Like other social communities like Mybloglog, BlogCatalog, etc.. Google Friend Connect can also say as a means of liaison and facilitate you to interact directly with each other.
Friday
Creating Traffic with Google Friend Connect
Like other social communities like Mybloglog, BlogCatalog, etc.. Google Friend Connect can also say as a means of liaison and facilitate you to interact directly with each other.
Thursday
Social Media Optimization - A Priority For Your SEO Campaign
In this article, we will describe the influence that social media optimization is currently having on search marketing. We'll also give you the rules of engagement for executing an effective SMO campaign. We'll explain what SEO social media is, and the advantage of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts.
The Influence Of Social Media Optimization On Search Marketing
Search marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffíc. For years, gaining that exposure was based solely upon the development of your site and generating links pointing to your site. Both are still important today. However, social media optimization has shifted the landscape of search engine marketing.
Saturday
Buy text links on my website easily with Ask2link
If you have a blog, website, or forum, with a minimum PageRank 1 or Alexa rank under 2,000,000 (2 million), you could earn more money from your website beyond Google Adsense contextual ads. I have recently joined Ask2link.com (http://www.ask2link.com/refer/titoadithya) to enable advertisers to buy ad space on my website. Ask2link.com provides secure, easy, and fast checkout flow so you could get your text link ads or banner ads live within 2 minutes after online payment. Platforms supported include PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ASP, JSP, and hosted blogs at Blogger.com or Wordpress.com . They also provide you with the ability to customize the 'nofollow' tag tag when you sell your ads. This may affect your ad sales, though.
If you would like to monetize your blog or website, you could visit Ask2link to learn more. Ask2link is a search engine marketing company that specializes in selling text links and banner ads. Advertisers, you may want to think about spending your marketing budget beyond PPC(Pay-per-click) such as Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, or Google Adwords. Why?
Static HTML links can bring you targeted traffic, bring you more organic search traffic, and also potentially improve your search engine rankings (SERPs), and you could increase your website traffic or sales. It also has uses in search engine reputation management. Search engine reputation management companies also use various SEO techniques to fight negative publicity. Start advertising now in this website as part of your SEO or online marketing campaign. You could now purchase static text links or banner ads on my website by following on the links below:
6 Things You Can Do Today to Drive More Traffic to Your Website for Free
You need to constantly work on it, fine-tune it, discard methods that are not working and implement new ones.
The following 6 methods are simple to implement and can be done for free by you today.
1. Email Marketíng
Your first step should be to send an email to your existing clients announcing the existence of your website. You should also ask your customers to forward your email onto their friends, family and colleagues.
Think Web Pages, not Websites
If you are starting a new business and don't have any customers yet, send an email to people you know who may be interested in your products/services.
Remember to email your clients every time you make changes, add new offers or features to your website to remind them to come back.
The next step could be to send your announcement to an opt-in email list. Opt-in email lists contain people or businesses who have requested to receive information about certain topic(s). There are many companies who can provide you with these lists.
Under no circumstance should you EVER send unsolicited email (spam) to people you either don't know or who have not requested to receive your information.
2. Search Engines & Directories
Submít your website to as many search engines and directories as you can. (A search engine is a searchable database of websites collected by a computer program (called a crawler, robot or spider). When you enter a keyword, the search engine looks for keywords in its database, and any relevant records are displayed.)
Currently there are thousands of search engines and directories on the internet. Some of the main ones include Google, Yahoo, MSN. When submittíng your website to the search engines, you can either do it manually by going to the search engine website and adding your URL (website address) or you can employ the services of a Search Engine Submission company, who will do it for you.
Search engines try to rank sites that contain good content higher, so you need keywords and phrases on your pages that best describe your service and products. For example, if you are a florist, use words such as "florist, online florist, virtual florist, wedding florist, florist in Sydney, florist on line, flowers, floral, bouquets, floral arrangements etc." as many times as possible to ensure high search engine ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching use Google's Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.
Once you decide on your keywords, use them in:
(a) Your website's domain name
(b) The title of your page - This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window.
