interest to mobile surfers?

If you’d like to do a serious deep-dive into mobile marketing strategy, check out MobiThinking’s Top 10 Mobile Marketing Mistakes article.You may decide that it’s more important to get a presence up and running on the mobile web now, and then tweak strategy and content in more detail later. If so, any of the five methods listed above should help. But don’t let that lull you into thinking you’ve got your bases covered when it comes to mobile. It means you’ve taken the first step.

10 Essential Onsite SEO Tips for your Website

2009-03-12T11:29:00.001+07:00

It is well documented that building links is a very effective way for your website to gain increased exposure in the search engines. However many people overlook the importance of the many onsite factors that should be implemented into your website to gain strength in the search engines. Below I have detailed the top ten that you should implement.

1. Title Tags:
his is one of the most known onsite tips; however it is still largely overlooked especially in ecommerce websites. All your title tags on you’re your website must be unique, short and contain the keyphrase you are optimising that page for.

2. Description Tags:
Another well-known optimisation technique, although again not used to its full potential. Your listings that appear in the search engine results pages are in effect an advert for your website so should be treated as such. Always include a call to action to entice the searcher to click on your listing.

3. Heading Tags:
You should always follow proper procedures when it comes to heading tags always give the page content a heading and try and include a keyphrase within the heading and use proper code, for the most important heading give it a h1 tag and use h2,h3, h4 etc as sub headings within your content.

4. File Name:
When naming your webpage always name it with the main keyphrase that you’re optimising that particular webpage for. Warning: Don’t rename your existing WebPages to reflect your keyphrase as this will be treated as a different page by the search engines and if the original page has gained any strength then all that strength will be lost.

5. Anchor Text:
The use of anchor text in external links is common place. However this should also be used on your own website. When linking to another page on your website use keyphrase rich anchor text in the page content. If you don’t how do you expect a search engine to think that your website is relevant for your keyphrases if your own website doesn’t? Check out Wikipedia for a good example of this.

6. Sitemap.xml:
You should create an xml file that contains a list of URL’s that are present on your website and submit it to Google and other search engines. This will help the search engines index your website more efficiently.

7. Sitemap.html:
All websites should include an HTML sitemap; this will also help the search engines index your website. If you have a large amount of pages on your website arrange you sitemap in categories and create more than one page. Don’t just create a list of your website pages as this isn’t much help to your website visitor.

8. No Follow:
If you are linking to a website that contains some relevant information that you think your visitors will find helpful but cannot vouch for that website, then use a no-follow attribute on said link to tell Google not to follow that link. You will also not bleed PageRank onto this external source.

9. Navigation:
Avoid linking to every webpage from every other webpage on your website. When linking from your homepage, link to your most important pages and from these sub pages link to other pages within your website. As the search engines will see which pages you consider important on your website, also from these sub pages link back to your most important pages.

10. Content:
This is an important one, create unique engaging content for your website that your visitors will find interesting. You should also add content on a regular basis as this will give your website more exposure in the search engines as if you have 10 pages on your website that’s 10 opportunities people will have to find your website, although don’t add content for the sake of adding content, only add it when you have something interesting to add.

Colors and Banner Designs

2009-03-12T11:28:00.000+07:00

When color is used correctly, it can add impact and clarity to your banner message. Color can emphasize, highlight, and lead your end users to a call-to-action (i.e. clicking on your banner). Color can also be used to trigger emotion.
When color is used incorrectly, it can compromise your message and confuse your target audience. The interpretation of a color depends on culture, physiology of the eye, readability, your target audience's profession or industry, and personal preference.

* Banner colors and target audience culture
* Colors and legibility
* Psychology of color
* Banner colors and ad placement

Banner colors and target audience culture
When designing a banner ad, you should be careful about the colors you select if you are targeting a specific country or a global audience. For example, though the color purple is also associated with royalty in European countries, the color orange is associated with royalty in the Netherlands. The color white is associated with death in China whereas white is associated with purity in Western cultures.

Colors and legibility
How the human eye processes color is also a consideration for selecting banner colors. Purple is one of the hardest colors for the eye to discern, so it might not be a good overall color choice. On the other hand, yellow is the first color the eye processes. So if you were t try and call attention to some text on a dark-colored banner, yellow can be an excellent color choice. But if you were to use yellow as a background color of a banner, you might want to alter the color so that it is less stressful on the eye.

In order to make the text on a banner legible, it is very important to use colors that provide a high contrast. Black and white is the two colors that provide the highest color contrast, but white banners tend to have the lowest click-through ratios (CTRs).

Psychology of color
The type of profession you are in should influence what colors you will select for your banner ad. In the finance industry, the color red signifies financial loss. In the health care industry, the color red is associated with danger or an emergency. So using the color red in the financial or health care banner designs would not be a wise choice.

Blues, teals, and greens tend to be safe color selections because many of their psychological interpretations include security, professionalism, reliability, conservatism, and technology. (Most web-savvy people know to click on the blue, underlined text link. So using blue in a banner design can help with CTRs.)

Banner colors and ad placement
Finally, when selecting colors for banner designs, it is extremely important to consider where your banner ad will be placed. You want your banners to stand out a bit from the sites they are being displayed in, but you don't want your banners to be so ostentatious and obnoxious that they conveys the message, "CLICK ME CLICK ME CLICK ME." Your banner ads should blend well with the web pages, and talented banner designers will always take that into consideration.

As you can see, selecting colors for banner ads is not as simple as using colors based on personal preference. Culture, readability, the psychology of color, and other factors are all considerations in designing banner ads.

Content Management Systems & SEO Revisited

2009-03-12T11:27:00.002+07:00

Two years ago, I wrote an article entitled “Content Management Systems Equal Business Suicide.” The basic premise was that at that time, CMS applications were inherently devoid of basic SEO functionality. Building a new site, or converting an existing site to the existing CMS versions of 2 years ago was rapid way of consigning those sites to the oblivion of Google’s supplementary index. Lacking inbuilt search engine friendly URL’s, outputting duplicate titles, descriptions and keywords, no ability to have customised Titles that differed from Headings - all those things were extraordinarily bad elements.

Since then, things have changed markedly. These days, there are still deficiencies in evidence, but for the CMS applications that have survived the intervening 2 years, and those that have evolved since, most have addressed the basic SEO issues.

My personal favourite CMS is WordPress. Especially since version 2.5 there’s been a wealth of feature expansion in the core application, the availability of plugins that expand on the core functionality, and the advent of professionally designed Themes that have taken WordPress to new heights. All of this has allowed WordPress to blossom into a fully-matured CMS with exceptional Search Engine Optimisation features.

Lets take a closer look at the SEO functionality. As Google et al are attempting to analyse and categorise a web site, there are an estimated 200 individual elements that are calculated in the SE relevancy ranking algorithms. Every one of these you can get right improves your chances of attaining your full ranking potential. Individually, each element offers incremental albeit small gains, but collectively, they can add up to the winning difference in the ranking stakes for competitive search terms. Duplicate content is Google’s pet hate, and its vital to every site’s standing that every single page be accurately described and categorised. Here are 10 of the most prominent among the many opportunities to achieve this individualisation of pages are;

SEF URLS:
Search engine friendly URL’s are important, because inclusion of keywords in page URL’s are taken into account, and have a bearing on rankings - particularly on Yahoo. Being able to exercise total control over page URL’s is important, and WordPress allows this with Permalink mod_rewrite functionality, coupled with manual URL control on every page or post!

Meta-Tags:
There are several WordPress plugin tools to provide total control of title, descriptions and keywords, and these are easily installed and configured.

Titles:
Being able to control the off-page Title separately from the on-page heading is very important. The title’s 70 character limitation needs to be exploited to maximum effect, its the single most important on-site page SEO element! Page Headings are usually space-constrained, and in systems where the Heading automatically become the Title, you are deprived of a significant advantage.

Description:
The off-page Description (meta-tag) is a vital element in accurately describing the page contents. If each page has accurate, custom-written Description content, its used verbatim in the search engine results pages (SERP’s). In contrast, if you are forced to use a generic Description, then Google will helpfully do its level best to generate an ‘ad lib’ Description of the page based on content. The result of that ca neither be not so bad, or truly awful. Regardless, its essential that YOU have control of the Description, and that you use it to maximum effect!

Keywords:
Erroneously dismissed by some people as of no account these days, the Keyword (meta-tag) still has a part to play. Stuff it full of vaguely relevant garbage unrelated to page content and it will be ignored. Use it wisely, with specific / relevant long-tailed keyword search phrases and it can give you a little bit of SE traction - even on Google!

Image File Names:
Accurately name your image files, and include keywords relevant to the page. WordPress allows you to upload media and retain the original files names even when auto-generating thumbnail images etc.

Image ALT Tags:
Accurately describe your images using the Image ALT tag, and include keywords/phrases relevant to the page. WordPress Add Media tools allow you to add ALT text and captions, enabling inclusion of additional relevant text content. Used wisely, without spamming, its another useful element.

Anchor Text:
The words you use to link to other pages / sections of the site. WordPress Link Editor allows full control of anchor Text links, including the ability to specify “Hyperlink Title” which essentially work like Image ALT text - the title of the link pops up when the mouse pointer hovers over the link… Again, used wisely, its another useful SEO element.

CSS Dropdown Menus:
Many of the new, highly professional WordPress CMS Themes utilise CSS dropdown menus, which is extremely important in aiding search engines to locate and index internal pages. This also facilitates Google’s ability to pass Page Rank throughout the internal page structure!

Google SiteMaps:
Another delightful WordPress plugin is the automatic Google Sitemap Generator! Once installed and configured, every new page, post or edit of a page or post automatically updates the sitemap.xml page!

RSS Feeds:
WordPress RSS feeds are easily extended by installation of an onsite Feedburner email subscription service, where your posts and pages are automatically distributed to subscribers by email. Moreover, your Feedburner account and site feed gives your site a pipeline directly into the Google index! I regularly see WordPress posts that make it into Google Alerts distribution in less than 4 hours!

So, on that basis I’m happy to accord WordPress 10 out of 10 for SEO functionality. Couple that with more than 3000 available plugins to extend the core functionality, the thousands of available design templates or themes, the ease-of-use factor, robust software, ease of installation etc, and I think we’ve got a winning CMS formula.

Copywriting for Search Engines, Directories and Websites

2009-03-12T11:27:00.001+07:00

To get optimal listings in search engine and directory queries, keywords and key concepts must be placed strategically throughout your web pages. To summarize, you need these words in phrases in:

* Title tags
* Meta-tags (keywords and descriptions)
* Headings (if used)
* Body text, and
* Alt-attribute in the image source tags

When online marketing professionals optimize a web site for search engine and directory queries, they should not spend most of their time redesigning the layout (in HTML) or submitting the site to the search engines. Most of their time should be spent on researching, writing good copy that will index well in search engines, and writing thorough, accurate descriptions for directory submissions. Good web copy must contain well-researched and varied keywords and key concepts based on a web page's topic; accurately reflect the web pages' content; and be strategically placed throughout a web page as mentioned above.

Most sales and advertising "fluff" should be eliminated.

Here's an example (and one of our pet peeves). How many of you have seen this scam, "Put your printed brochure on the web!" Print advertising copy contains a lot of "fluff" phrases such as "service that is second to none." Search engine analysis? "Service" is a stop word in some search engines and will be ignored in a search query. "Second to none?" How many people do you know really search using that phrase? When we are looking for something on the web, we are going to type in exactly the type of product or service we are looking for, not sales and advertising "fluff."

Web copywriting should contain keywords and key concepts without all the "fluff." Web copy has to flow and be strategically placed to get your web pages ranked well in search engine and directory queries. Your potential customers will also appreciate being able to find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. That's just good customer service.

The one time that web copywriting is extremely important is your site submission to Yahoo. Although Yahoo reserves the right to change or modify the site description you send them, if you can submit a well-written description containing your most important keywords and key concepts without word stacking, Yahoo will likely keep most of your description intact.

Good copywriting is a necessary element of both online and offline marketing. If you do not have experience in writing good copy for the web, we recommend that you hire an online marketing consultant to initially write the copy for you. Then you can learn from the copy you paid for. The more practice you get at web copywriting, the better you will get at it.

8 Ways To Increase How Long A Visitor Stays On Your Site

2009-03-12T11:26:00.000+07:00

How long do people stay on your site when they get there? In this article let’s talk about 8 ways to increase how long a visitor stays on your site so you can achieve more positive responses!

Getting traffic to your website is only half of the battle. The other half is getting them to stay long enough to complete a positive action. The more positive responses you get from your website visitors the better your Internet business will do.

Do you use any type of site statistic tracking on your site? Google Analytics is very good and can tell you how long a website visitor is staying on your site.

Before we get to ways to increase how long a visitor stays on your site lets talk about what positive response is. Since we know that everyone who comes to your website is going to leave you want to get them to do something positive before they do.

Examples of a positive response would be subscribing to your newsletter, clicking on a pay per click ad, filling out a lead form, bookmarking your site, subscribing to your RSS feed if you have a blog, going to another page on your site, buying something, contacting you by email for more information, and so on.

These are all things that someone could do while they’re on your site that would be considered a positive response. This also increases the amount of time that they spend on your site.

Okay back to the 8 ways to increase how long they stay.

1. Offer only fresh content. If your content is unique and interesting a person will spend more time reading it. Using private label right content is generally not the best way to do this because your visitors may already be familiar with it having seen it on someone else’s site.

2. Make your site interesting by adding video, audio, graphics, and so on to liven it up a little bit. Understanding how social media works is a very good way to come up with ideas to make your site more interesting.

3. Remind your visitors they can print out content on your website. While it’s printing it gives them an opportunity to look at other things on your site.

4. Encourage visitors to participate in a survey in exchange for a free gift. Once they complete the survey send them to another page on your site where they can access the freebie.

5. As opposed to sending your visitors to affiliate webpages, create a file with a redirect name to another page of your own. You will get credit for another page view and the time a person spends on your site will increase.

6. Pay attention to how fast your site loads. Today people are in a hurry and they do not have a lot of time to wait for webpages that load slow. If your pages are not loading fast consider what is slowing them down and change it.

7. Make sure your website is professional in every way. This includes the text that you are using on your pages. It should be easy to read and the pages themselves should be easy to navigate around them.

8. Brand yourself in every way so that as a visitor goes from one page to the next they always feel like they are still on your site. This includes having the same background color for every page including your blog. Your header should be the same on every page, and any logos should be consistent as well.These are 8 ways increase how long a visitor stays on your site. By keeping your visitors around longer you increase the odds of having a positive response from more of them.

8 Reasons to Start an Online Business in 2009

2009-03-12T11:25:00.000+07:00

The economy is down, we’re in probably the worst financial crisis since the great depression, and unemployment is shooting through the roof. Sounds like the worst time to start an online business right? Wrong! 2009 could be the perfect time to start a business if you are smart about it. Here’s the reasons why:

It’s Easy to do
Starting an online business is simple to do. It’s not like starting a normal business. It doesn’t take as much money or time to create an online business. There are many different ways to make money online including retail stores, affiliate advertising, creating a successful blog, article writing, or website/graphic design etc.

All those ideas are legitimate online businesses that have made a ton of money for a ton of people who are doing what they love. You can even create a successful online business in your spare time. You don’t have to quit your day job to be a success.

It’s Cheap
Creating a website is extremely cheap compared to starting up a store or office. Even if you don’t design your website yourself you can pay someone else to do it and you can get it done cheap by free lancers through sites like Guru.com. After you get your site designed you will need to pick a domain name. You’re going to want to pick a domain name that relates to what you are selling. After that you will need to pick a web host.

Web hosting is a service that takes all the files that make up your website and stores them on a server that is connected up to the internet 24/7/365. From their users will be able to access your website all the time. You can find reliable web hosting for $10-$20 a month, (Learn How to Pick the Right Web Host). After initial start up costs, the cost of maintaining a website are very small which allows you to be very profitable. All the choices you have to make here are extremely important ones for your site, but they can all be very cheap.

Creating a Website is Easy Now!
You don’t have to know HTML to create a good looking website now. Using programs like Adobe Dreamweaver allows you to create the design of your website and it creates the HTML that goes along with the design. There are simple tutorials all over the internet that tell you how to create a website. You can use sites like Yahoo’s Site Builder to drag and drop pictures to design your website. If you wanted to create a blog you can use free blog hosting sites like Google’s Blogger and create a blog in minutes.

E-commerce is Succeeding even in a Down Economy
While regular brick & mortar stores are struggling to even stay in business, e-commerce business is growing. According to the Department of Commerce U.S. Retail E-commerce sales numbers are up all around. The 2nd Quarter of 2008 saw $34.6 billion in sales which was a 2.9% increase from the 1st quarter and a 9.5% increase from the second quarter of 2007. Just recently on “Cyber Monday” (the online world’s “black Friday”) the online world saw another positive sign, consumers spent $846 billion on cyber Monday which was an increase of 15% over 2007’s cyber Monday.

Marketing is better/faster/more measurable online
Marketing online is all around better online. There’s an estimated 1.5 billion people who use the internet worldwide. That’s 21.9% of the world’s population. It has grown 305% from 2000-2008 and that number will only continue to grow as the populations in emerging markets like China, the Middle East, and Africa continue to get modernized.

The Internet is a force that you cannot ignore. There’s a lot of people that use the internet and the great news is they are easy to reach and easy to target. A survey by Hearst Electronics Group and Goldstein Group of business to business marketers showed that the “migration of communications budgets from traditional media to online has accelerated to the point where nearly half of all spending, 47 percent, is spent on online marketing techniques today."

The businesses are doing that for a reason, they can track their marketing methods online a lot easier so they can understand what their ROI is and decide where to put the money. Also it is easier to target people online than it is in the real world so it takes less money to make more sales. Some of the ways to advertise online include search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click ads, article marketing, blogging. All but the pay per click ads can be free. SEO is the technical term for optimizing your site and link building with the goal of getting to the top spot in search engines for a certain keyword.

This is important for the success of your online business because the majority of online users use search engines like Google to find what they are looking for. Being at the top spot in Google gets you the most traffic for the cheapest amount….free! There are tons of easy and cheap ways to market your website online.

Tracking…Online Analytics
I touched on this in the previous paragraph but this deserves more attention. Tracking how your business is doing in all aspects is important, no matter what type of business you have. When I say tracking your business I mean figuring out if you are putting your dollars in the right place. If users are leaving your site right away (a term called “bouncing”) maybe it’s because your site is not user friendly so you must re-design your website, if users are reading the content of your site but then leaving during the check out process maybe it’s time for a new shopping cart, it’s also important to know where your users are coming from and where they are going.

You can tell all of this by using analytics software that you can get online. Google Analytics is perhaps the best program that you can use to track your website and the best part is it’s completely free. All it involves is placing code that Google provides you on every page that you want the program to track. On a daily basis you can check to see how many people visited your site, what they looked at, how they came to your site, how long they stayed, where they exited from, and most importantly if they were a conversion and how they got there. That type of measurability is critical to any business and that and so much more is possible online.

Starting in a Bad Economy is a Good Thing!
Starting up a business in a bad economy can be a good thing if you are passionate about what you are doing. As Paul Graham pointed out in his essay the economy does not necessarily affect a startup it is the founders that make or break the company. Just ask Bill Gates of Microsoft or Steve Jobs of Apple both of which were started in the terrible economy of the 1970’s.

A down economy is an opportunity if looked at in the right light, by opportunistic entrepreneurs. A down economy means less competition, more companies/people looking to make deals, people looking for ways to save. It has become a well known fact that online is the place to get deals on just about anything you need. Retailers offering aggressive online discounts this year were able to increase sales from last year because they were able to adjust to a down economy because of the flexibility of online business.

Online businesses are cheap to start up and cheap to maintain, those saving get passed onto the customer in the form of great discounts. At the same time do not ignore the economy creating a website that shows people creative ways to save money would be a great site in a down economy, or a debt consolidation website, or shop and compare sites, or a community forum that lets people share the best deals. There are countless opportunities waiting to be filled in the online world.

It’s About Time You Start Doing What You Want to Do!
Who doesn’t want to own their own business? You get to be your own boss, make your own hours, and feel the joy of successfully having your own company. If you’re tired of your job or even just want to turn your hobby into a profitable venture an online business is the way to go. The best part is it does not have to take over your entire life. With an online business you can do a lot of the work in a short amount of time which means you do not necessarily have to quit your day job.

Do you like writing? Become a blogger, blogging is the hot thing in the online world right now and it takes all of 5 minutes to create a blog on blogger and not too much more time to create your own site with a Wordpress themed blog. You can write what you feel like writing about and make money doing it. Do you like a certain topic and you know a bunch of other people do? Why not start an online forum about it, that’s a great way to do what you want and profit off of it. There are plenty of businesses out there and an online business is the easiest way to get started.As you can see there are great reasons to start an online business in 2009. It’s the easiest, cheapest, fastest way to start your own business and it’s a growing market that basically anyone can be successful in, if your passionate about what you are doing. Make 2009 your year to start an online business, Get out there and Get Started.

7 Simple Ways To Build Traffic To A New Website

2009-03-12T11:24:00.002+07:00

Got a brand new website? That’s great, but nobody cares. OK, maybe that’s a little harsh. The truth, however, is that just having a website doesn’t get you much. Many business owners I meet are surprised to find, once we look at the numbers, that the shiny new site they had built not too long ago gets little to no traffic on a daily basis.

Many newcomers to the web make the mistake of thinking that just by buying a domain main and putting up your site visitors are going to happen by - something like when you buy property and build a storefront in a busy part of town.

It just doesn’t work that way. The web is harsh. You can have the best looking site in the world with great resources and content and go entirely ignored or unnoticed. It happens. It’s happening right now. Somewhere out there in the ether is a brand new gorgeous website loaded with great content, and nobody cares. Poor little lonely site.

But there is hope. Every website had its early days. Even sites that get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day started out with none.
Here are 7 simple things you can start doing right now to help drive traffic to your site.

1. Get some quick links from trusted directories
Link building is a long-term process with long-term goals, but for brand new sites with no history you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a number of directories out there that offer free and paid listings (subject to editorial review, of course).

Here are the ones I recommend:
1. Yahoo!
2. Business.com
3. JoeAnt.com
4. DMOZ.org
5. BOTW.org
6. Ah, what the heck - here’s a great list of directories sorted by SEOmoz’s Trifecta score - bookmark it and get started

2. Start blogging
OK, blogging isn’t for everybody (especially you boring people), but it’s a great way to build relevant content at your site on a consistent basis. It also gives your visitors/customers a way to engage with you. But please don’t make the mistake of being too “corporate” on your blog - do yourself a favor and check your Public Relations cap at the door. Don’t be afraid to discuss your mistakes, missteps you’ve made, and what you’ve learned from them as well as your triumphs. In short, be a human, not a brand.

3. Consider Paid Search
For new websites, the day when you receive all the traffic you need for free from search engines and other referrals is a long way off - if not just a pipe dream altogether. Often times paid search campaigns are a great way to get your site in front of your target market today. Be sure to keep your budget modest, though, until you’re confident in your ROI. Be sure to do your keyword research to find lower-cost “long tail” keywords - going after the big traffic keywords might be tempting, but it gets expensive the ROI is often not the best.

4. Use Article Marketing To Build Links
As with any tactic, I’d recommend using this one in moderation. Article marketing is, essentially, trading words for links. It can help with link building, but the quality of the links it garners is usually less than stellar.

Here’s how it works:
1. Write an informative article on your site topic (or something related)
2. Include an “about the author” section as well as links in the article that point to your pages using relevant anchor text
3. Submit the article through one of the many article syndication services (such as EZineArticles.com or GoArticles.com)
4. The deal is, anybody can come along and publish your article on their website - provided they use the article in its original format including the “about the author” section. So when the article is published, any links you include back to your site are published as well.

1. Guest Post At Relevant Blogs
This certainly requires some up-front investment, mainly in terms of building relationships with bloggers in your topic (a little brown-nosing never hurt), but it can help get the flywheel turning for your site like nothing else can. Take the time to make your guest post remarkable and smart - your host blogger will appreciate it, and it’ll improve the likelihood of attention coming back to your site (which you’ll link to in your guest post, of course). Links from blogs are some of the most powerful editorial links you can get - don’t underestimate them for a second.

2. Submit Your Site to Design Galleries
Is your website breathtaking to behold, beautiful enough to make angels weep? Yeah, sure it is. But seriously, if it looks pretty sharp there are plenty of web design galleries that accept submission for new sites and link to the sites they feature. Particularly for CSS-driven design there are a number of galleries that will consider your site for listing (provided your site uses CSS for layout/styling - and God help you if it doesn’t) - including CSSElite.com, CSSHeaven.com, CSSBeauty.com and many others. Just search in Google for “CSS design gallery.” Unless your site is ugly - in that case, I can’t help you, and stop asking me to look at it.

3. Sponsor a Local Event or Charity
OK, I admit this is kind of a tired tip - but it works! Especially for local small businesses. Is there a local event coming up in your community? A local charity that has a website? Not only will sponsoring such an event give you all of the normal PR benefits (and self-righteous bragging rights) that are the byproducts of charity, but any web announcement for the event will potential include a mention of your website as well as a link to it. And you can feel good about yourself for a change.

Bonus Tip: Be Patient
Alright, this one is cheap, I admit it. Not much of a tip. But it’s important to remember that you’re not going to see your unique visitors count skyrocket immediately for your new website. Most “overnight successes” actually take a few years to get going. And if you find yourself checking your traffic numbers on a daily basis, please do us all a favor - step away from the computer, go toss the ball around with your kid, maybe take your niece out for ice cream. Contrary to popular belief, staring at your site traffic data has no positive effect on it.

5 Surefire Ways To Generate Website Traffic

2009-03-12T11:24:00.001+07:00

The whole purpose of building a website is to get it noticed on the World Wide Web. However, without targeted traffic, your website will wither away and die. Traffic is the lifeline of a successful website business. In this short article, I am going to give you just 5 of the many possible ways in which to generate targeted traffic.

1. Article Marketing
Article marketing is one of the very best ways for driving targeted traffic to your website. Write an article between 300-500 words and submit it to some of the many article directories on the internet. Be sure to include a resource box at the end of your article with a back link to your site. Make absolutely sure you follow the rules of the article directories you are submitting to. Once your article is approved you can enjoy the traffic it brings for a long time to come.

If you have written an informative article with high quality content, it may be picked up and used by bloggers, ezine publishers and owners of newsletters. Just one article a day submitted to the directories could result in 30 articles sending you traffic on a daily basis.

2. Submitting Blog Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites
There are hundreds of Social Bookmarking sites on the internet today. Sign up for several and submit your blog posts. Be sure to submit your post in the right category. Somebody that is interested in Internet Marketing wouldn’t look in the Pets category!

3. Write Testimonials
If you have bought an online product and are happy with it, why not submit a testimonial? The site owner would be very happy to display your testimonial on their site to show other interested customers how great their product is. The beauty of doing this strategy is putting a link to your website on their website. If their website is popular it can generate a lot of traffic for you.

4. Forum Marketing
Forums are a great way for driving targeted traffic to your website. Find a forum that is highly targeted to your website and become involved with the community. You must also create a signature. With your signature, you should provide a link back to your website. Give the reader some value and provide a call to action to induce them to click on your link.

The biggest benefit of all with forum marketing is the fact that the community is a very tight knit group of people who are interested in the same subject, making them extremely targeted prospects.

5. Commenting
If, like me, you may have signed up for many newsletters. Upon reading the newsletter, and if you find it interesting, then why not comment on it? As most of the comments are moderated, it is in your best interest to say something useful and not just a one-liner such as: “Great Newsletter”. This doesn’t give value to the newsletter or to yourself, so think about creating an informative comment. You will provide a back link to your website. If the newsletter provider has a huge mailing list, then your comment and link will be in front of thousands.

These are just 5 of the very many ways in which you can easily generate huge amounts of traffic to your website for little effort and, best of all, for no cost.

Happy traffic hunting...!!!

5 Frequently Used / Abused SEO Link Building Techniques

2009-03-12T11:22:00.000+07:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) embraces multiple facets to produce viable shifts in rankings for specific keywords for the website in question. One of those facets is link building (a metric that uses link popularity and the authority of the referral to dictate a pecking order).

We all know SEO and positioning are important, but what are some of the more common link building techniques people use to promote their websites and build website authority. We will briefly discuss 5 frequently used and abused techniques for building links below, with their respective pros and cons.

1. Site wide links -
Site wide links are when another website adds you to a portion of their website that is duplicated throughout the entire site. Areas like the footer, in their navigation, on the sidebar or (blogroll) as it is commonly called. As a result, if the website gains trust, authority or page rank from Google, the site being linked to gets a boost in the SERPS (search engine result pages).

There is nothing wrong with getting links from people who genuinely like your site and wish to share it with others in this fashion. However, on the flip side, this technique can be abused rather easily and leave a questionably link profile particularly when the anchor text selected just happens to be something the target site wanted to rank for (such as their main keyword vs. the site name or brand). Like all things, moderation for building links is the key as well as diversity to create a balanced link profile.

Remember, SEO based on off page links alone are volatile, any change to the algorithm could devalue or suppress excessive noise from one site offering thousands of the same links from multiple pages with the same anchor text. Google and other search engines already have countermeasures in place for excessive over-linking, so once again, if is it within your control exercise moderation and do more than just acquire tons of links without backing them up with substance, traffic and user engagement.

2. Redirects -
Regarding redirects the most frequently used for SEO is the 301 redirect. 301 redirectshttp://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.63/t.gif are implemented at the server level so that pages were deleted that no longer served their purpose could still pass rankings and authority to another page. Say for example you ran a promotion for 6 months and thousands of people linked to you as a result, well that page represents a great deal in the search engine result pages and can be used to elevate other pages in your site.

However, if you delete it, all ranking and authority for that page disappears, so from an SEO perspective a 301 redirect (permanently moved to the following address) is an excellent solution. Once again, done for the right reasons this is a benefit, however this technique if used with the wrong intentions can be abused to load a specific page up with an immense amount of link weight (which invariably impacts the search engine result pages) if the target page is optimized properly.

The con of this technique is (1) if others redirect spammy sites at your domain (known as Google bowling) or (2) if massive link bait campaigns (using emotional triggers to incite links from media, powerful blogs or editorial sources) are then redirected at the new “real page” the link bait was actually attracting links for. This can be a virtual source of unlimited links for those with enough creativity to embrace the medium. Is it ethical or is it just marketing?, it is not our place to say. The purpose was just to show how something designed for one purpose can easily serve another when ranking and keyword positioning is at stake.

3. Social Media -
Social media is great for creating exposure, building RSS subscribers who are hip to identify with your core message. But many often use it only as a way to create backlinks to posts that have less than favorable appeal. It is a double-edged sword which implies to use it (to promote), but don’t use it the wrong way (to spam others with irreverent content). Etiquette is the only thing separating someone sharing something useful with others to plain and simple online noise and spam.

I suggest that you look for other ways to build links or, if you embrace social media that you do so respectfully, be a part of a community (don’t just look at it as a place to go and build links). Links all have different types of value, some are for ranking higher in search engines, and others are no-followed but can yield hundreds of visitors to your site.

Finding the right balance (and finding evangelists for your brand) are the ideal way to promote your content. Social media leaves an imprint which can be favorable or just essentially hike up your bounce rate (as hundreds or thousands of visitors dip in for one post and bounce back to other sites).

If used properly (from social media power users who have a following of thousands) with a specific message (that does not appear as an advertisement) social media can work effectively to expedite authority for your website. Once authority is gained, ranking for anything related to your topic is far easier, so it must be a part of the process rather than the objective.

4. Press Releases -
Press releases are an effective way to draw a new audience from using the news/ angle of appeal that search engines are fond off. Sure, the results are not long-lasting, but if leveraged properly with the right message, they can create a viral effect and lead to other unique opportunities.

Our take on press releases is, they should only be used when something is worthy of press, but once again, anything that can be used for good reason, can also be abused online. Since most services no-follow the links, don’t expect the press release to feed your pages with link juice (so to speak).

On the contrary, it is the value of the visibility that press releases create that inclines others to pick up your story, link to your site or visit your site as a result to investigate your offer. Make sure you have something worth saying and appeal to those who will take action.

The basis of the web is content and copy, which means that driving traffic through whatever means you use will not yield fruitful results, unless the copy speaks to your target audience. I offer thanks to Brian Clark from CopyBloggerhttp://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.63/t.gif for reminding us that everything has its place, and SEO without appealing content is just noise.

Think from the perspective of benefits and features with a compelling call to action. Over time, you will be able to gauge if using press releases as a viable marketing strategy for building links is suitable for your marketing objectives or not.

5. Directories -
Once the mecca of link building and link building services, directories have seen better days. In the past the main objective for a website was to be inducted into DMOZhttp://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.63/t.gif (the open directory project), which was an indication of passing a stringent review process. That was in fact until directories were abused and starting charging hefty fees for inclusion (starting the paid link conundrum) and automating the addition of sites without sufficient review. As a result, Google and other search engines devalued their reputation and pulled their ability to impact the search engine result pages in such a dramatic fashion.

Granted all directories are not created equal, the problem with most is that they are strained for link flow and the minute amount that they pass on to your site is hardly worth the effort (due to long periods of deeper pages not being indexed).

In order for a link to aid your website, search engines must index the page that link is on, so, if your link is buried 5 folders away from the root folder for a site that has thousands of outbound links and a disproportionate amount of inbound links, chances are that link is a dud.
Just like punches in bunches, directories do add up and can produce a substantial impact on search engines as far as sculpting a link profile for your website. However for all of those minor league links, one heavyweight with trust coming from a website that already has an affinity with the market or niche you are trying to rank for is worth its weight in gold in the long-run.
Quality directories (that pass rank and authority) still exist, you just have to know what to look for (like crawl rate, age of the domain, number of inbound links to that page and ensuring the links are capped on that page with no more than 40 outbound links).

While this list could most definitely go indefinitely highlighting the pros and cons of link building, the take away is quite simple. Understand your ranking objectives enough to know what the tipping point will require.

If your competition has used all of the methods above to create a substantial position, there is no guarantee that those same methods will work for you today. Ranking algorithms are constantly shifting in favor or out of favor with particular SEO link building techniques.

One thing is constant, language and since search engines are to a great extent based on information retrieval and assessment, the stronger the grasp of language and the cues you use as signals impart an imprint to search engines that identify what your site is about.

In layman’s terms,

(1) create topical pools of quality content if applicable or attract quality links from websites that are ranking for the key phrases you are targeting

(2) build your own internal link reputation (much like Wikipedia) by linking to yourself when applicable when there is a co-occurrence of keywords

(3) look for linking opportunities but more importantly make your content link worthy and our target audience will find you once the word gets out (such as using a press release).There is never a one and done method for securing a top position, it requires constant diligence and adaptation to remain flexible and fluid to accommodate change. By working with some of the ethical formats of the methods above, it is still possible to make a tremendous impact while really driving home your message with frequent updates by adding quality content to stay buoyant in search engines (in addition to building quality links).

3 Simple Tips to Make Your Website User-Friendly

2009-01-03T19:56:00.000+07:00

The one assumption you need to make to follow along with me in this article is “People Buy People.” It can be a hard concept for many people to understand and agree with. However, millions of spent dollars have proven this premise to me, so I consider it more of a law than a theory.

If you understand the rule that people buy people, then your website MUST have a pleasant atmosphere that allows the visitor to connect with you, your company and your products.

By now, you've heard me talk about our Celebrity Branding™ philosophies, and the fact that you need your picture on your website goes without saying. But, there are some smaller, often overlooked, areas that shouldn't be forgotten.

Here are three simple tip to make your website user-friendly:

1. Navigation
The navigation on your site is probably its most important element. If visitors find your site confusing or cannot successfully navigate through it, they will leave. Make your navigation bar as simple as possible. One of the worst mistakes is using an expanding navigation bar that makes the visitor scroll over it in order for the menu to reveal their options. Most often, this type of navigation bar has too many choices; your visitor doesn't know where to go, so they get flustered and leave.