(c) The heading of your home page.
(d) The first paragraph of your home page.
(e) Meta tags - Keywords, description.
(f) Titles of your graphics.
Thursday
SEO Results Take Time
It doesn't matter what industry you are involved in, or what techniques you follow, in all cases you will be a prisoner of time. In the vast majority of cases search engine rankings don't come over night.
Regardless of the scope of the SEO campaign you are undertaking, you will have to wait for results. It doesn't matter if you are undertaking a massive link building & social media campaign combined with extreme content development - you will still have to wait for those results. Just how long you need to wait however, will depend on a large number of factors.
In this article I will discuss some of these factors and give a few scenarios to help you gauge how long you may need to wait to start seeing results.
The Importance of Deep Linking in Your Search Engine Marketing
There are a number of strategies that you can use to create back links to your website. Some of these strategies include emailing webmasters and asking them to place a link to your website, submittíng your site to directories, distributing free reprint articles, and paying for links. All of these have their pros and cons, and some have a better success ratio than others.
How Many Back Links Does Your Website Have?
Take a look at your website and see just how many back links you actually do have. Do not do this for only one search engine, but for all search engines where you are trying to get good SERP results. To check your backlinks, simply type into the particular search engine's box - link:http://www.yourdomainurl.com . Of course you will replace the yourdomainurl with the name of your domain.
The more back links that you have to your website, the better off you are. Not only do back links help your SERP, but also the visitors of pages where your back link is listed may just choose to visit your site.
A common mistake that new webmasters make is that they create back links, but they have all of these links pointing to their home page. It is great that you have 50 back links pointing to your home page, but take a look at other pages on your site. How many links are pointing to these pages? The answer is probably zero unless you have utilized deep linking in your link building campaigns.
What Are Deep Links?
Deep links are links that go to specific pages within your website. For example, let's say that you have a home improvement website that has a large number of pages and articles on it telling people how to do projects. If all of your back links are pointing only to your home page and you have none pointing to specific article pages, then you are not getting the full benefit of your linking activities.
Think about it this way, if I go to your website and find a piece of information that I find particularly helpful or interesting and I want to tell other people about it, how will I do it? When I tell all my friends on my blog about this great page of yours, am I going to link to your home page? No, I am going to copy and paste the actual webpage address out of my browser, into my blog. That is deep linking and what is considered to be natural linking by the search engines.
What Are Natural Links?
Natural links are those links that are created by people other than the website's marketing team. Suppose I posted a link in my own blog that said that the "most easily understood tutorial, I have read, for creating a php-xml parser" was: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-xml-parsing-rss-1-0 , and I put my quoted text into the link. That is a natural link, because I created the link with no prompting from the management at SitePoint.com.
Difficulties In Creating Deep Links
There are a few problems that you will run into when trying to create deep links to your site. One problem is that if you ask a Webmaster of another site to link to you, they will most likely just link to your home page. When you submít to directories, the vast majority of them will only allow you a link to your home page, not a deep link. Even if they do allow you to submit a deep link, they will not allow you to submit 10 deep links.
Success Tips For Creating Deep Links
Deep linking is quite a bit easier when utilizing free reprint articles as a part of your link building campaign. This is because you can put whatever link you want to put in the "About The Author" box. The About The Author box is required to stay intact in all websites that are using your article. If you intend on writing a large number of articles to promote your domain, then you will want to optimize your results by putting a different deep link into the About The Author box for each of the articles that you write.
Another method of doing this is free and easy, but requires a bit of time. Take keywords in each page of the text on your website and make a hyperlink on that word or phrase to another page on your site. This is very easily done if you know how to do basic HTML. The ultimate goal here is to have every page of your website linked to, at least once, by another page on your site. You will want to spread these out among your domain's webpages, instead of having just a couple of pages linking to the other 50 pages.