Navigation on your site is an art, and you should direct your visitors through a logical path to where YOU want them to go (not to where they think they want to go). One way to do this is through call to action buttons or CTAs. We use these buttons on all of our sites; a visitor will go to a main page, and then we can direct them to the parts of that site that we want them to be aware of. We use this method instead of an expanding menu, because we find that it is more logical for visitors. With this method, you can direct visitors to where you want them to go, allowing you to control the buying process.

Quick Tip: most “expanding menus” are created in Macromedia Flash. Search engines cannot read Flash, and therefore they will not pick up these links on your website. If the search engines do not pick up the links on the navigation bar and these links are nowhere else on your site, they cannot accurately crawl or index your site. This is search engine suicide, because without even knowing it, you are stopping search engines from understanding what your site has to offer and from driving traffic to you.

A good rule of thumb is that a visitor should be able to get to every page on your site with two clicks from your home page. Now, this is not realistic for very complex sites. If your website is complex, you can have a sitemap to help visitors navigate. Some sort of search function may also be a good idea for your site.

2. Page Load Speed
It's hard to believe that some people are still stuck using dial up. Even if you have entered the world of high-speed Internet, no matter what you do, some websites will load slowly. (If you're frustrated using high-speed Internet, imagine the frustration of those on good ‘ol dial up!)

Page load speed is VERY important. I know that when I am surfing the Internet and I stumble upon a site that loads slowly, I get annoyed, frustrated, and don't browse the site for very long. If your website is loading slowly, you are probably losing out on valuable customers, no matter what business you are in.

In today's web world, we are seeing more and more images, audio files and videos. These things are useful, but you have to be careful that they do not affect the inner workings of your site (in this case, the time it takes for a web page to load). You want to be careful about the size of the images on your website. Both large-sized images and using too many images can cause your website to take too long to load, resulting in visitors leaving. Another tip is to convert videos into a jpeg (image) that only loads and plays the video when a visitor clicks on it. Yes, you may be adding more images to your website, but these are usually small image files; in the hierarchy of the web, a video will slow down your website much more than a small image.

Another factor that can influence the load time of your website is the amount of excess code you have on your site (that is a topic for another day - but ask your webmaster, and they will know what I am talking about).

3. Information
The number one thing that visitors look for is information. They are coming to your site to be educated about your products and/or services and, most of all, how THEY can benefit. With this in mind, it is critical for the information on your website to be accurate, complete and up-to-date. Visitors will leave your site in a split second if the information you are providing is old news.

What's that best way to provide up-to-date information on your website? The best way we suggest is through blogs and articles. By having a section on your website for blogs and articles, you can provide new, relevant and educational information to your visitors. Adding them is not only simple, but it is fast too!

So there are my three simple tips for the month on how to make your website user-friendly. Although this covered just the beginning of what your website should contain, don't worry, I won't leave you stranded– I'll reveal even more tips in next month's article!

3 Reasons To Have Your Article Published On Smaller Websites

2009-01-03T19:55:00.000+07:00

The main reason why website owners love article marketing is because it's an effective way to build long term traffic to a website.

Here's how that works:

When you do article marketing, you're writing articles on the general topic of your website, and then submitting the articles to article directories and other online publishers.

When website owners need content they will look at article directories and select articles that they'd like to re-publish on their website. Each time your article is picked up for re-publication, your resource box (including a link back to your website) is also published.

So, as more and more publishers pick up your article, you build more and more links.

Pretty much every person who's doing article marketing knows the power of building links and also that the links contribute to an elevated search engine ranking, but a question that I get repeatedly is this:

“What would be the benefit of having my article published on smaller websites? I mean, those websites don't have authority in Google's eyes–why bother with them?”

I would answer that there is definitely benefit to having your article published on websites of all sizes–big, medium and small websites.

The big websites are the ones that attract the most attention–everyone wants a link from a website that is seen as an authority in Google's eyes. But there are a few reasons why you should solicit publication on lesser known websites too:

1) Yes, one way that article marketing builds traffic is by increasing your search engine ranking for your keyword terms, but don't forget that traffic is also driven to a website through your articles themselves.

For example, a potential customer might find your website in one of the following ways:

*By doing a Google search for your keyword terms, and then finding your article or your website listed in the results.

*By stumbling across your article and then clicking the link in your resource box that leads to your website.

The first way is indirect traffic–a potential customer has to do a search for your keyword terms, and then your article or your website appears high up in the search engine rankings.

The second way is direct traffic–the person visits a favorite directory or otherwise stumbles upon your article, and then just clicks from your article through to your website.

A link from the bigger websites will aid your cause if you're trying to rise up in the search engine rankings. A link from an authority site can help boost Google's estimation of your article and in turn help your website jump up in the rankings.

But a link from any size website (even small ones) can help you build direct traffic. Direct traffic is independent of Google and search engine rankings–if a reader happens to see your article on a website, they can go directly to your website from your resource box.

For this reason, it is a good idea to have your article published on as many sites as possible. The more website's that pick up your article for publication, the more opportunities for your potential customers to see your article (and then click through to your website).

2) Imagine this–even a newbie website that has only 50 visitors a day creates 50 chances for your article to come before the eyes of potential customers.
Would you turn down the opportunity to speak to 50 potential customers if you had the chance?

I think not.

Then why pass up the opportunity to have your article published on as many websites as possible–small, medium and mega-sized sites?

3) What is a small site today is not necessarily a small site tomorrow.
Websites grow and change in their authority and ranking (thankfully!). Instead of discarding the idea of getting a link from a lesser known site, why not go for that link now, when the site is still in its infancy, and then ride the escalator up with their increasing success?

There is merit to receiving backlinks from online publishers regardless of size. Yes, the mega size sites offer more benefits, but that doesn't mean that links from other sites are worthless.

If you think about it, it's kind of like comparing mega bookstores with independent bookstores–this is Amazon vs The Corner Bookstore. When an author has a book that she wants people to buy, she will make certain that her book is available on Amazon, but she will also take an interest in the smaller bookstores.

As an article marketer, your article is your book, and it's your job to market it. Don't you want it appearing in as many “bookstores” as possible?

3 Quick and Easy Ways to Monopolize Google Rankings!

2009-01-03T19:54:00.000+07:00

I got into SEO back in 1998. Back in the day, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was much simpler than it is today. Most tricks like blatant keyword spamming and hidden key phrases worked like a champ. Even better, little tricks like these were usually OK to use. Not anymore.

In fact, most old-school tricks don't work today and many can get your pages banned. This is great news for you. Over the next few minutes I'll show you how to make Google absolutely LOVE your web pages and help you jump to the top!

Here is what you need to know… Google places about 90% of its ranking priorities on content and links. Keywords are still important, but only in your pages' content (not the META Tags.)

Sounds simple, right? Definitely! And it really is. First you find the best keywords and place them just right in your web page text. Next you get great inbound links. Then finally, you monitor your progress closely (and competition's progress.)

Step 1: Find the Best Keywords
Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in any keyword or phrase you think your target audience is looking for.

Tip: Use specific keyword phrases whenever possible. If you have a Web page dealing with floral delivery, think beyond just the word “flowers”, with its 257,000,000 competing pages on Google and try “sending flowers”, which has fewer than one percent the number of competing pages (at 1,940,000 pages) but plenty of people searching for it each month (”flowers” = 24,900,000 searches last month while “sending flowers” had 9,400,000.) Think about it for a minute… You can compete against less than less than 1% of the pages for about 40% of the possible targeted visitors. Now that's impressive! You have a huge advantage over 99.5% of your competition with just that single tip.

Now list the top three keywords and keyword phases in order from best to second best and so on. You'll need this for your content.

Step 2: Develop Killer Content
Content is your most important on page optimization resource. Don't ever forget that. It is what Google bases your ranking on, AFTER linking that is. Developing search engine friendly, “people optimized” content is vital to your success. Google can read a Web page just like a person does, thanks to natural text algorithms. And they can tell if you are writing your pages for real people or just trying to get higher ranking. Relax. With this tip, you will do both!

First, grab a pen and pad and call a friend. Tell him all about your product or service. You're talking to a friend so be natural and let it flow. Forget grammar.

Now end the call and write it all down. Write it word for word, as close as you can remember it. If you can record the call, that's even better.

Next, go through your newly developed page content and fit your top keyword somewhere near the beginning of the first sentence. Now try to find a natural place to insert your number two keyword; hopefully also in the first paragraph. If possible, try to get your third keyword somewhere in the second paragraph.

Now place each of your three keywords in the next three paragraphs; one keyword per paragraph. Just work it in naturally. If it doesn't fit, don't force it.

Avoid repeating any given keyword more than four times per page and mix it up a little. Use one of the keywords a little more or less than the others so it does not create a visible pattern.

When you get to your final paragraph at the bottom of the page, be sure to use your most important keyword in the latter half.

Step 3: Get Great Links and Monitor Your Progress
Today, quality inbound links typically account for more than 85% of your Google ranking success. Getting the best possible links is the critical step that will put your Web pages over the top. But don't stop there! Finding and landing these links is an ongoing task that needs to happen every couple weeks, at the least. Once you are on the right track you need to monitor your progress and your site's status (how any given search engine actually sees it). This will tell you not just where you are, but also where you are most likely to be. Years ago we had to do all link work and monitoring by hand, and it took a long time. I averaged about 16 hours per week for each site! My advice is to find a good SEO tool and let it do that work for you. If you get hold of the right product, it's the best money you'll ever spend.

I used WebPosition for almost three years but switched to another with automated linking, which I personally find the most time consuming part of any SEO project. Both are excellent products for tracking and reporting however (Please note that Google has since banned Web Position due to abuse but it still works great on other search engines and has very nice reporting features and worth considering if you own an SEO company with many clients.)

#1 Pick: http://www.SeoEliteWeb.com
Cost = $167 (actual cost: lifetime free upgrades and no annual fees)

Personal Results: 121 top 5 rankings on Google in 3 weeks; Mostly 1's and 2's.

Top Features: Finds best link partners; Automates the link building process; Provides great Site Monitoring on the major search engines including Google.

Comments: The linking alone was enough reason for me to buy it but I have since learned it does a whole lot more. I'm on version 4 after purchasing version 2 in 2005 and getting the free updates since.

#2 Pick: http://www.webposition.com
Cost = $389 WebPosition Pro or $149 Standard (actual cost: add $99 per year subscription fees for either)

Personal Results: 44 top 5 rankings in Google in 8 weeks; Mostly 3's and 4's.

Top Features: Site Monitoring; Excellent reporting (but now banned on Google); Site Critic

Comments: I stopped using this one because there were no automated linking capabilities. I did however enjoy the reporting. If you own an SEO company the reporting is great to have but be advised that Google has banned the use of this product against their site and blocks it.

Now you are ready to take on the best of Google and win. Good luck!

3 SEO Tips for Small Business

2009-01-03T19:52:00.000+07:00

With the economic downturn as of late, businesses are forced to be more careful with their marketing budget. The dichotomy however, is that small businesses need SEO more than any other type of marketing platform to keep afloat, reach a more targeted type of consumer and achieve a healthy ROI on dwindling margins due to inflation.

Not having deep pockets to throw away on ineffectual websites that exist soley for branding like the colossal corporate counterparts (the big brands that are publicly traded) means being more adept to identify advantage and moving quicker to secure a niche.

Most enterprise clients have a plethora of red tape and legality that even if they could make a push for specific keywords or market segments , the bureaucracy alone would slow the process to a crawl vs. their nimble and fleet footed small business who are competing for same market share.

So, what can a small business do to turn the tables on the competition large or small?

1) Tone down the PPC Spend Per Month - and focus on creating organic rankings.

Sounds simple enough, as you know PPC (pay per click advertising) is addictive and can be like crack in the sense that once you start using it, your hooked.

Why pay for 100% of the traffic when only 2 out of 10 people executing a broad match search actually click PPC links anyway? Just do the math and invest a few months in the less competitive phrases to wein yourself away from the clutches of PPC.

Most keywords can be acquired for $500-1,500 organically, unless they are competitive, which takes more time to chip away and produce the same results.

It is the same traffic/visitors clicking your link ultimately with organic rankings, the advantage is, that you do not have to pay every time they do, so it is an aggregate value amortized over time.

2) Specialize instead of brand - instead of thinking broad and attempting to optimize a series of competitive keywords.

Focus on ROI and target dozens of topical long tail keywords instead.

By targeting less competitive terms, you establish a foothold and can start building an organic link profile that indicates that your website is a go to source for related products, services and information. Granted it is an investment in time (to build authority) but the takeaway produces long-term effects that put money back in your pocket 10 fold over time.

3) Plan for the future - Start putting future tense landing pages with supporting content in the index so that when they mature, your website hedges itself as a result of diversity.

This tutorial on how to create a ranking juggernaut will provide a great overview on the process as well as how to develop website authority.

The competition is not going to decrease, so thinking about it will only let them dig in further, you need to take action and take action now to secure your place in search engines tomorrow. Whoever says rankings and SEO are dead are failing to grasp the adage of supply and demand. Consumers will always have a need to consume and as the methodology shifts (yellow pages to search engines, traditional search to personalized or mobile platforms), positioning is imperative across a variety of sectors which have the potential for conversion.

The lines of marketing and SEO are becoming mere facets of the other. To embrace one without the other is pointless. The conversion medium has evolved and necessity dictates that all businesses interested in achieving a higher / more efficient return on investment should also.

SEO is a great alternative to simply broadcasting your message through traditional (muted) channels . Just consider it a cost-effective opt-in method for consumers already searching for your targeted keywords and long-tail key phrases. It all boils down to exposure and opportunity, both are prevalent with SEO.

3 Hidden Traffic Tactics

2009-01-03T19:50:00.000+07:00

If you're like me, then you've probably heard all about article marketing, SEO, video marketing, social bookmarking, press releases, blogging, etc…

They are the cornerstones of Internet Marketing. And they work. But sometimes don't you just want to read about something new. I know I do. In fact, every time I discover a new traffic technique, it's like opening a shiny new present on Christmas morning.

And I'm hoping I can give you that feeling with this article, because I'm about to reveal 3 traffic methods that you may not have heard of yet.

1. Download Sites
You can get thousands of visitors with download sites, even if you've never programmed a day in your life.

Here's what I do. I take my articles and turn them into EXE files. This allows me to submit my article to hundreds of software directories, sending me hundreds of one-way links and visitors.

Now, here's a quick tip on how you can use this technique to build your subscriber list quickly. Require people to register for your software (in this case your ebook is considered software) before they are able to read your ebook. This allows you to grow your list quickly simply by recycling your articles and turning them into EXE files.

You can turn your articles into EXE files using some free software called WebSiteZip Packer. This software will allow you to turn an HTML page into a solid executable file (.exe) with an integreated HTML browser.

Quick Tip: This is an excellent way to get hundreds of one-way backlinks by using those PLR articles you have laying around.

Since you're converting the articles into software, you don't have to worry about duplicate content. Just one of your plr articles can now generate you 100's of one-way backlinks by converting it into software and submitting it to all the different software directories.

Here's a list of some of the top download sites you can submit to…

Download.com
Tucows.com
Versiontracker.com
Jumbo.com
freedownloadcenter.com
regnow.com
regsoft.com
5star-shareware.com
shareit.com
topshareware.com
passtheshareware.com
sharewarejunkies.com
softpedia.com
shareware.com

Plus, Google loves these authority sites, especially Download.com. I've found many of my software titles ranking on the front page of Google with these high-authority download sites.

2. Get your articles into Google News.
Google News has become very popular in the past couple years and can send you a ton of traffic. To get your article into Google news, all you have to do is get published on one of the many sites that is syndicated by Google News.

I personally use the American Chronicle.

You can sign up for an author's account and start submitting articles. Once your article is published, it will be listed on 20 sites owned by the American Chronicle as well as Google News.

This strategy can send you a lot of traffic, especially if you use the right keywords.

3. Webwire.com.
I have saved the best for last…

Webwire.com is a hidden gem that I have been using to rank on the front page of Google within 24 hours.

Here's a quick overview of how I am able to capture front page rankings…

First, I title my press release with the keyword phrase that I want to rank for. I have found that keyword phrases with a competition of less than 30,000 (in quotes) in Google rank really well.

I then make sure to include the phrase and variations in the first and last paragraph. Sprinkle it in but don't go hog wild.

This simple formula has landed me multiple front page rankings and thousands of visitors.

Choosing Shopping Cart Software

2008-12-19T02:51:00.001+07:00

Introduction
Choosing shopping cart software can turn into a tough job due to the large number of e-commerce solutions available on the market. Overall, it's almost impossible to say which product is the best one since their feature richness, pricing, flexibility and the range of extra services vary to a great extent.

Therefore, buying the right product which fits into your goals can save a lot of time and effort, while a mistake may turn into extra costs, additional months of work or even cause starting the whole project from scratch.

There are several key factors which should be considered while picking the right solution. In this article, I'll try to outline the most important steps that definitely should not be missed. The tactics described below may be varied according to your goals, however, following this advice will be useful in the decision-making process as a whole.

Key groups of factors

Who you are
In my opinion, the first thing you should ask is the role he's going to play in the online store functioning process. The key factor of this role (at least for small and medium businesses) is the level of a person's technical knowledge.

In most cases, technology is an issue for store owners , managers and administrators . Since each store needs its own unique design, functionality and storefront design along with the initial setup and server administration, you should clearly understand how these services could be purchased and what the manufacturer has to offer. Another important issue for this target group is the ease of administration and usage of basic functions.

Another group of users are web developers and designers who are technically skilled and usually maintain the store by themselves or develop e-commerce solutions for their clients (which usually involves complex code changes and development of extra functionality). For these people, the most important factors are: the quality of code, the ease of customization and add-ons implementation and flexibility of storefront design.

Types of shopping carts
All shopping cart solutions can be divided into two large groups: hosted and distributed.

Hosted carts are usually provided in the same manner as hosting services, which means that a customer has several predefined plans/packages (varying in number of products, monthly bandwidth, number of features, etc) to choose from. The pricing structure is also based on regular (monthly or yearly) fees. A hosting platform is provided directly from the manufacturer and the cart is usually activated without any actions needed from a client.

Hosted shopping carts are managed through the administration area which provides the interface to manage product catalog (add, remove items and edit their properties), define and change prices and so on. The storefront design can usually be altered by modifying templates, however, the access to the source code for hosted solutions is usually limited and it's not always possible to modify the functionality.

Distributed solutions are sold at a fixed price (one-time fee for a lifetime license) as a software package which should installed on any compatible server chosen by a customer. After the initial setup, the store can also be managed using the administration area.

Usually such products come with source code and thus can be modified or extended to suit your needs. However, such modifications require good technical and programming knowledge (or working with those that have those skills).

Overall, hosted carts are often preferable for store owners as more easy to use and administer while web programmers, designers and developers mostly choose distributed solutions due to their flexibility.

Additional services
While most shopping cart features can often be used right out of the box, it's important to note that in most cases online stores require some additional professional services.

For example, e-commerce software may come with a number of pre-installed design templates, but a serious store owner would usually have its own unique store look or integrating it's existing design into the storefront. Also, since it's impossible for an ecommerce product containing each and every possible feature or working the way which is totally suitable for everyone, a shopping cart manufacturer providing custom programming service is a good option in case you're planning to implement some extended functionality.

Another option worth checking is whether it's possible to get a fully-compatible hosting solution (since shopping carts usually have significant server-side requirements due to their complexity) and technical support (in case you need consultations or assistance in problem resolution).

Integration with external systems
Ecommerce software should not be treated as a standalone product, but rather as a solid ground for interaction between various components.

Not all operations are performed within the shopping cart engine. Most often, external services are used for payment processing, real-time shipping rates calculation, order processing systems, affiliate and statistics software, product directories and so on.

Thus, the richness of integration allows store owners to have a wider choice of services for their online business.

Technical support, forum & third-party solutions
Responsive technical support is another key factor which ensures that you're not left alone with your problems and, in case the assistance is needed, you can be sure to receive a thoughtful response or a solution in a reasonable amount of time.

Support schemes from different companies may vary in type and costs. For shopping cart vendors, technical support is often on a pay-per-incident basis, or yearly/monthly flat-fee contract. Free technical support for ecommerce solutions is quite rare and may not always be effective or timely.

Forum activity is also a good indicator since it can be a good, free source of knowledge and assistance from experience software users.

In addition, it is advisable to check if third-party vendors offer modules or services related to a chosen e-commerce product to ensure that you will have a decent choice of extra solutions.

Tips and advice for research

Requirements
First of all, before proceeding with the actual product research, I'd advise that you collect the list of key features which are necessary for your upcoming online store. Such a checklist will allow you to ensure that all (or most) of them are present while examining features lists for chosen candidates.

Looking in search engines using relevant queries
Next, you may proceed with picking products for comparison. To find the most popular solutions, start searching in Google/Yahoo/MSN using relevant search phrases characterizing the product, like “shopping cart software”, “ecommerce solution”, “online store builder” etc.

For each query, pick products from top ten or top twenty search results. Visit their websites, compare product features and services presented there, pricing and any other information that you may consider relevant.

Looking for reviews and comments on forums and directories
For each product in your list, you would surely be interested to know what others have to say. In this case, independent sources provide valuable additions to official information from software vendors.

Most likely, product profiles along with customer reviews can be found on large script and software libraries like HotScripts, Freshmeat and Download. Also, check out some comparison sites, for example, Epinions and Shopping Cart Reviews. Also, you may search through archives or start a new thread with your questions at popular IT forums, like SitePoint or WebmasterWorld.

Contacting sales department with your questions
Finally, I'm sure that for your short list of solutions, some questions may still remain. This is a good reason to contact a vendor's sales team to find out their responses. Do not hesitate to do it, since the quality of feedback and attention to you as a potential client is worth checking before you actually proceed with the purchase.

Conclusion
Choosing shopping cart software may not seem easy since it involves significant effort from a serious customer. However, the rewards for the effort is obvious: you get a product which fits into your goals and allows you to concentrate on sales and marketing without worrying about the technical side. Moreover, as a client, you get to know the software vendor before buying a product and ensure that the technical side can be handled without a problem. Good luck in your research!

Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment By NOT “Shipping” Your Customers To Your Competitors!

2008-12-19T02:49:00.000+07:00

According to a recent Stompernet study, the industry average for shopping cart abandonment is 59.6%. Shopping cart abandonment” means that someone goes to a website, reads the sales letter, and clicks on the buy link to go to the secure order form, but they don't finish filling out the form. So, this means that for every 10 people who click on a “buy” or “order” link to go to a shopping cart, only four (4) actually complete the transaction.

And that's in an OPTIMAL environment, assuming the overall site traffic is high-quality and targeted, and the order process is crystal clear and caveman-easy.

Pretty sobering, eh?

Where do they all go?

We usually have our clients start by checking on their shipping rates. The Stompernet study also reveals that one of the top causes for shopping cart abandonment is that shipping is too high, or numerous options make it too confusing.

There are some fast adjustments you can make WITHOUT having to get into programming or custom software if you use a solution like MyEasyOnlineStore.com or Infusionsoft.com,

3 Easy Ways to Stop Shopping Cart Abandonment Resulting From High Shipping Prices:

1) Avoid real-time shipping tables that offer too many shipping choices.
Here's something we actually encountered.

To buy a $14.95 CD, the “real time shipping” on a shopping cart gave them prices anywhere from $6.82 to $68.44 for various air, ground, and rush options for shipping. Of course customers would leave.

It's just too much to think about. And seeing the option to pay $70 to get a $15 CD the next day really jumped out at the customer. They left, saying “shipping's too expensive.” Even many customers who bought said “wow, that's a lot to pay to have it shipped.”

2) Have only one or two shipping options
Replace that long shipping table with statements like:
“It's $2.50 shipping, and you should get it in the mail in 2-3 business days.”

“Price includes all shipping and handling. Orders are typically shipped the same day we receive them.”

See the difference?
We recently had a client end their real-time shipping calculations, end rush-shipping options, and simply offer two rates (one domestic and one international.)
Their shopping cart abandonment rates dropped and their conversion rates went up a consistent 5% with just that one change. And, the fulfillment house said that the client is having far few instances of collecting “too little” shipping than they did when it was real-time.

3) Don't do rush shipping - offer instant downloads
If there's any reason why a customer would “need it right now,” instead of rush shipping, how about adding an instant download option?

This way, not only can your prospects have it RIGHT NOW (instead of “tomorrow”) but then you're also spared the headache of making sure “rush” orders, indeed were “rushed.”

Bottom line:
When it comes to shipping, get to the bottom line and make it easy. When interested customers have to stop and think about shipping, they hesitate. It gets right in the way of the sales momentum.

Give prospects too much to think about and they'll think about buying somewhere else. This means you lost customers for life!

So, keep it simple - and you will reduce shopping cart abandonment fast.

Now of course, there are many other factors that will affect your website sales conversion and shopping cart abandonment rates. And, that's why I, now invite you to get a website review “live” on screen capture video that will reveal right in front of your eyes easy, understandable and proven shortcut secrets to plug your specific profit draining leaks. We'll give you our NEW, FREE e-Book: “Top 10 Deadly Mistakes That Will Cost You Traffic & Sales.”

Here's to decreased shopping cart abandonment rates and increased website sales conversion rates!

4 Easy and Proved Ways to Pull in Traffic to a New Website

2008-12-19T02:47:00.000+07:00

The reason so many people fail online so quickly is because they don't get traffic, at least not enough of it.

The problem is, people end up spending money on advertising without making much (if any) profit back, or they simply spend too much time trying to get free traffic and burn themselves out.

Of course, once you're successful you can pay someone to get you the traffic, but how do we get out of the never ending cycle of trying to get traffic without wasting time and money?

Well, I am going to start with the fundamental tasks that you should focus on first, then we'll take it from there…

1. Directory submissions.
This can be achieved using automated submission software or can be done by hand. It's a little dull but will result in lots of back links to your website for better visibility in the search engines. This is pay off as you add more content and back links to your site.

2. Social bookmarking.
This is about submitting links to the major Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Propeller and Reddit (to name just a few). The great thing is you can use software such as socialmarker.com to make the process far easier. You can also buy inexpensive software to automate the whole process.

The benefit of social bookmarking your content is so that you gain back links from these authority sites (which is essential for being found in the search engines) but also, if you content is worthwhile and interesting, you increase the chances of your submission being passed around other readers really quickly, which can of course result in a lot of traffic to your website.

3. Back links.
Back links are the backbone of getting your pages listed high in the search engines. The more people link to your site naturally (i.e. without being paid or listing your site in some sort of link farm where the site linking to you is junk), then the better your rankings will be in the search engines. Not to mention the direct traffic that will come from the actual links from other sites too.

4. Collaboration.
Most people want to be the “one person wonder” or the sole entrepreneur in their business, which is fine. However, don't underestimate the sheer power of teaming up with other well established websites directly and offering your content, help or other services in exchange for some exposure to your own website.

The classic “I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine” effect comes into play here and trust me, it works like a charm providing you genuinely approach people to help them first.

There are of course, many other ways to start getting traffic to your site such as writing articles like this one, or getting involved with many of the Web 2.0 properties out there online today. The more social you become with your website at other people's parties, the more people will come to your party when you come to tell them about it…just like real life isn't it?

Increase Website Profit Online with Online SEO and Marketing Content

2008-12-19T02:45:00.000+07:00

You can easily increase you website profit online if you have the right marketing content and use good online SEO to promote it. The benefit of good online search engine optimization is that it can earn you an avalanche of free traffic through high search engine listings, while at the same time pointing prospects to some good online content.

The question is what is that content, and what online SEO should you be using? The answer to the first part of that question is obvious: the content you use must relate to the topic of your web page, and each web page must be optimized for one keyword, and one keyword only. Where most people fail with their online marketing is that they try to be all things to all people, and are not specific enough in targeting prospects to the right website pages.

To increase web profit online, it is essential that your marketing content is highly focused to the topic or product in hand, and that your online SEO is spot on, missing none of the elementary aspects of SEO, while taking advantage of the more advanced search engine optimization techniques that the vast majority either ignore or are unaware of. You can't do much about other people's ignorance, but you can sure take advantage of it!

Doing so, however, might take some specialized information on online SEO techniques and how to apply them to your advantage. You will no doubt be aware of the simple Meta tag rules, and how to use heading tags in your body content, but how are you with internal linking strategies, or being able to lead spiders by the nose around your whole website exactly as you want them to visit each page? No? Then you have a lot to learn.

Intimate knowledge and understanding of search engine optimization techniques such as the correct use of the ‘nofollow' and ‘noindex' tags can be critical to your success. The same is true of an understanding of latent semantic analysis and how Google is applying it to the Bigdaddy algorithm. How about the correct use of images, video and Flash? Are you fully conversant of how Google looks upon these? Probably not, because it might surprise you to know that Flash is not what is used to be in the eyes of Google spiders, and that the vast majority still does not know how to properly use images to their maximum benefit.

Marketing content is also very important, and writing articles is an excellent way to generate content both for your web pages and to use on article directories to advertise them. You will sell nothing if your web pages get no visitors, and two of the best ways to achieve that are to get a good listing on search engines for your main keyword and to publish articles that contain an advert for the relevant web pages in the author's resource.

Marketing content can also be in the form of well written and SEO optimized articles, and in order to increase web profit online you must have good search engine optimized marketing content. Without that you are dead in the water, because your web pages will never be listed on Google, which is the most important of the search engines.

So, focus on your online SEO and your marketing content and you will increase your web profit online as a result of that. It is not as simple as you might have been led to believe, but if you can find the right mentor then you should find it a fairly simple task as long as you have a reasonable product and know how to market it online.

Article Marketing is Hot, Article Content is Not

2008-12-19T02:42:00.000+07:00

I've been reviewing articles for newsletters and sites for over 10 years and about 7 years ago I launched GoArticles.com, now one of the largest free article content directories on the Web. In that time, the volume of article content being pumped out has mushroomed, but the overall quality has seriously declined. One of the main reasons for this decline has been the growing realization by webmasters and marketers that articles are an effective and free means for acquiring back links and traffic.

Article writing has become a red flag drawing would be writers from every walk of life and every area of real or imagined expertise. Just like web sites spawned search engines and a host of secondary support services (SEO, site submission, etc.), article writing has given birth to article directories, article submission services, ghost writing, and article SEO. Article directories and article search engines are now struggling with the same problem that web search engines have grappled with for years - crap content.

Here are some of the most common article submission problems I've seen:

1. Blatant copyright violation and plagiarism.

2. Short advertorials trying to pass as articles.

3. Articles that have a catchy title and absolutely no worthwhile content. Generally, the publication guidelines for these articles are longer than the article.

4. Recycled article content. The topic and the content has been written about ad nauseum.

5. Software generated articles. Read like the author was on drugs.

Winnowing through the mountains of useless published content has become a full time endeavor for article directories, newsletter publishers and anyone looking for useful information. The demand for quality article content hasn't waned but the challenges for the article content industry continue to grow.

5 Basic Rules of web page design and layout

2008-12-02T11:46:00.000+07:00

Your web site should be easy to read
The most important rule in web design is that your web site should be easy to read. What does this mean? You should choose your text and background colors very carefully. You don't want to use backgrounds that obscure your text or use colors that are hard to read. Dark-colored text on a light-colored background is easier to read than light-colored text on a dark-colored background.

You also don't want to set your text size too small (hard to read) or too large (it will appear to shout at your visitors). All capitalized letters give the appearance of shouting at your visitors.

Keep the alignment of your main text to the left, not centered. Center-aligned text is best used in headlines. You want your visitors to be comfortable with what they are reading, and most text (in the West) is left aligned.

Read details on how to make your web site and web graphic images easy to read.

Your web site should be easy to navigate
All of your hyperlinks should be clear to your visitors. Graphic images, such as buttons or tabs, should be clearly labeled and easy to read. Your web graphic designer should select the colors, backgrounds, textures, and special effects on your web graphics very carefully. It is more important that your navigational buttons and tabs be easy to read and understand than to have "flashy" effects.

Link colors in your text should be familiar to your visitor (blue text usually indicates an unvisited link and purple or maroon text usually indicates a visited link), if possible. If you elect not to use the default colors, your text links should be emphasized in some other way (boldfaced, a larger font size, set between small vertical lines, or a combination of these). Text links should be unique -- they should not look the same as any other text in your web pages. You do not want people clicking on your headings because they think the headings are links.

Your visitors should be able to find what they are looking for in your site within three clicks. If not, they are very likely to click off your site as quickly as they clicked on.

Your web site should be easy to find
How are your visitors finding you online? The myth, "If I build a web site, they will come," is still a commonly held belief among companies and organizations new to the Internet. People will not come to your web site unless you promote your site both online and offline.

Web sites are promoted online via search engines, directories, award sites, banner advertising, electronic magazines (e-zines) and links from other web sites. If you are not familiar with any of these online terms, then it is best that you have your site promoted by an online marketing professional. (See our section, What to Look for in an Online Marketing Company, for some general guidelines.)

Web sites are promoted offline via the conventional advertising methods: print ads, radio, television, brochures, word-of-mouth, etc. Once you have created a web site, all of your company's printed materials including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, etc. should have your URL printed on them.

Not only should your web site be easy to find, but your contact information should be easy to find. People like to know that there is a person at the other end of a web site who can help them in the event that:

1. they need answers to questions which are not readily available on your web site;
2. some element on your site is not working and end users need to be able to tell you about it, and
3. Directory editors need you to modify parts of your site to be sure that your site is placed in the most relevant category.

By giving all relevant contact information (physical address, telephone numbers, fax numbers, and email address), you are also creating a sense of security for your end users. They can contact you in the way that makes them feel the most comfortable.

Your web page layout and design should be consistent throughout the site
Just as in any document formatted on a word processor or as in any brochure, newsletter, or newspaper formatted in a desktop publishing program, all graphic images and elements, typefaces, headings, and footers should remain consistent throughout your web site. Consistency and coherence in any document, whether it be a report or a set of web pages, project a professional image.

For example, if you use a drop shadow as a special effect in your bullet points, you should use drop shadows in all of your bullets. Link-colors should be consistent throughout your web pages. Typefaces and background colors, too, should remain the same throughout your site.

Color-coded web pages, in particular, need this consistency. Typefaces, alignment in the main text and the headings, background effects, and the special effects on graphics should remain the same. Only the colors should change.

Your web site should be quick to download
Studies have indicated that visitors will quickly lose interest in your web site if the majority of a page does not download within 15 seconds. (Artists' pages should have a warning at the top of their pages.) Even web sites that are marketed to high-end users need to consider download times. Sometimes, getting to web site such as Microsoft or Sun Microsystems is so difficult and time consuming that visitors will often try to access the sites during non-working hours from their homes. If your business does not have good brand name recognition, it is best to keep your download time as short as possible.

A good application of this rule is adding animation to your site. Sure, animation looks "cool" and does initially catch your eye, but animation graphics tend to be large files. Test the download time of your pages first. If the download time of your page is relatively short and the addition of animation does not unreasonably increase the download time of your page, then and ONLY then should animation be a consideration.

Finally, before you consider the personal preferences of your web page design, you should consider all of the above rules FIRST and adapt your personal preferences accordingly. The attitude "I don't like how it looks" should always be secondary to your web site's function. Which is more important: creative expression/corporate image or running a successful business?

10 Easy Search Engine Optimization Tips

2008-12-02T11:45:00.000+07:00

Be bold. Use the tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page.

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You've heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else's article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don't overdo the anchor text. You don't want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

Do you need to tweak your ecommerce website?

2008-12-02T11:42:00.000+07:00

As an owner of your own ecommerce website, how do you know when is it right time to revamp and tweak things? How do you find things are not working the way it supposed to?