Another reason to spread your links across all of the pages of your domain, is that users are likely to be turned off by a page that is almost all hyperlinks; those pages often appear spammy or cluttered. A good idea for any Webmaster is to create these internal deep links when you create a new page. It is much easier to spend a couple of minutes from the beginning, rather than trying to go back and do all of them at a later date.
Incorporate Deep Linking Into Your Linking Strategies
Deep linking is as important a consideration as back linking! It does not matter which page visitors use to enter our websites. If they like what they read on our internal pages, they are more likely to view other pages on our websites. If they view other pages on our website, they are likely to find our homepage, and we will get a chance to tell them why they should buy our products or services.
Deep links to our website help to ensure that the search engines will have good cause to show our internal webpages as well as our homepage. For every page in our website that gets great SERP, our chances of getting a sale are increased significantly.
We have 15 pages on our website, eight of which provide real content to our prospective clients. All eight of these pages have a significant number of back links pointing to them. 48% of our visitors land on our home page. 37% of our visitors land on our internal pages. As a result, 85% of our traffic lands on our website as a result of our back links, either directly or through our natural search placement in the search engínes. The remaining 15% arrive on our website through bookmarks, personal referrals, and paid listings.
Deep linking works. Give it a shot.
Source by:
Trey Pennewell is a writer, who writes about online marketíng. Learn more about our Pay For Results SEO services at: LinksAndTraffic.com. Trey also manages article approvals at the free article directory located at: TechCentralPublishing.com.
Quick and Easy Keyword Research for More Traffíc
Before you say "Oh no, not another keyword research article", let me just say you will learn exactly how to quickly and easily do keyword research and even create SEO friendly pages based on keywords you find.
Clearly one of the most beneficial ways to generate more traffíc to your site is to create backlinks to it. Backlinks from relevant sites helps to boost your page rank and can even get your website, or a particular webpage, showing on the first pages of a Google search for that keyword.
Now you don't want just any old backlinks but ones that contain specific keywords you have optimized a particular page, blog or website for.
Lets say your website is about "dog training". A common and highly sought after keyword, but one that a new or even established site is going to find hard to be ranked high for.
Now we all know that trying to get a webpage ranked in Google for one of the primary search terms is a real challenge. Those keywords are in effect, out of the range of most marketers, both in time and money resources to try to rank for.
So the best possible way to raise search results and rank in your niche is to select secondary keywords that still get a lot of searches but don't eliminate you from the possibility for ranking for them.
Stick with me here because this isn't as hard as you were perhaps ** lead ** to believe.
Now the first thing you should do is to narrow down the keyword(s) that you want to build or optimize a webpage for. You can do this very easily by going to the following website SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and typing in a primary keyword in the search box.
In the results that show, you are going to get a good líst of the highest searched for keywords related to the primary keyword you entered in the search box. You will also find a lot more information presented that can really help you narrow down your selection. You are looking for phrases that contain part or all of the primary keyword that you started your search with.
The next thing you must do is determine what keywords are being used successfully to market products, services or websites online. To do this, I suggest you use the Google Adwords search term tool.
You can simply copy and paste a keyword from the líst into the form, hit enter and get a listing of keywords based on the one you input and also provide a líst of additional keywords to consider that expands the possibilities even further.
Most importantly you will see a listing of keywords followed by a box filled in with the color green.
At this point, my suggestion to you is that you choose a keyword that has good monthly search quantity but whose box [colored in green] is only about half or less green. Less green means there is less competition for that particular keyword phrase.
Now we want to measure the link building competition for a keyword in Google's search engine by selecting a keyword from the above líst and placing the phrase in the Google search box using the specific search operator: inanchor:"your keyword goes here"
Being that we are narrowing our keyword to a specific one you want to be sure to include the quotation marks before and after the keyword. If you use the inanchor operator without the quotation marks, it will give results for every page that contains every word in the phrase you entered individually or together, instead of the specific phrase, and doesn't narrow the pages down to relevant ones that you would be directly competing for on that particular keyword phrase.
Using the inanchor operator with the quotation marks will show the results (pages or links) shown (at top right of page) that contain the exact keyword phrase. These are sites already using that "keyword search term" on their webpages.