Website owners are aware of the time and stress involved to go through the entire process of building a website that works for their business. The feeling of relief when the site goes ‘live' is immense. The result being that entrepreneurs are so darn glad when the job is finally over, that they just don't want to even think about changes or God forbid a new website design anytime in future! Unfortunately, in this age of rapid technological changes and virtual access to just about anything the customer wants, ignoring your website would be a disaster.

Just as there are indications before a natural disaster strikes similarly there are indications that your website might be headed towards disaster, if you do not upgrade it when required.

Be alert to the following signals that indicate when your ecommerce site needs to be tweaked, upgraded or redesigned to continue serving your business in the best possible manner:

1) Difficulties with various browser platforms:
Your e-commerce website is the heart and soul of your online business. Imagine if it looks disfigured on different browsers (IE, Fox, Netscape, etc). Such cross browser issues might not surface immediately, but when the browser's upgrade their own software, the results can be quite damaging for your website. Problems could be as minor as graphic design defects to major issues like functional problems, shopping cart problems, problems with online payment etc. Such problems will virtually push your visitors away from your site to a faster, quicker and sleeker competitor out there, who can make life easier for the average online shopper.

Point to remember : Always ask the web designer to test your website on various platforms and to personally test this to ensure the website coding is compatible on all the major web browsers.

2) Business Model has changed or diversified:
No business owner can afford to work with a static and stagnant business model, if they plan to grow and succeed. Innovation, research and development are part and parcel of every business, ensuring products/services stays in line with the current needs and requirements are in alignment with your industry, competitor and clients. Changes could be minor ones in the product/services or major ones like offering brand new products or services, or broadcasting changes when your firm expands and enters diverse industry verticals.

Point to remember : It becomes very imperative to reconsider the changes to your business and make sure the same is reflected factually, accurately, lucidly in a timely manner in the structure, design and strategy behind your website.

3) The site looks dull and old:
Online visitors are bombarded with creative visual stimulants and images with latest technological aids from all the sides. If your website in comparison looks like it was made in 1990s, the race is over before it began. Your website is definitely outdated if it's chunky, has slow loading graphics, and has an old table layout and frame, if the various table design panels loads separately and irritatingly slowly, if there are very few eye catching graphics, flash, animations to attract and retain attention throughout the site or if it's too overloaded with text. An e-commerce site cannot survive, if it's so behind the times. Besides creating a poor impression that you don't care enough about your business it also shows your complete lack of awareness when it comes to technological innovations.

Point to remember : Never lose touch with technological changes occurring in your particular industry. Check out the competitor's site, other relevant industry sites, ask customers their preferences, and encourage them to complain (if necessary) about problems faced while shopping online on your site. This will give you precious nuggets of intelligence to keep your site modern, user friendly and credible.

4) Your site is annoying your customer:
Yes, website can annoy online visitors. According to a recent online survey the following were major pet peeves of online visitors:

a. 93% of consumer said POP-UP ADS extremely annoyed them

b. 89% were annoyed by REQUESTS TO INSTALL EXTRA SOFTWARE

c. 83% noted LOG-IN / REGISTRATION PROMPTS (to access content).

The result was: 75% of customers said they'd never return, 74% of customers said they would unsubscribe from the company's messages, 71% said they viewed the company in a negative way and 55% said they bad mouthed the firm to friends or associates. (That's dangerous!)

Other extreme irritations include:

a. Dead links (86%)

b. Confusing navigation (84%)

c. Slow-loading pages (83%)

d. Ineffective site-search tools (80%)

e. Moving text (59%)

f. Poor color, fonts and format (55%)

Point to remember: It is good to make use of various online marketing tools and technology available at your disposal. But don't go overboard and clutter your site with unnecessary features to such an extent that it annoys your customer and makes them view your ecommerce site negatively. Keep the site as clean, simple and as user friendly as possible. The goal is to make them shop and not run away.

5) Textual Content on your site is a turn off:
Have you ever sat down and read the content (site text) aloud? Try it. Does it make you cringe? Do you sound phony? Are your claims too tall, to be believable? If you yourself feel the content sounds insincere and information is not up to date/ wrong/misguided, imagine the plight of your online visitors.

Point to remember : Seek professional content writer's help, if you are not good at business communication and especially online content writing. Although it might cost initially, it is truly worth every penny you spend.

6) You are not proud of your site:
If you find yourself feeling apologetic when referring your ecommerce site or handing out your business card, then it's obviously time to tweak your site. Your website should be a source of pride for you and your employees. If you find yourself apologizing for outdated information, broken images, poor design, difficult navigation or anything else on your site, then you need to redesign the site without delay. Your website offers your clients and prospects an easy access to information on your business and it is very important to have a site that is top in shape and looks impressive and makes your client believe that your business is in good shape.

Point to remember : View your online website as an investment that needs regular inputs in terms of resources, time, energy and funding to help it grow strong and turn into a profit centre for your business.

7) The Navigation Has Become Confusing
As websites grow, so does the visual hierarchy of links. Your site may have started with only a few web pages and now you realize you have so many links that it's hard for visitors to navigate through all your content. An overgrown or scattered link structure is a good reason to redesign your existing site. Below are some solutions to interface design:

• Drop Down Menus

• Collapsible Navigation

• Dynamic Flash Menus

• Good Hierarchy Layout

• Site Map

Point to remember : Redesigning your site “just for looks” is definitely not the best move. There could be existing elements that are working with your current website that you may wish to consider incorporating into the new design. Thinking about your visitors and search engine friendly web pages is also crucial. You should analyze your web statistics to find out which pages are most popular, helpful to visitors, and required so that you can include them into your website redesign.

Last but not the least, poor customer service:
Ecommerce sites are tricky since there are still many barriers and prejudices plaguing the mind of the customers when they go online to shop. The only way to remove this and help them give the assurance they need to take that plunge and ordering online, is offering them superb customer service.

Since they cannot, see, touch, feel the product or service before buying, it is all the more important to make your firm as humanized as possible. If your ecommerce site fails to address issues sent on inquiry form or contact us form, if customer do not receive confirmation with shipment details, if your customer feels cheated/fooled/scammed after buying from your site, then your business will not be successful for long.

As an ecommerce site owner, ensure to go step ahead of the normal website to provide instantaneous support and help to your customers. If it's possible to offer live help service, it would be great. If not, display your customer care contact information very prominently on all pages and encourage your customers to call on your toll free numbers to sort their problems. Read and re-read FAQ section to make sure you have covered all the doubts and fears faced during online shopping, no matter how ridiculous or stupid it might sound to you.

Point to remember : Reassure your customer and never make them feel they were a fool to buy from your site. The feeling of being ripped/cheated/scammed online, will lead to severe loss of reputation, trust and ultimately erode your survival.

Using logos in banner designs

2008-12-02T11:40:00.000+07:00

When is it preferable to use a logo in a web banner? While displaying your logo may be essential for print and related media promotions, a logo on a banner deserves serious reconsideration.

People react to ads differently on the web than other types of media. A logo in a banner usually screams "advertisement" to the audience, and web pages are already oversaturated with banner ads. Visitors usually don't want to see ads when they come to a web site. Visitors are expecting to find information or entertainment.

One of the most ineffective banners is one that contains a logo and a company slogan. How does that banner ad benefit your audience? What reason does the viewer have to click on to your site? None! You've just said in your banner "look how good I am" rather than thinking "look what good I can do for you."

There are some instances when a logo in a banner ad can be helpful: one is for "branding" purposes, that is, getting your company name out in public so people are more likely to remember your company, product, or service. Some companies purposely create branding banners when their logo or name is already well known with the public, such as Coke or Microsoft. Other companies using banner ads just to tell the public that their business' services will be available soon.

Companies who use banner advertising for branding are companies which
(a) are already well known to the public, and
(b) have a large advertising budget to feature their name in many places. And that means for the majority of businesses, using a company name and/or a slogan in a banner ad is an ineffective way of obtaining high CTRs (click-through-ratios).

So if your company is not a big, well-known company, then how do you get people to click on to your site through your banner ad? Design your banner with the appearance that it will provide information or solve a problem if you click on it. If you have to include your logo on the banner, then make sure the logo is not the main focus of the banner. Make your logo small and place most of the emphasis on the call-to-action.

Logos in banner ads can generate better results if they are part of a keyword search. Say for instance, you have purchased keywords from a portal site, such as Yahoo, where anyone who enters keywords in a search query will come to a web page on the portal's site that has your banner displayed. Because you have already narrowed down your target audience, and people who have come to the particular web page are more likely to be looking for what you provide. A logo that says what your company let the visitor may is more likely to click on your banner and go to your site.

In conclusion, we rarely recommend that companies use logos in banner ads because those banners tend to have the lowest CTRs. The only times we recommend using logos in banner ads is for branding purposes, but expect low CTRs.

7 Ways to Use Keyword Analytics to Your Advantage

2008-12-02T11:33:00.000+07:00

You should be paying very close attention to which keywords are driving traffic to your site. If someone at your company isn't digging into your keyword referral reports in your analytics tool, you are leaving money on the table. Here's a list of seven ways to effectively leverage your keyword analytics (for both organic and paid search traffic).

1. Peek inside the minds of searchers
Often we as marketers think we know a lot about how people search. The truth is, there are a lot of different ways to search and it varies by industry and from one individual to another. By analyzing the keywords and phrases that are driving traffic and sales to your website, you can find out how your customers search to find your site. What adjectives or other modifiers do potential customers search on? What order do they search.

2. See which keywords are working for organic search
If your site is showing up on the first page for some of those keywords, how much traffic are you getting from those organic listings? More importantly, how many leads or sales are you getting from those keywords? You will sometimes be surprised at which keywords drive the most traffic. Often it's not the keywords you think will be best, and that's why you have to watch your keyword referral reports to see which keywords are working.

3. Determine which keywords are not driving traffic
If you're on the first page of Google and you get zero clicks, it's time to find some new keywords. Stick with the keywords that drive sales and ditch the keywords that don't work. There is a huge difference in click through rates depending on the position your site is listed in, but if your site is anywhere on the first page of Google, you should expect some level of traffic, or you're not targeting the right keyword.

4. Find keywords that work in PPC that can be used for SE
The nice thing about PPC search advertising is that you can choose exactly which keywords your ad shows up for. The thing that sucks about PPC is that you have to pay for every click. So why not take what you've learned from your PPC campaign and make sure you're focusing your SEO efforts on the right keywords? You'll usually find that a first page organic listing for the same keyword will send a lot more traffic than a paid listing for the same phrase, and the price per click is way better.

5. Find keywords that work for SEO that can be used for PPC campaigns
The same idea for taking PPC keywords into your SEO campaign works the other way, too. Organic search listings will bring people to your site for all kinds of different keywords–including tons of keyword combinations that you never would have thought to include in your PPC campaign. If you notice a particular phrase that drives a lot of sales from a unique organic search keyword, you should try it out in your PPC ads. You'll usually see a similar conversion rate, or maybe even better conversion from PPC on the same keyword!

6. Identify keywords to add as negative matches
Negative matching with PPC campaigns is when you tell the search engines to not show your ad when certain words are included in the search query. This can come in handy when you're doing broad matching on keywords that have multiple meanings or connotations. They can also help you eliminate keywords that are driving a lot of traffic without resulting in sales. By watching your conversion metrics on a keyword level, you can identify keywords that drive traffic without sales and add those keywords to your campaigns as negative matches. You can even save yourself some money by looking at irrelevant, under-performing keywords from your organic search that should be excluded from your PPC campaigns before you even spend a penny on PPC ads.

7. Get ideas for new content and products
You'll start to notice that people find your site for all kinds of different, sometimes strange, keywords. Watch the keyword list for new ideas for topics you can write about on your blog or even a new product you can add to meet the needs of your customers. If you're getting significant traffic on keywords that you don't have content about, it's a good indicator that traffic would flow to your site if you create content to match what people are looking for.

I find it very interesting to review the keyword referral data in website analytics reports. As you dig in you'll find all kinds of hidden gems that you can apply to make your website better and more profitable!

Any other ideas of ways you're using keyword analytics to grow your business?

Website Slowing You Down?

2008-11-11T01:18:00.000+07:00

In a world where more and more households are connected to the internet, bandwidth is becoming an issue and brownouts have been predicted to occur in the next few years. With the strain on the infrastructure of the internet this makes having an efficient, fast loading website all that much more important.

The bottom line for most site owners though, is not the efficiency of the internet as a whole, but rather the financial sustainability of their websites. While there are many ways to make a site perform better in terms of converting visitors, one of the simplest, and probably most important aspects is simply to reduce the load time of your website.

If your site suffers from poor performance you could be missing out not only on sales and average visitor time on site, but also search rankings. Below I will discuss some of the negative impacts a slow loading site may experience, as well as a few ways you can correct the issue. In some cases, correcting the problem will cost you only some time, although it has the potential to really pay off in the long run.

Negative Impacts of Long Load Times
If your site takes too long to load this can have a number of negative effects including loss of sales, loss or rankings, and increased pay per click cost. It can even increase your hosting costs depending on the cause.

Loss of Sales
Let's pretend for a moment that search engines just didn't exist and rankings didn't matter. People are impatient - if your site takes too long to load, many potential customers will simply give up and go elsewhere.

Broadband connections are growing incredibly fast in the US; however, according to a study posted at FoxNews this past July, approximately 10% of Americans still have dial-up internet access. If your site loads slowly, you may be alienating 10% of your potential customers.

The last thing you want to do is frustrate your visitors. If you do this, you may drive them away, never to return. If you can provide a fast loading efficient website, you will increase the likelihood that your visitors will make a purchase, and return again in the future.

Increased Pay per Click Costs
Only a few short months ago a post by Heather Lane at the Inside AdWords blog announced that landing page load times will affect a keyword's quality score. The reason for this is quite simple: a fast loading website improves the end user experience. As a result, ads directing to a slow loading page will be given a lower quality score. This in turn will cause your keyword bids to be higher, costing you significantly on a per click basis.

Loss of Organic Rankings
We know two things for a fact. Google factors in load times with AdWords, and Google focuses on an improved end user experience. As a result, I for one am convinced that a site's load time does impact overall organic search rankings. While this is likely only a small piece of the very large algorithmic puzzle, it does play a part, and if you can speed up your site, you just may be able to move your rankings up a notch or two.

Speeding up your site is unlikely to move your site from page 8 all the way to page 1, but it may be enough to move up a few positions.

Increased Hosting Costs
Assuming your load times are due to file size issues and not other server constraints, your hosting costs may be more than they need to be. This factor will vary a great deal based on the hosting company and the package you have chosen.

Many hosts now offer packages where a significant amount of bandwidth usage is included, resulting in a single flat monthly or annual rate. ( LunarPages for example, has a $4.95 monthly plan with unlimited bandwidth per month.) If your hosting provider does put a limit on usage and you are using beyond the allocated max, you could be paying a fair bit in overage charges. If you fall into this category, optimizing your files to reduce bandwidth usages could save you a considerable amount of cash.

Issues and Fixes
There are a number of issues that can cause a site to load slowly. Below I have noted a few items that are fairly common and can be relatively easily corrected.

Issue: Un-Optimized Images
This is probably one of the biggest culprits out there impacting load time today. I have seen countless websites where image optimization is simply not done, resulting in significantly increased page load times. One of the biggest problems is when images are scaled down to fit the application.

Quite often webmasters will take a large image, and scale it down using the height and width attributes rather than physically resizing the image. What this does is then require the browser to load the full high resolution image, when it really only needs a fraction.

Let's take this real world example. A client recently had a photo on their home page; the photo was 600 x 403 pixels, weighed in at 124.68 KB, and visually they had scaled the image to fit 473 x 317 pixels.

By resizing the original image to the desired dimensions, and then reducing the quality of the jpg to 70%, the end result was an image that looked identical on his website but weighed in at only 23 KB - that's 101.68 KB smaller than the original. Using a simple filesize download calculator I found online, 101.68 KB would take 14 seconds to download using a 56 Kb modem, or about 2 seconds on your run of the mill broadband connection.

For broadband users 2 seconds may not seem like much, but remember, this is only for a single image. When you add up all other images and on-site components, the time can significantly add up.

Issue: Un-Optimized files
Another way you can speed up your sites load time is to have clean HTML, CSS, and other included files. Remove extraneous code from your files, and use CSS wherever possible. Every piece of old html code adds up in size, even if it doesn't impact the visual site itself. I have seen many cases where links have been removed but the code remains accidently .

Audio and video can also be compressed. If your site uses a fair bit of multimedia, see if you can compress these files a bit more than you have already. You may be able to save some load time here as well without impacting user experience.

Issue: Hosting Server
It is possible that your site is perfect in every way, but the culprit is simply your web host. It does not necessarily mean that your host is slow, but if you are paying for an account on an old archaic computer with limited system resources servicing 1000 websites, this could seriously impact your site's load time. If you have worked to ensure that the site is well optimized for efficiency and the load times are still extreme, you may need to upgrade your hosting account to one more suited for your business needs.

If your site is a fairly basic, such as a static 8 page html site, then a slow server may have little to no impact, but if your site requires extensive database queries and the help of an intensive content management system, and serves up tens of thousands of visitors a day, then you may need to switch to a higher end dedicated server. If you have found that your server is the only problem in your slow load times, contact your host to see what they can do for you.

Issue: HTTP Requests
According to a post at the Yahoo Developer Blog , “80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.”

The article discusses combining files in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests, largely by the use of CSS Sprites. They also discuss using image maps to combine multiple images, however, from an SEO perspective, this is not something that I would recommend as my experience has shown image-mapped links are not always followed by search engine spiders.

They go on to explain a vast number of rather technical aspects to speeding up a page. If you are a technical person capable of implementing advanced techniques, the Yahoo Developer Network is definitely something you should check out.

Load Time Tools
Before you undergo any changes to your site to resolve the slow load times, I suggest first finding a tool and benchmarking your progress. Record how long your site takes to load, and then try again after you have made an effort to correct the problem.

There are a number of tools out there that can help you calculate your load times. One such tool is WebSiteOptimization.com. This site specializes in optimizing the performance of your site in order to decrease bandwidth and load times. They have created a very simple tool which will give you the load times for the individual components of your site, which can give you a good idea where to start.