Note: you can find a full description of all google search operators at: GoogleGuide.com
After you find a suitable keyword with good search volume and minimal competition and build a webpage around it, you can begin creating backlinks to that page using several resources. Your backlinks should be from high traffic sites because they usually get spidered for new information regularly by the search engines looking for new content and links.
Here are some suggestions:
* Post to forums with your sig file containing the link to your webpage
* Leave a comment on blogs
* Write and submit articles
Be sure that somewhere you include the specific search term that you have optimized your webpage for and the link to that specific page.
Is there an easier way to create backlinks without having to spend hours and hours of your time doing it?
Yes, there are automated sites and systems to help with creating backlinks. Just be sure the systems mesh with your needs and don't send up red flags to the search engines.
Using Keywords as Part of Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Anyone involved in an online business will tell you their marketing efforts are dramatically reduced if they haven't optimized their published content correctly with the right keywords.
Keyword optimization is a very integral component of an effective online marketing strategy.
The proper keyword optimization of content helps anyone searching for information like yours to easily find it. Done correctly and you'll be rewarded with a higher ranking in the search results. The manner in which you use keywords within your content will make or break you in the search engine rankings. A low search engine ranking will make you virtually invisible to anyone searching for content like yours.
Search engines rely heavily on keywords to accurately identify and rank sites found on the internet for people searching for the content that these sites contain. Under or over utilizing keywords will only hurt the ranking of the site giving it a very weak showing in any search results.
There are 3 areas of focus you'll need to be concerned with to correctly utilize keywords within your content. By doing so you'll gain the favor of the search engines and also quite a bit more traffic to your site.
Let's discuss these 3 important areas of keyword optimization below:
ACCURACY
Any keywords you select to use should be relevant to the content itself. Search engines are very strict about this and will bury you in the search results if they feel your keyword selection doesn't reflect the content. When people search keywords on the internet they're expecting to find information directly related to the words they are searching on. Search engines for their part want to insure that people using their search engine find what it is they're looking for.
POSITIONING
Another factor to be considered when using keywords is the placement of these words within the content itself. For instance it is recommended to use keywords in the title of your content when you can. Even within the title it is better to place the selected word or phrase at the title beginning if at all possible. Again you must remember that these keywords must accurately describe, reflect, or relate to the content within.
Another consideration is to place your primary keyword at the beginning and the end of the body of content you're performing the keyword optimization on. Additional theme keywords should be used conservatively thru out the content when their use makes grammatical sense.
FREQUENCY
Here's an area where some people may have a tendency to get carried away. In an attempt to gain the attention of search engines some may overuse their selected keywords throughout the content. Keyword 'stuffing' as this is known is frowned upon by search engines as a deliberate attempt to gain higher search rankings. Search engines discourage this by penalizing you with a lower search engine ranking.
Opinions vary on what is the right percentage of keywords to use within the content that will maximize your optimization efforts while avoiding penalties. Generally any keyword usage between 2 and 5 percent of the total body of content is considered safe. A free keyword density tool you can use online to check your content can be found at live-keyword-analysis.
Always remember to use your selected words in a natural way within the body of your content since you're writing for the reader and not the search engine. So before you hit the 'submit' bottom proof-read your work to ensure it reads like a human wrote it and not some cyborg.
Proper keyword placement and utilization is almost always at the core of any successful internet marketing strategy. Thru the correct implementation of this online marketing technique you will increase your search rankings thereby boosting the awareness of your online presence. Whatever your reasons for being online may be, if you're looking to boost your traffic this is one of the most effective and fundamental ways to achieve that!
Source by :
TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina. For additional online success tips and a free guide that demonstrates how to find both profitable markets and products visit: http://blogbrawn.com.
Streamlining Your Social Web Presence in 6 Steps
Relax. With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.