Summary
If you take a bit of time to speed up the load time for your website by optimizing your existing content and cleaning up your code, you may just find yourself making more sales. As an added bonus you may also find improved search engine rankings, which will then in turn increase your sales further. Depending on your hosting provider, you may even have a reduced monthly hosting bill. Decreasing the load time of your site is really win-win for everyone.

As the internet becomes more and more bandwidth intensive with an ever increasing stream of users and higher use applications, doing whatever we can do reduce the strain on the system will make for a faster internet for everyone. If every webpage on the internet could be reduced be even just 100 kb, the web would be a much faster place.

Getting Your Website Noticed by the Search Engines

2008-11-11T01:17:00.000+07:00

You've just launched your website, marking the end of a huge effort and the beginning of a whole new way of doing business. Now, all you have to do is sit back and wait for visitors to flood in, right?

But, wait, people have to know your site there in order to visit. So you go over to Google and search on your field to find your business. You don't see anything on the first few pages. Disappointing, but that's o.k. After all, your site's pretty new. Then you do a search on your company name, expecting to see your new site in the first position.

That's when the panic sets in…
Uh oh. Not only is your site not in the first slot, it's not even on the first page! For your own name! What's going on here? Did your designer do a bad job? Is your web host to blame? Why isn't it there yet???

Calm down!
Before you have to start breathing into a paper bag, realize that getting listed takes time. There are millions of websites out there with more uploaded every day. The search engines browse all these sites, adding them to their data banks, and updating their listings if the site already exists. But they can only get through so many sites in a day. It may take a while to locate and scan your new site.

So how can you shorten the time it takes to be listed in Google's results?
Unless you make it easier for search engines to find you, it may take time, even years for this to happen naturally. To speed the process, take the following actions. They're simple and well worth the effort.

1. Submit your site
Tell Google and the other search engines that you're there! Look for the “Submit Your Site” links on their sites and follow the instructions. Go to dmoz.org and list your site there. Though these aren't guaranteed ways to get listed, they're free, they only take a few minutes and every little bit helps.

2. Make sure your site's not an island
Search engines follow links to navigate around the Internet. If your site is not linked to other sites, you've greatly reduced the chance that a search engine will find it naturally. Make sure that other sites, business directories, article libraries, your clients, link to yours and you'll get found more quickly.

3. Break down and pay
Some engines, such as Yahoo, also have paid inclusion plans. For a fee, they'll visit your site immediately and list you promptly. If your business is a storefront, for example, depends on attracting visitors, you'll want to pay for a listing.

4. Establish your presence with a blog
The search engines love, love, love blogs. Blogs give them exactly what they want, which is new text-based information. If you start a blog that also links to your site, you'll be more likely to lead the search engines right to you.

If you take even 2 or 3 of these actions, you'll decrease the time it takes for the search engines to find you. And visitors will rush to your site, just like you wanted!

Blogger, WordPress, Sub-Domain, Sub-Directory and New Domain Name

2008-11-11T01:15:00.000+07:00

When it comes to setting up your Blog, there are many options and it's enough to drive you crazy.

Here is some information for each option…

Blogger Versus WordPress

• WordPress offers a lot more customization and has more marketing and SEO power.
• Some people think since Google owns Blogger it gives you a boost - that is not true.
• Blogger has more rules you must follow and it could potentially limit a marketing technique or tactic.

My experience and personal opinion is that any Blog is better than no Blog but if you want to get the most out of your Blog - go WordPress.

There are other Blog platforms as well, but I consider the two main contenders to be WordPress and Blogger so that is all I have commented on.

Once you've decided on your Blog platform, you then have to decide on your Blog structure.

There has been a lot of debate about a Sub-Domain versus a Sub-Directory versus setting up a new domain.

• A sub-domain would be: blog . yoursite . com
• A sub-directory would be: yoursite . com/blog
• A whole new domain would be: newdomain .com

If you go with a whole new domain, then you have no “trust” and history built up and it may take longer for the Blog to get picked up.

It used to be that a sub-domain was treated as its own separate site with a root directory so you got the benefit of link juice and you potentially got more listings in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Since December 2007, Google states this is no longer the case. So you aren't really getting any extra link juice from this structure.

Matt Cutts, the public face of Google had this to say about sub-domains versus sub-directory (as related to the December 2007 change):

“Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn't affect a majority of our queries. In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed. The only reason I talked about the subject at PubCon at all was because someone asked for my advice on subdomains vs. subdirectories.”

He then goes on to say: “My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content.

A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news .google. com or maps . google . com, for example.

If you're a newer webmaster or SEO, I'd recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you'll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.”

Although his feedback wasn't directly related to setting up Blogs, it still applies. So, based on that feedback, and my own personal success and experience I too vote for a sub-directory.

Don't forget, you may as well make it as search engine friendly as possible and rather than just call the sub-directory Blog (ex: yoursite . com/Blog) you could use a keyword or short keyword phrase (ex: yoursite . com/keyword-Blog or yoursite . com/keyword-phrase-Blog)

So in summary - any Blog is better than no Blog, but to get the most power from your Blog, go with a WordPress Blog in a sub-directory named with a keyword on your own server. Make sure you learn about all the necessary plugins and configure them properly to get the most out of your Blog. Hey - that sounds like a great article topic. Stay tuned!

A Compatible E-Commerce Solution for Your SEO Campaign

2008-11-11T01:14:00.000+07:00

The most ambitious Internet retailers, hoping to emulate the style and online influence of Amazon.com and other recognized brands, tend to aim for sprawling electronic retail websites that may look pretty but accomplish little else. If all the push is towards what appears on the front end instead of a concerted effort in choosing a reliable e-commerce solution from the get go, these decisions can ultimately impact the long-term success of any SEO campaign.

Most Internet retailers opt to use an out of the box e-commerce solution, eliminating the need to build something more suitable from the ground up. Out of the box software, however, may lack some of the flexibility that is required to implement a robust SEO campaign. On the other hand, building a fully customized e-commerce platform can be outright expensive. In an ideal situation, you will want to look for something that is somewhere in between. To help you bridge the gap, we've identified four major requirements when shopping for a suitable e-commerce solution that's compatible with your SEO campaign.

The Proof's in the Code
Ideally, we would always like to have the code available for us to modify if needed. This constant accessibility allows us to set up server behavior recommendations as well as change the way that things work or function in order to ensure that they are more effective for your SEO campaign. Many vendors will not give out their codes unless you pay them a premium, sometimes upwards of $10,000 per site using that code only, and many vendors may be reluctant to allow even that option.

Search engines only care about resulting code, meaning the HTML is sent to the browser post-parse. So, for an e-commerce website to have an effective SEO campaign, the SEO company you've enlisted may need the ability to modify how the software displays the code while the page is being dynamically built. This usually includes any category pages, product pages, or even some of the more “static” pages, such as the privacy policy, site map, and home page.

Customizable Product Administration
Sometimes we run across platforms that allow us to customize certain attributes of pages from the back-end administration, including Title tags, Meta tags, and body content. This is a great advantage when working with an e-commerce solution that does not provide any sort of code access, as that provides the only way for us to “individualize” the hundreds of dynamic pages that may be present on your website when working on your SEO campaign.

Occasionally, however, the administration sections for your e-commerce solution are not all that robust, and once we have proper access to the underlying code, we have to develop code “hacks” in order to get the recommendations for your SEO campaign onto the website. For instance, when adding these “hacks” to client websites, they often take the form of what appears to be a small configuration file with our recommendations attached to variables. And depending on the page, our configuration file will spit out the proper recommendations for that page, manually adding them where they need to go. Unfortunately, this is usually only accomplished with direct access to underlying code in your e-commerce solution. Furthermore, if direct access is not given, we're often stuck between a rock and a hard place.

A Linux-Based OS
Until IIS can handle .htaccess files (tiny files allowing a wide range of flexibility for your website), an e-commerce solution that runs under Linux is highly desirable for myriad of tasks, such as flattening URLs. Some Windows applications have found ways around this, but they are usually not very aesthetically appealing and don't function as well as a simple rewrite would. Linux, our operating system of choice, is able to run more applications, and the operating system and associated software are much cheaper than their Windows counterparts.

“flatten URLs” - for example, it takes http://www.example.com/products.php?id=437 and changes it into something more friendly, like http://www.example.com/products/Yellow-School-Bus/437/ . By flattening the URL, we make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl the website - ridding ourselves of dynamic querystrings, which, oftentimes, the spiders have difficulty crawling. Furthermore, flattening URLs allows us to add keyphrases from your SEO campaign into the URL to make them even more attractive to the search engines. And even though the URL may appear to be different, because of the .htaccess file, it will work exactly as it did prior to the flattening process.

http://example.com to http://www.example.com - which can be completed entirely on Linux in just two lines that are added to an .htacess file. Implementing this on IIS (Windows) turns out to be an arduous task that involves having root access to the server, which is not often granted by hosting companies.

Flexibility is Key
Often, an SEO company will need to change how a page is displayed or what is displayed and when, perhaps in order to boost rankings and traffic for your SEO campaign. This is where the flexibility of the software comes into play for any effective e-commerce solution. For instance, there is an e-commerce solution that can provide header, footer, and page templates directly through the backend administration.

However, there are some vendors that prefer to lock away the templates by hard-coding them into the site code. The real paradox is when they won't give you access to the code to modify these things for yourself. This kind of inflexibility can spell disaster for any SEO campaign.

Avoiding Long-Term Hassles
At this point in time, there aren't any specific recommendations to give on a top performing e-commerce solution as nothing we've come across thus far is anywhere near perfect. Unless your company has an in-house SEO technician, you'd be wise to engage a knowledgeable SEO company to avoid the headaches that come with finding out that you've spent a significant amount of time and money on an e-commerce solution that does not offer the flexibility needed for a successful SEO campaign.

If you end up choosing an e-commerce solution that doesn't meet the requirements outlined above, you may just end up with a half optimized site that fails to achieve the rankings and traffic you've been hoping for at the outset of your SEO campaign.

Social Networks and Heavy Duty Web Hosting

2008-11-11T01:13:00.000+07:00

As user-generated website popularity surges so too does the need for "intense" Web hosting.

Through new forms of technology, such as digital video, blogging and podcasting, infinite numbers of end-users now have the power to create and spread their views as they see fit. Prominent examples such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia reflect this unlimited – and unpredictable – potential for content, images, videos and more.

Such immense levels of website usage mean that, behind the scenes, Web hosting providers need to be at the top of their game offering their social media clients the utmost in infrastructure and support. TopHosts asked two leading Web hosts what it takes to support this niche user-generated website market and how they go about helping social media website owners meet their goals.

Rackspace in the United Kingdom is reporting a huge uptake in user-generated website clientele, which they say involves great peaks and troughs in demand. The Web host previously announced the signing of two big social media customers, Woyano Pro social media platform and Wadja.com, a social networking site for mobile devices. Their current social media customer portfolio also includes makefriendsonline and Let's Decide.

Fabio Torlini, Marketing Director for Rackspace, says solid infrastructure and scalability are the most important elements for ensuring the success of their social media websites. “It's a pretty new phenomenon, but the (user-generated) sites very much want to grow quickly,” Torlini said. “If the site takes off then they're going to need the right support and infrastructure… and the whole package, which is what we can give them.”

The tremendous potential for growth by user-generated sites calls for top-quality bandwidth capabilities, such as Rackspace's unlimited bandwidth guarantee. Torlini says social media websites also need access to enterprise level storage or advanced storage area networks (SAN), because content uploads can easily reach capacity in very short amounts of time. So for all the massive amounts of data these sites bring in, Web hosts must be able to provide ample storage space at all times.

Aaron Phillips, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Fatsserver.Net, agrees social media clients require “intense hosting” and Enterprise Level storage for uptime and top performance. Fastserver handles many social networking sites, from regional to international to smaller non-profit groups, which have always contributed greatly to their growth. Lifelogger.com and yo4ya.com are their largest social media site clients, with massive communities and followings.

Besides providing large amounts of bandwidth and disk space, these sites need a scalable solution that can grow with them. “The major focus we provide to social media sites is our ability to design custom solutions tailored specifically for significant and fast growth, Phillips added. “Our enterprise team can design, test, and deploy solutions where an initial single server plan can grow into a multi-server enterprise solution in a short period of time.”

The biggest challenge facing social media networking, Phillips says, is vast growth management. Even the most prepared website clients, with extensive marketing plans, demographics and growth projections, can't be sure how they might progress. Phillips explained that specific niche sites often grow at rates that far exceed initial expectations, and that's why Web hosts need to offer solutions that can quickly scale according to those growth patterns.

A hosting provider's commitment to security is another important feature for social media sites to consider, Torlini of Rackspace said. Vast amounts of content are constantly uploaded to these sites, so online abuse and security threats are inevitable. User generated sites should look to hosting infrastructure with security features built in it, across all components. Torlini highlighted Rackspace's multi-layered approach to security, with 24x7x365 staffed security and the monitoring of both internal devices and external threats.

Compressing Flash movies and Flash banners

2008-11-11T01:09:00.000+07:00

Businesses and designers alike prefer Flash web banners over animated GIF banners because Flash web banners allow more complex animations, have high graphic quality, and can include scripting features and interactivity, all of which are desirable for e-commerce.

End users, in turn, benefit from Flash's smaller files, faster download times and streaming capabilities. For example, a short banner animation can play in the forefront while the main banner downloads in the background. And Flash banners are now almost universally accepted, displaying on more than 96 percent of computers with Internet connections.

But Flash banners aren't designed as well as they could be when it comes to file size. If not handled skillfully, Flash files can become too big and take too long to download. Below are some important tips that will trim the fat from your Flash file and leave you with a lean, mean banner machine.

(Note : These tips assume you have a copy of Macromedia Flash and are familiar with its functions.)

* Colors
* Gradients
* Symbols
* Fonts
* Lines
* Bitmap images
* Sound
* Animation
* Exporting

Colors

1. When working with colors, use a limited color palette on your Flash banner.

2. Web-safe colors are best because your Flash banner's colors will look the same across all major browsers and platforms.

Gradients

1. Use gradients sparingly on Flash banners. Each area of a gradient fill requires more data than a solid fill.

2. Left-to-right (horizontal) linear gradients are preferable to up-and-down (vertical) gradients as browsers read them more quickly.

Symbols
To understand advanced optimizing in Flash, you must first know how to create symbols. Symbols are elements in your movie that you select for using over and over again. Symbols can be graphics, buttons, movie clips, sound files or fonts.

1. By creating a symbol, the symbol is stored in the Flash file's library, which you can grab and place for multiple uses and edits. Symbols reduce file size because no matter how many times you make and place a symbol, Flash stores the symbol in the file only once.

2. For advanced color optimizing, use the effects panel's tint to create different colored instances of a single symbol instead of creating multiple symbols.

3. Be careful not to overuse the alpha transparency color effect. It can slow playback.

Fonts
1. Limit the number of fonts and font styles you use in your Flash banners. For embedded font options, select only the characters needed instead of the entire font.

2. Use font symbols as shared library assets. A library is where all your symbols are stored. You can access the main library by going to Window > Library, or you can access a shared library by defining the linkage properties of the original library's items or assets.

To use the assets from a shared library in another movie, choose File > Open As Shared Library in your current movie and select the shared library file you want to use.

Lines

1. Limit the number of special line styles used, such as dashed and dotted. Solid lines require less memory. Also, lines created with the pencil tool require less memory than brush strokes.

2. Use Modify > Optimize to minimize the number of separate lines in your shapes.

Limiting the number of special line effects will also keep the file size of your Flash banners low. The commands Convert Lines to Fills, Expand Shape, and Soften Edge in the Modify > Shape submenu increase the number of vector elements in your file.

Bitmap images

1. Bitmap graphic images imported into Flash, such as a photo or a file from another software program, take up more file size than Flash (vector) graphics. Use them sparingly.

2. Size bitmap images to the exact dimensions you need before importing them into Flash. This includes reducing image quality as much as possible.

3. Avoid animating bitmap elements, whenever possible, if you must use them in Flash banners.

4. Try converting your bitmaps to vector graphics. Sometimes you will achieve a considerably smaller file size.

5. Adjust the JPEG quality of bitmap files and turn off the Smoothing option for bitmap images in a movie's library. Playback will be faster because the bitmaps will render more quickly.

Sound

1. To choose sound compression options, use the options in the Export Settings of the Sound Properties dialog box. Use the lowest sampling rate and bit depth required. Sixteen Kbps should suffice for most situations.

2. Instead of using a long sound file, take a segment of the file and set it to loop, that is, to repeat itself.

3. Choose fast in your quality button under Sound Settings. Fast gives better compression results than medium or best.

4. In the Compression menu from the Sound Properties dialog box, choose ADPCM (Advanced Differential Pulse Code Modulation) for short sounds, and streaming (MP3 compression setting) for longer sounds such as background music and soundtracks.

Animation

1. File size increases with the number of frames. Use symbols for every element in your banner that appears and changes in more than one frame.

2. Use key frames and twining to reduce the number of individual frames and keep your file size down to a minimum. Avoid using too many twining operations at one time, however. Too many could significantly slow playback.

3. Animate a fixed area of your banner, not everywhere on it.

4. Choose motion twining over shape twining. Motion twee symbols instead of grouping objects.

5. Use caution when creating complex symbols or having many symbols in a single frame. It might cause the movie to pause while symbols are downloading

Exporting to the Web

1. Flash movies for export — SWF or ShockWave Flash movie — require you to also save an HTML file. The HTML document is needed to activate the Flash movie and specifies the browser settings, including where the Flash movie appears on screen and the movie size. You can change these settings in the HTML panel of the Publish Settings dialog box.

2. Be sure to choose carefully among the anti-aliasing options found in the HTML section of a movie's Publish Settings. We usually recommend auto high.

3. Use the bandwidth profiler to see if your movie meets or exceeds your target audience's connection speed. You can see where a movie may be paused to wait for a large file to download.

Flash is a powerful tool for creating web banners. It will take time to learn all the features. But keep these optimizing tips in mind and you will be able to make stunning banners that are quick to download.

Monster Video Sharing Site List and How to Use it

2008-11-11T01:08:00.000+07:00

Let's say you have made your first “great” video. You have critiqued it, massaged it and perfected it. You feel good about it. Now what?

If you want to increase traffic to your website, create backlinks to your site.

Backlinks are one-way links pointing to your site from other sites. The search engines put a great deal of importance on these. In a sense, backlinks say to the world, your website is a trusted, worthwhile site because all these other sites point to it.

You will want to post the video to several video sharing sites, to magnify the video's effect. Each time someone watches your video, you get another linkback ping . . . wow! Be sure you use your keywords in the description of the video. Also, start your description with your full URL, including the http: etc. This will help people find your video.

Make sure that you look at several videos on each site so that you can determine whether your video will fit on their site. For example, if your video is about “Eating Healthfully”, don't expect to place it on a site dedicated to news. If your video is not a How-to type, for example, it won't be accepted by HowCast.com. Do not post to a video sharing site that is too diverse from what your video is about. Who on that site will watch it?

Fill in the profile information portion of the video sharing site that tells about you, shows your picture, your likes and dislikes, favorite books and hobbies. This information makes you a real person. If people like your video, they will look at your profile. Potentially, they will be in line with you in some way and perhaps want to create a sharing relationship, or other mutually beneficial link to you.

Don't forget to post to your video to the social networking sites like Digg.com, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit and others. Some won't let you put your video on their site, but you can still put your article on their site. Your article is a summary of what the video is about. Your article will point them to your video which is hosted on your site.

This technique needs a little more explaining:

• Post your video on your blog
• Write an article, to accompany your video, using the appropriate keywords that describe your video. (Remember, the search engines, at this time, cannot look at your video to see what it is about . . . you will have to tell them in your article.)
• Post your article on the social networking sites, mentioning the video.
• Point them to your article and video which resides on your website.
Video Sharing Site List & Page Rank:
• Google Video 9
• Blip 8
• BrightCove 8
• MotionBox 8
• PhotoBucket 8
• Yahoo Video 8
• YouTube 8
• UncutVideo(AOL) 7
• DailyMotion 7
• Esnips 7
• iFilm 7
• MetaCafe 7
• Myspace 7
• Revver 7
• Vimeo 7
• HowCast 6
• Crackle 6
• Break 6
• Buzznet 6
• EyeSpot 6
• Flixya 6
• Grouper 6
• GoFish 6
• JumpCut 6
• Kwego 6
• LiveVideo 6
• Lulu 6
• Multiply 6
• MyHeavy 6
• OurMedia 6
• PutFile 6
• SoapBox(MSN) 6
• StupidVideos 6
• Veoh 6
• VMix 6
• VidiLife 6
• ZippyVideos 6
• CastPost 5
• ClipShack 5
• Doty 5
• DoveTail 5
• Famster 5
• ManiaTV 5
• MeraVideo 5
• Openvlog 5
• Porkolt 5
• Sharkle 5
• VideoWebTown 5
• Vsocial 5
• VidMax 4
• Apanatube 3

In summary, in this article we covered:

• Your website needs backlinks.
• Search engines put great weight on backlinks.
• Increase your exposure by posting your video on many sites.
• Make sure that you look first to see what type of videos and demographic they are targeting.
• It will take some extra time, but make sure that you fill in the information in the profile section. This information makes you a real person.
• Don't forget to post to the social networking sites like Digg, etc.

These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily

2008-11-11T01:06:00.000+07:00

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche - you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time.

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them.

You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings.

You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don't forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.

3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content.

Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it - keeping a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords… are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site - make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.

4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google.

Don't ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google's influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google's Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.

5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings.

Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the ‘anchor text' is related to your keywords but don't ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don't forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in your niche.

6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works.

Writing short 500 - 700 word informative helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters… plus other major online sites. Don't forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you're also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don't forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages… to increase your rankings and traffic.

7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me.

These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts - a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts. Works similar as a sub-domain but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you're creating content to first satisfy your visitors.

8. WordPress blog software is extremely effective for SEO purposes.

WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.

9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web.

These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter… media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati… you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It's time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on all my content.

10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO.

You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don't want SEO - you want effective SEO. In order to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.

First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you're pursuing - your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That's why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what's been searched for or discussed.

Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site - tops in your niche - the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.

Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you're into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.

Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you're seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.

Network Marketing Now - Secrets for Finding Prospects on Online Message Boards

2008-11-11T01:05:00.000+07:00

Promoting and advertising your network marketing and MLM business online is challenging. There are many different ways to go about it. If you want to promote your business inexpensively and effectively, message boards and forums are a solid and proven way to do it.

Choosing the Right Message Boards
There are lots of message boards and forums online, on just about every topic you can imagine. Since you are promoting your network marketing business, you will want to choose boards related to home business or working from home. This is where people looking for ways to make money will hang out.

Go to Google and do a search for “home business message boards”, “work from home discussions”, and similar keywords. This will bring up a list of boards and forums that you can visit. Look for boards that are active. Most will display the last post date for their various topics, and the total number of posts in the topic. Look for lots of recent posts as a sign that the message board is active and thriving.

Learn About the Community
Once you have chosen some boards to visit, take time to visit them and do some reading. Get a feel for the community and the type of discussions that go on there. Take a look at the board rules and make sure that “signatures” are okay - most forums allow them, but a few don't. Once you have a good feel for the community, create an account and get ready to start posting.

The First Rule for Using Message Boards
The first rule for using message boards to promote your network marketing business - do not post advertisements, or direct invitations to consider your opportunity unless the board has a specific section set aside for ads. The boards you want to use will have strict rules about advertising. Posting ads in discussion areas will not attract prospects for your business, and you risk getting banned from posting in the future.

Become a Contributor and Build Your Reputation
Your goal is to establish yourself as an authority and a valuable contributor to the community. There are many more people reading these boards than actually posting, so each time you post, a lot of potential prospects will see it. Will they see you as a leader? This is your objective. Your first thought should be “how can I help or contribute something positive”. You will attract leads for your MLM business over time by doing this.

Creating Your Profile and Signature
Before you get started, be sure to fill out your profile. This is where you can tell more about yourself and create your signature. People can click on your profile at any time and find out more about who you are. Make your profile as complete and meaningful as possible.

Your signature will appear at the bottom of each post you submit. It can contain a link to your site, and usually a line or two you can use for a mini-advertisement.

Once your profile is set up, start looking for messages where someone is asking for help, or a discussion about a home business or network marketing related topic. If you know something that will help someone or contribute to the discussion, post it! Draw on your past experiences. Take time to provide thoughtful and meaningful replies.

Again, the key to making this work is establishing yourself as a leader and someone who is knowledgeable about network marketing and home business in general. People reading the boards will get to know you and you will begin to receive inquiries and visits to your opportunity site after you've been active for a while.

Pick a few boards to work with, and try to post something as often as possible. Daily posting is best, but if time is limited you can contribute 3-4 times a week and do well. You want to be seen as active and involved, and frequent posting is the way to achieve this.

Final Thoughts
Proper use of message boards and forums for promoting your network marketing and MLM business can be very effective. The key is to present yourself as a professional. Set yourself apart.

The Internet is full of self-serving business opportunity peddlers who take every opportunity to spam and promote their business on message boards while contributing nothing. These people do not succeed. You, by presenting yourself as a professional, will do well.

Short Cut :
Services | Download | Domain | Hosting | Order | Articles | Portofolio | Contact Us

Related Links :
Superhostindo l Jababeka Business l Ayo Kencan l Kesaksian Kristen l Gudang Artikel SEO l Lirik Lagu Rohani Kristen

Promoting Your New Website

2008-11-11T01:03:00.002+07:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about building your website from the ground up. This article did not dive into great detail on any specific topics, but rather touched on the key points you will want to address. In this article I will place most of the focus on the promotion aspect of this previous article.

While at times new websites can experience organic search rankings in a matter of months, for the most part, it can take well over a year before you start to see any progress, and that is if you start promoting right away!

SEO
If your new website has not been properly optimized for the search engines, then this is a necessary first step you must take. Ensure that your new site has integrated the appropriate keywords into all the fundamental areas of the site. Without this critical step of optimizing your site, in many cases no level of promotion will help you get those search rankings.

Note:
Extreme numbers of inbound links can sometimes cause an un-optimized site to rank, but an optimized website will drastically reduce the number of links needed, and its associated cost. This varies from industry to industry, but is true as a general rule.

Ideally the optimization of your site occurred during the planning and building stages, but if it did not be sure to get this completed as soon as possible.

Press Releases
The first thing you should do when your site goes live is issue a press release. Be sure to include a link back to your website, preferably with your target phrase hyperlinked as well. Submit this press release to an aggregator such as PRWeb. This will help get the word out that your site is live, draw some attention from the public, and also get you that first valuable link to your website.

Search Engine Submission
These days search engines will find your site on their own, and submitting to them is not necessary. If you feel you must submit your site to the engines, submit it only once and shortly after the site goes live.

In order to help the search engines fully spider your new site, the best thing you can do in terms of submissions, is to create and submit an XML sitemap. Submit this sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools account, and also be sure to include a call to it within your robots.txt file by adding the following line including a complete path to your sitemap:

Sitemap : http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

There are many tools out there to help you build your xml sitemap. Google has placed a list of some of these tools on their “Third Party Programs” page.

Directory Submission
Back in August I wrote about using Directory Submission to help build links. The general gist of it is to be sure that there is a high level of relevance in the directories you submit your site to, especially if it is a paid directory. Currently DMOZ still has a high level of value as it is seen as a strong authority at Google. Make the attempt to have your site listed here in the most relevant category possible.

Link Building
There are a number of ways you can work to increase your back links. In July I wrote about 13 ways to help build links. Links are one of those strategic tools that will never be a bad investment. Today they play a significant role in search rankings for most industries, especially in Google. While the future will almost undoubtedly still see search value in links, even if that value declines, or disappears entirely, quality links can still help drive traffic as well, and a strong base of inbound links can deliver you customers well into the future.

Explore the different ways to build links to your site. A steady progressive increase in inbound links will help Google look positively in your direction. Do not be afraid of reciprocal links either. If you are trading with highly relevant websites to your industry, then you should have nothing to be afraid of.

Social Media
Promotion largely consists of building links and becoming recognized by the search engines, but in order to help you build those links, getting your name and brand out there can really do wonders. By increasing awareness of your site and product, the public will often help create the buzz you need, and often, this can result in fresh links to your website.

To help get your site in the eyes of as many people as possible, take a look into Social Media and consider creating profiles on some of the popular platforms. This can include creating a YouTube account and uploading instructional, informational, or interesting product videos. You can set up a Facebook page, and work to build a community around your product. Create a profile page on Squidoo, MySpace, and Flickr, amongst many others.

These pages often act as backlinks to your site, and also help spread awareness. Be sure to keep your social endeavors updated regularly or any viewership you have will dwindle as people lose interest. If you are able to build a strong following, this can result in many individuals linking to your site and spreading the word, resulting in long term benefits for you and your site.

Your use of social media does not have to be exactly about your company. For instance, let's say you sell cars. Your use of the social platform, while it may note your business, can focus on other car info including trivia, news, photos, etc. The key is to keep it relevant, not identical - you are not looking to create a mirror of your site.

Article Writing
Write articles about the subject of your website and submit them to various services such as EzineArticles. Consider also writing for your own blog to help grow your site content. By writing and distributing relevant articles you can create a nice cushion of relevant incoming links. By writing articles that closely match the topic of your site, and including a link back to relevant content within your site, you can help out not only with search engine rankings, but by creating an extra traffic stream for your site.

Pay Per Click
While Pay Per Click (PPC) will not give you many long standing benefits, it can help you to start making sales immediately which in turn can give you the funds needed to promote your site via other means. If you need that immediate traffic, this is one way to get it, but at a cost, and as soon as you stop paying, your traffic stops, so it is far from a reliable long term means. In some industries however, it can pay off, so it is definitely worth considering.

Summary
In general, reference your website everywhere possible. Get links from every relevant source you can think of, issue a press release, and get your site listed the key directories for your industry. The more eyes you can put your URL in front of and the more relevant sites you can get to link back to yours, the sooner you will start to see progress in the search engines.

For many industries it can literally take years to get those coveted first page results - in some industries it may be near impossible, but if you want a chance, you need to start promoting that new site of yours immediately.

Write a Feature Article To Get More Exposure To Your Website

2008-11-11T01:03:00.001+07:00

Article writing is a great way to showcase your talents and expertise. If you want to make a name for yourself and brand yourself as an expert in your niche, then articles are a great way to allow the reader to see just how much you know about your niche. Writing an article can get you some credibility, but writing a feature article puts you a bit higher on the credibility scale.

A feature article is an article that is showcased in a newsletter or on a website. It is an article that is considered valuable to it's readers and goes into a bit more depth that a typical 450 to 500 word article. Featured articles can be anywhere from 650 to 1000 words long and are definitely high quality. Featured articles aren't sales letters, or a spammy keyword-stuffed stream of consciousness to get better search engine rankings. Featured articles solve a problem common in your niche, answer frequently asked questions, or provide a different way of looking at the something in your target niche.

The best way to write one of these articles is to see what are some of the common questions people have in your target niche. You can find these questions from going to a forum in your niche, one of the groups in Yahoo or Google, or you could even put up a survey form on your site and see what kinds of questions visitors leave on your site. The last way of getting questions is the most powerful because you can really target your feature article to your site in the resource box of the article (”for more answers to questions like these go to mysite.com”).

Once you have your article, you will want to get it featured in some sort of online publication. You have a choice of having it featured on a website, or in a newsletter. If you want your article featured in a newsletter, you will have a better chance approaching the publisher of the newsletter that is targeted to the audience in your niche. You can go to many of the newsletter directories and see which ones take article submissions and then approach them. You will increase your chances if you sign up for their newsletter first so you can get a good understanding of how their newsletter is structured, and what kind of articles they publish in their newsletter. It will also give you something to talk to the publisher about in regards to their newsletter. What did you like about the article? What didn't you like? This will prove you are there for more than just a “what can you give me” mentality. If you have some other articles that have been published in other newsletters, you can share this information with the publisher as well.

If you are looking to have your article featured on a website in your niche, a good way to find websites is to do a search for them in the search engines. Doing the following search string will give you a list of websites that publish featured articles: “<>” +”featured articles”. You can then go to the websites and see if they publish articles from other authors. Once you find a website, you can take a similar approach of the Webmaster that you did with the publisher. You would share with them what you liked about their website and ask them if they would like to publish any of your articles. If you present your request in a way that will show the webmaster the benefit they will get out of publishing your article on their website, you will increase your chances of having your article published.

Having your articles featured on a website or in a newsletter, you give you additional credibility in your niche. Featured articles should be high quality and provide value to the visitor of the website or subscriber of the newsletter. The style of approach you take with the Webmaster or publisher also makes a difference in whether or not you can get your articles featured.

Website Optimization Tips for Link Building and SEO

2008-11-11T01:02:00.000+07:00

Since link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO, let's take a minute to revisit some very important link building and website optimization tactics.

Trust, timing and authority are three metrics that impact the target site for building links. Sites that rank at the helm of search engines (above the fold on the first page) do so because of fundamental characteristics shared across multiple industries, websites and topics.

Sites ranking in the top 10 are there because they :

(1) either started before others realized the potential for those keywords and have an advantage of time to market / indexing saturation

(2) because they understand link popularity and have built a plethora of links from a variety of sites or

(3) because they understand the value of a good domain, site architecture and on page optimization.

Not to say that this is the only way, but we are only focusing on three metrics for the sake of argument. I have mentioned before that chronology begets authority, in layman's terms, if you started years ago optimizing, refining and grooming your site for higher search engine visibility, you understand the layers involved in producing high ranking search engine result pages.

The typical process is, you make a change to a page, you wait for the page to get indexed (typically you may build some links to expedite the process). Then when the page is indexed, you measure the result of your on page adjustments (tweaks to content, titles, tags, and code), you monitor the impact of the inbound links then evaluate how to bump it up another notch.

This process of refinement is an ongoing obsession until the goal is achieved (until you break the top 20) and then you have to wait for time to infer the element of trust to your page which results in the search result creeping its way to the top 10. Based on how well you implemented the previous steps will determine where your page finally stabilizes in the search results.

I am referring to more competitive terms here, long tail key phrases (keywords that have 3 or more keywords combined) can move to the top 10 unchallenged with the right tactic. Balancing your profile of long tail and competitive phrases is imperative for stabilizing traffic and appealing to an entire audience rather than just the tip of the iceberg.

By selecting a range of keywords, creating content and building links back to that content using a variety of keywords and keyword modifiers.

You are essentially priming the pump for what is to come after 30-90 days when those links have had a chance to pass the quality check from search engines and start passing real value. Link building is cumulative, so understanding the law of cycles and when to fertilize the seeds you plant (your keywords) is crucial for harvesting search engine traffic as a result.

In any case, once you are able to measure the impact, you can assess if you :

(a) need to leverage other pages or parts of your site (such as creating a series of posts or pages on the topic) to get enough traction for the keywords in question or

(b) just need more links to give the page buoyancy in search engines.

The idea here is to keep in mind that a natural progression towards a keyword objective is much safer to acquire over time. There is no need to disregard a moderate link velocity (link velocity is the rate in which you gain or lose links to your pages).

The ideal scenario would be to couple links with timely bursts of content with the intention of creating more value topically in the site. More pages equate to additional opportunities to rank for related overlapping keywords that you can interlink (much like wikipedia) to bring each page up in the rankings like the buddy system.

Which leads to the next point, there is a natural phenomenon that occurs over time as words stem across semantically related keywords and synonyms, this is referred to as “keyword stemming”. Ideally this process takes 3-6 months for a given range of keywords as long as a series of fresh or seasoned inbound links are linking to the page in question.

The first objective for SEO is to put the site in order (including site architecture, robots.txt file, .htacess file, remove spider traps and coding errors) in other words groom the on page factors.