To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I'll start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:
* A WordPress Blog
* A Facebook Profile
* A Facebook Page
* A MySpace Page
* A YouTube Account
* A Flickr Account
* A Twitter Account
* An Upcoming.org Account
* A GoodReads Account
Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence:
Step 1: Optimize Your Blog Feed
The very first step in streamlining your presence in the Social Web is burning your blog's feed to Feedburner. This is a free service, and obtaining a FeedBurner account will help you to easily manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new feed, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName .
Step 2: Feed Your Blog Now
You want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding applications. Remember that each social site may provide its own different way of accomplishing this.
Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that allows you to import notes from an external blog.
Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different. Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.
It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for streamlining your micro-blog entries.
Step 3: Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia
Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and by feeding your images and videos into your social networking profiles and pages.
WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag, a plugin that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right into your blog posts, and create galleries.
A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your Flickr account. Find out more by going to: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.
Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or Website by using your YouTube channels. After you've added videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.
To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr; for MySpace, use Happy Flickr.
You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing an application called YouTube Box, and using the application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips on your MySpace profile.
Step 4: Integrate Other Social Tools
The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social Web presence. In the example I have created, we have accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications in Facebook and MySpace, you'll find that Facebook offers an application that allows you to integrate your Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books and book reviews.
Step 5: Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools
Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm is a useful tool that lets you post one brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a number of social sites.
Step 6: Research and Repeat
The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people through social platforms and applications; therefore, when deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a new social tool, it's best to research the ways that tool will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer applications to integrate the new tool?
When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable steps presented above.
Source by:
Deltina Hay is the principal of Social Media Power, and founder of the new social media Website service, Plumb Social. Ms. Hay's graduate education in computer science, applied mathematics, and psychology led her naturally to social media consulting. Her new book, A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, will be released in March 2009.
Tuesday
How to Get Massive Free Websíte Traffic
When you think of it in those terms, it's really simple.
There are also only three real ways to get in front of the traffic flow. You can buy traffic, borrow traffic, or create traffic.
You buy traffic using pay-per-click search engines. It's very dependable, and can give you a steady flow of consistent traffic.
The big drawback with using pay-per-clicks to generate traffic is that it can be very risky. Those who use pay-per- clicks to generate 100% of their traffic, and are considered the best of the best, will tell you that as many as 7 out of 10 campaigns that they set up will lose money. The professionals very quickly shut off the losers, and their winners more than make up for the losses, but it's really not a game for someone not properly trained.
You can also buy traffic using an affiliate program. Since you only pay for the traffic when a sale is made, it's a very low-risk method. Since your affiliates are sending you their best customers, you can also think of it as borrowing traffic.
I love the affiliate program model, and have numerous products sold via affiliate programs. I also sell a lot of others' affiliate products. It's win-win.
You can also create traffic by putting things on the Internet that people are attracted to. You can create content by writing articles or blogging for example. I love content creation and have written over 1100 different articles. My articles teach people how to solve pressing problems, and at the same time point them to me (my sites) as a great resource.
When you create content your big challenge is to get it noticed and indexed by the search engines, so that people can follow links from there to your site. It's actually fairly easy - but time and labor intensive.
If your content is "viral" it will be something that others will happily share. Examples include in-depth articles, essays that touch people on a deep emotional level, or humorous videos that you post on YouTube.
Of the three methods of getting traffic (buying, borrowing, and creating it) my favorite has to be borrowing it... with creating it second. I generally only buy traffic when I need a really quick surge to test my website's conversion process.
The key to generating an absolute flood of free traffic is getting noticed, getting backlinks, etc., from high traffic websites such as Google, Craig's List, Yahoo, YouTube, and the various bookmarking and social networking sites.
This can be as simple as searching through Yahoo Answers for questions on your area of expertise, and then posting a great answer - along with an appropriate link to your website or product.
It can be as simple as searching through YouTube for videos on your area of expertise, and then leaving a comment along with a link sharing that they can find more information on the topic at your site.
It can be as simple as using the search engines to locate dozens or even hundreds of blogs and forums in your niche, and then interacting with these communities.