The second objective is to create the appropriate content that will eventually mature into the perfect on page topical relevance and mature to an independently ranking page in 3-6 months. Creating content with the objective of future tense expression is part of a layered and tiered optimization strategy and is imperative for either creating 301 redirects eventually or using those pages as anchors for fresh related content (by linking from them to new pages).

The third objective is to build relevance for other pages besides the home page. Creating the appropriate balance of page rank and how page rank flows throughout the site (as a result of navigation, site maps, anchor text and back links).

This step is crucial for developing a site with website authority which is a key ranking factor based on trust, relevance and popularity. A common ratio is 35% of the total inbound links should go to your homepage, the other 65% should be to deep links (pages other than your home page).

The fourth objective for SEO would be to create keyword stemming across a series of predetermined keywords through systematic expression. Start with 10, those 10 turn into 20 or 30, then develop another 20 keywords (to create topical relevance for the topic) and those 20 turn into 50 keywords, etc.

Then in 6 months, as you add new keywords each month the previous round creates keyword stemming to lay the foundation for the next round and the next round of link building and content creation. This is one very successful search engine optimization strategy that uses timing, link diversity and content on a stable platform to produce relevant results based on on page and off page SEO factors unifying harmoniously.

By managing these steps, it is possible with a game plan and series of tiered strategies to acquire multiple traffic bearing keywords across an entire range of phrases that an individual may use to find your website. Instead of relying on a narrow range of keywords to deliver traffic (since you never really know which terms will outperform others until you optimize them). This tactic is based on topical relevance, link diversity, deep links, aging pages and website authority and using a variety of anchor text for link popularity to promote keyword stemming.

This is one of many methods you can use to scale your results to climb over your competition and gain the highest potential relevance score for each page of your website. That is, if you can see beyond the parts an view your website holistically as an interdependent organism capable of scaling to accommodate distinct conversion objectives.

Treasure Trove of Website Tips

2008-11-11T01:01:00.001+07:00

Recently people have been asking for tips and “Do's and Don'ts” for website design and content.

Whether you are building a new site or redesigning a current site, here is a collection of tips that you'd be wise to follow:

• Create your site with a clear hierarchy and interconnection of pages.

• Your most important pages should never be more than one click away from your homepage.

• Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. I'm conservative; I don't like more than 50 links on a page.

• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.

• If you are using images, name them with your keyword phrases.

• Avoid frames.

• Avoid an all Flash site. It doesn't matter that Google can read and index Flash. You are still better off not having a site that is all Flash.

• Optimize your site

• if you don't know how

• hire someone.

• Create a plan for content addition

• keeping your site current with fresh content is good for the engines and your site visitors.

• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

• Test your site for broken links and errors

• nothing scares site visitors off like a site that isn't well maintained.

• Test your shopping cart often to make sure there are no errors that are causing you to lose sales.

• Don't waste your thank you page

• make an up-sell offer on your thank you page. People have already bought from you and should be open to other offers.

• Test, test, test. You should be split testing or multivariate testing your pages to improve results.

• Make your opt-in box prominent and compelling. Building a list is vitally important to your business.

• Never make major website changes before an ad or holiday campaign unless you are sure you have time to complete the changes and test the pages.

• Don't wait too long to start holiday marketing. Some campaigns (like SEO) take time to build momentum. End of summer (at the latest) is when you should start.

• Avoid Site Builders unless you absolutely must use one

• and then before you do, make sure they allow you to do everything necessary to get your site optimized. (I've written articles on this, it's really important!!)

• Don't use too much jargon or confusing language. Talk to your site visitors in a language they will understand and relate to.

• If at all possible, consult with a marketing expert to make sure your site is in tip top shape. Remember many designers know design but not marketing - and your site may be missing some of the core marketing principals and techniques.

It's a lot, I know, but it's all really important to the success of your site. Print this article and keep it handy as a reference sheet. Stay tuned for future tips and advice - there is still so much more!

How To Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website

2008-11-11T00:59:00.000+07:00

You will need visitors to your site that are looking for exactly what you are offering, which is known as targeted traffic. Here are ten proven ways you can drive quality traffic to your affiliate marketing business site and increase your online income:

1. Articles
Well-written, informative how-to articles are proven traffic baits for affiliate marketing business sites. Use the resource box to provide additional links and include links in the content body to similar or additional information that can only be read on your site.

2. Email Campaigns
Email campaigns, used carefully, can easily drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing business site. By providing highly relevant and valuable information in the body of the email message and then offering a link that will take the recipients to your site.

You can provide the full content in the email message and then offer a link inviting the recipient to view more similar write-ups on your site. Or give only a portion of the content in the email and offer the rest on your affiliate marketing site. A link in your signature should also be provided.

3. Blogs
Apart from your affiliate marketing site, use a blog to keep in touch with prospective customers and members. Blogs are considerably more personal and lighter in tone than most affiliate business sites and they can be a great source of information, news, advice and tips from you to your prospects. Include a link from your blog to your affiliate marketing site. Allow comments too so your visitors can interact with you.

4. Ezines and Newsletters
Information is what people are searching for on the internet. By using proven methods to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing business and offering a free ezine or newsletter about the subjects your visitors are interested in, will result in many visitors opting-in to receive your information.

Offer your visitors free bonuses such as eBooks for signing up to your free newsletter. Either use a separate landing page to handle the subscription process or have the subscription box placed above the fold on your website where it is clearly visible.

5. Discussion boards and forums
You can encourage other members to react and send you a reply by leaving useful and thought-provoking comments on discussion boards and forums. This will enable you to build a networking relationship from here. Be sure to sign with a link back to your affiliate marketing business website.

6. Social bookmarking sites
You will find that these sites are a rich source of targeted traffic that you can drive to your affiliate marketing business site. Your market demographics are also easier to define so sending out invitations to potential leads and members is much simpler.

7. Guest Blogging
By becoming a guest blogger you could drive another blog's captured traffic to your affiliate site. The site's readership will find you interesting enough to follow you to your own site if you can write well and can offer unique and useful content.

8. Host a Contest
Locate your target market and then promote a contest through ads or e-mails. All details must be found on your affiliate marketing website so you can drive traffic there. Registration must also be performed on one of your landing pages. Just make sure to offer prizes that visitors who will be coming in will find useful.

9. Allow bookmarks on your web pages
You can drive traffic to your affiliate marketing site by allowing your readers to bookmark certain pages that contain good content. This will help promote those pages and your website to other people who might be interested in the same subjects.

10. Offer freebies!
Everybody loves a freebie! There's nothing like a free gift to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing site. It's easy to implement and can be relatively cheap or even free. Also, you can offer these visitors an incentive to sign up for whatever campaign it is you are promoting.

10 Ways to Drive Massive Traffic to Your Website

2008-11-11T00:57:00.000+07:00

Targeted traffic is the lifeblood of any successful business. In this article, I'm going to show you how to get laser targeted traffic in just a few simple steps.

1. Article Marketing -
One of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to your website is through the use of article marketing. This is one of the oldest techniques for generating traffic, but it's still one of the best.

Once you have written your article, you can then submit it to some of the top article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, Buzzle, the American Chronicle, ArticlesBase, and SearchWarp. For a list of the top article directories online, go to… Article Directory List | Article Directory Rank | MasonWorld Internet Marketing Strategy | Internet Based Marketing Blog You can also publish your website to Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Zimbio, and Gather.com.

For a complete list of Web 2.0 sites, go to… Web 2.0 Directory : eConsultant Article marketing is even more powerful when you submit exclusive articles to bloggers and owners of newsletters. This technique has sent me thousands of visitors with a single article. The key is to find the right distribution outlets.

Just imagine if you spend just one hour each day writing and distributing one article. In three months you would have 100 articles all sending you traffic on a daily basis.

So get out there and start syndicating your articles, submitting guests posts, and writing for online newsletters.

2. Viral Ebooks -
Why not bundle your articles together and create a viral ebook? Giving away free ebooks is one of the best ways to generate traffic online. It's also one of the best ways to build your mailing list.

You can submit your PDF ebooks to Scribd, eSnips, DocStoc, Calameo, Issuu, Yudu, FreeIQ, and ButterflyReports.

For a complete list of ebook directories you can submit to, go to Free Ebook Directories

Quick Tip: You can also convert your ebooks to exe files and submit them to all the different software directories online. You can convert your ebooks using afree piece of software called WebsiteZip Packer.

3. Blogging -
Blogging is one of the best things you can do for your business. Blogging is a great way to get to know your readers. Plus, blogging can play a major role in getting valuable search engine traffic from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

4. Submit your articles to Blog Carnivals.
A blog carnival is a collection of blog posts on a particular subject. They are then posted together on on blog - called a host. The host (who is also a blogger), publishes the carnival on their blog, with links to each blog post that has been submitted.

This creates an excellent opportunity to get your blog posts shared on other blogs.

There are a number of benefits to participating in blog carnivals. Not only will you generate extra traffic, but it also provides you with quality backlinks and an excellent opportunity to connect with other bloggers.

To submit your article to a blog carnival, go to Blog Carnival - Blog Communities Publishing Magazines. For extra exposure, submit to multiple blog carnivals. Just make sure they're all relevant to your topic.

This is one of the easiest ways to create one-way backlinks coming into your site, which is one of the biggest factors when it comes to ranking high in Google.

5. Submit your blog posts to social bookmarking sites.
Social Bookmarking is one of the easiest ways to get extra traffic and links coming into your blog. Social bookmarking allows Internet users to save and organize bookmarks to a public website, tag them with keywords, share them with others, and browse what others have bookmarked.

Digg, Delicious, Mixx, and Digg are just a few of the social bookmarking sites you can use to maximize your exposure.

You can do a semi-automated submission to over 50 social bookmarking sites at AutoPoster.com.

You can also encourage your blog readers to bookmark your posts as well with a Wordpress plugin called ShareThis.

6. Ustream.tv -
Ustream allows you to create your very own tv station on the Web. However, it's better than TV because it's a live, interactive experience. While you're broadcasting the video, you're also getting feedback from the live chatroom.

Ustream gives your business a human face and a real personality. This is extremely valuable, because people like to buy and interact with people, not impersonal companies.

Live video allows you to reach entirely new audiences and develop a much greater level of engagement. A deeper level of engagement almost allows equates to a higher conversion rate when done correctly.

It's also an excellent way to get feedback from your audience.

7. Forum Marketing -
Forums are another way to drive targeted visitors to your website. The key to getting quality traffic from forums is to find a forum that is highly targeted to your website, become involved in the community, and create a benefit-laden signature.

You can put a link back to your website in your signature. It's critical that you use your signature to offer something of extreme value along with a good call-to-action. Otherwise, why would anybody click?

The biggest benefit of marketing in forums is that they are centered around a very tight group of people who are all interested in the same subject. This is essentially a community of raving fans for a particular topic, making them extremely targeted prospects.

Forums are also an excellent way to connect with other bloggers, meet other marketers, and gain insights into your market.

8. Interviews are another great way to generate traffic.
When you interview a fellow blogger, they will almost always publish a link to the interview on their blog. At the same time, you are also sending traffic to their website by posting the interview on your own blog. This can be a very effective technique for generating traffic and meeting new bloggers. Unfortunately, most people are just afraid to ask.

9. Build a List -
If you're not building a list, you're missing out on a major source of ongoing traffic. Your list is the most valuable asset in your business. Best of all, it can be leveraged at anytime to drive a funnel of visitors to your website.

10. Video Marketing -
Video sites have quickly become some of the most highly trafficked sites on the Internet, making them one of the best places to generate lots of extra traffic.

Don't worry, your video doesn't have to be a Spielberg classic. In fact, it can just be a PowerPoint presentation with audio. Even simple videos can drive thousands of visitors to your site.

Once you've created your video, you can then submit it to the top video submission sites with a tool called TubeMogul. And finally, My Favorite… Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to generate extremely targeted traffic online. By following just a few basic principles, you can get lots of traffic from the search engines every month.

A Double Take on Affordable Web Hosting

2008-11-11T00:56:00.000+07:00

What does Affordable Web Hosting actually mean?

Like any bustling marketplace, Web hosting shoppers are always trying to pick out the best plans, at the most affordable prices.

So with the term ‘affordable Web hosting' thrown around so much these days, it's easy to become overwhelmed and consumed by cheap price tags, and crazy disk space and bandwidth deals.

TopHosts asked a couple of leading service providers what affordable Web hosting truly means these days, and how shoppers should navigate a market so full of numbers and promises.

Lou Honick, CEO of HostmySite, a provider of wide-ranging website services, thinks Web hosting turned affordable a long time ago, and that price tags have basically bottomed out recently. This reality makes finding the right plan at an appropriate price more difficult than ever.

Price, Space, Bandwidth Trap
“Web hosting is such a big market, and when you're exposed to so many companies everybody starts to look the same,” Honick said. “That's why hosting companies, consciously or unconsciously, fall into the pricing, bandwidth and disk space trap – it's the easiest way to look different, with numbers.”

Honick admits HostMySite takes part in low-priced, affordable strategies as well, with their $2.95/month shared hosting plan. But that's just the nature of the market he explained, and says his company goes way beyond just low prices. Affordability, to Honick, is not simply about a price tag. It's about the value behind that price tag, which isn't expressed in numbers – like customer service, support and uptime.

Brent Oxley, Founder and President of Host Gator, agrees that the idea of affordable Web hosting has taken on an extreme state as of late. He also thinks cheap monthly rates, big disk space and bandwidth are not the only things that make a hosting plan affordable. Customers need to keep in mind what they'll need to make their website successful, and what services are most important down the road. If you can get solid customer support, great uptime, at a good price then that's affordable Web hosting, Oxley says.

Disk Space Overrated
“The prices for Web hosting in my opinion have bottomed out a while ago. What hasn't bottomed out is the advertised size of the plans,” Oxley said. “The amount of users who actually use all the disk space and bandwidth on a large plan is close to nil… It's not that hosting companies are able to physically offer that much more, it just means they keep overselling more and more to keep up with their competitors.”

Oxley says customers virtually never use those large amounts of disk space promised by companies, so customers need to look beyond big, flashy numbers and consider what's important – a whopping 100 GB of space for cheap, or good service and uptime at an affordable price?

Degrees of Affordable Web Hosting
Of course, affordability will mean something different to everyone. Honick explained that those that plan to have a website where uptime is critical to their customers, and who want to ensure availability at all times, need to raise their view on affordability a level or two. Virtual Private Servers or a managed dedicated plan with solid, accessible 24/7 customer support may be the kind of solution your website requires. In this case, affordability takes on a whole new level, with the most affordable Web hosting plan being the one that best combines price, uptime, support and the offering itself.

Then again, if you're just starting out and all you want is a basic shared hosting plan at a low price, perhaps the most affordable monthly rate, along with just the essentials – hard disk space, monthly transfer, email accounts, design and marketing tools, etc. – is all you require.

But if you're going to go cheap, make sure it's with a company you can grow with, Honick says. Seek out a Web host that offers a “life cycle of services”, which provides a progression of plans from shared to VPS to dedicated hosting. If you go with such a company you can always upgrade when your website outgrows the cheaper, basic plan you started with.

And always consider the customer support behind the price. “Look for a partner,” Honick says, “someone that can be there to answer questions and guide you through all the steps.” That's the most valuable element behind a price: Web hosting support and reliability.

Future of Affordable Web Hosting
In fact, as more and more realize the importance of customer support, Honick predicts a slight increase in prices. Web hosting has become as cheap as it's going to get, and eventually customers will stop focusing on disk space and price. The focus will shift towards website support and customer service, Honick explained, which hold real value. That kind of service actually costs companies money and, if more people demand it, Web hosting may become less affordable in the future.

“It's going to get to a point where people are going to stop caring about how much disk space you get. It's already not much of a differentiator,” Honick said. “It's easy to offer lots of disk space knowing people aren't going to use it. It's harder to offer great service, and that's what it will boil down to. As people lean on that more, you'll see at least a small uptake in prices because that's a real cost.”

Banner Design Tips

2008-11-11T00:53:00.000+07:00

An effective banner design can make the difference between an unsuccessful and successful banner ad campaign. At Grantastic Designs, we have found that the following banner design tips can increase CTRs (click through ratios) and resulting sales. We hope these tips help you.

Banner Design Dos

* Use animation.
A quick-to-download animation can greatly increase a banner's CTR. Animation must be used very carefully since the purpose of the animation is to attract visitors, not to irritate them.

For animated banners, these general guidelines apply:

o The animation should be subtle enough to attract attention but should not be so ostentatious as to interfere or clash with the design of the web page you are advertising on.
o An animation that loops endlessly tends to irritate visitors. Have the animation loop 7-10 times, leaving the main message on the last animation frame.
o Conversely, some visitors will stop a web page from loading before the banner animation has loaded, leaving only the first frame. Thus, it might be a good idea to have your message come across in your first frame if you know that the web page you are advertising on has a long download time.

* Feature a call to action.
Placing a "Click here" or "Submit" graphic image on your banner can significantly improve your CTR.

* Use bright colors.
Blue, yellow, and green banners have a higher CTR than black-and-white banners. Use the color red sparingly.

* Use the word "Free" in your banner.
Depending on what's offered, the word "free" can increase CTRs. For example, offering a free software demo gets a good response. Offering free money arouses suspicion since people will want to know what the catch is.

* Give a benefit for clicking on your banner.
For example, "Do you want more traffic?" or, "Need help with taxes?" The answer to the question will be on your web site.

* Keep the message short.
Simple banners have higher CTRs than unfocused, wordy banners.

* Link the banner to a specific page.
When people click on the banner, they want to go directly to the web page that has the information they want. Your visitors do not want to go to your home page and have to hunt for the information.

* Refresh or change your banners frequently.
Studies have shown that CTRs drop significantly after 2 weeks. The CTR usually increases when a new banner appears.

To find the most effective banner design for your business, you must go through a period of testing. Testing means you run a banner over a period of time and measure the results (i.e. CTRs and resulting sales). Then you change one thing about the banner design, such as a color or a font change, and run that banner over a period of time and measure the results. The banner designs that result in the most sales should be the types of banners you use for your banner campaigns.