There's only one problem with most of the methods that I just mentioned. They can be time consuming and labor intensive. Just locating active communities in your niche can literally take hours.
I do have a secret. I use automated software to monitor and notify me of active blogs, forums, and communities in my niche. I use automated software to notify me when they are discussing my area of expertise or there is a new video posted pertaining to my area of expertise.
When I discover a new resource, I then analyze it, and if appropriate, I interact with that high traffic site, and leave a link back to my site, which is a perfectly acceptable practice.
So there you have my secret for generating literally hundreds of thousands of free hits to even my newest sites. Of course, your site has to be about something that people are interested it.
I do strongly advocate using software to automate many of the mundane processes such as just finding these sites. Many webmasters really struggle with website traffic generation, and there is absolutely no need to. You merely find the huge pools of traffic interested in your topic, and then you stand underneath the waterfall, and enjoy the cool, refreshing flow of new visitors.
Source by :
Willie Crawford has been marketing goods and services online since 1996. With very busy websites in dozens of niches, he teaches that the secret is automating the flow of traffic, using the tools at: IncredibleWebsiteTraffic.com
Thursday
Discover The Answers To The Top 10 SEO Questions
Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.
1. What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they're looking for, in the places they are looking, they'll find you and place you in their results when a person is looking for your information.
The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking…what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your webpage content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.
2. How important is SEO?
Let's just put it this way. What's better a few visitors who stumble upon your website or hundreds of visitors that go to your website with the direct intention of learning more or making a purchase?
With more and more people searching and shopping online, getting on the first page or two of the search engine results can mean the difference between keeping your day job and becoming an internet millionaire.
3. What are text links?
Links are just one of the tools you can use to increase your search engine optimization. The more quality links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. Text links are links that contain only text. Wikipedia is a great place to examine internal text links. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them they are taken to a different page on the same website. The kind of text links you're looking for will be text links that will take readers from your article, ebook, or web copy to your website.
An excellent tool to generate incoming links is to write copy for online audiences like article directories, blogs, and ezines and insert text links in the copy. Webmasters will link to the content and thus to your site. Additionally, when you allow free reprints of your copy provided the links are maintained, you're encouraging links to your website.
4. What are link farms and link exchanges?
Search engines don't accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality company. This means you don't want to participate in link farming. If a search engine suspects your links to be lacking, they'll actually penalize you. Link farming or link exchanging is essentially the process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase your search engine ranking. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites. Stay away from link farms. When you generate a link from another site, it had better be relevant and coming from a real web site.
5. What is duplicate content?
The definition of duplicate content is web pages that contain substantially the same content. Search engines will penalize you for this. How do you avoid duplicate content? Don't publish the same article in several locations. There are many tools available online to help you re-write your content so that it is 30%, 40%, and even 50% different. However, the best way to avoid duplicate content is to simply write new content.
6. How do I find the right keywords?
There are several steps to finding the most profitable keywords. The first step is to generally do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords you think people will use to find your products. The next step is to research supply and demand for those particular keywords. Supply means how many other websites are using those same keywords and demand is how many people are looking for those particular keywords.
The key is to find keywords with high demand and relatively low supply. There are many effective and useful keyword tools to help you find this information and to generate keyword ideas. Once you decide on a few keywords, it may be useful to do a bit of testing before you commit to them.
7. How do I optimize my web pages?
Placing your keywords in the right location is a good start to optimizing your web pages. Search engines look to the headings, subheadings, domain name, and title of your website. They also look in the content on your page and primarily focus on the first paragraph.
Try to get a domain name with your primary keyword included. When you include your keyword in your URL it tells the search engine spiders immediately what your site is about.
Title Tag. Your title tag is the line of text that appears on search engine results pages that acts as a link to your site. This is a crucial element of your webpage as it describes to your visitors what your page is about.
If you view your source code, your title tag will look something like this: <TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Tips</TITLE>
Keep your title tags brief, descriptive, up to date, and keyword rich will help to increase the relevance of your site in the eyes of the search engines, as well as giving your potential visitors a good idea of what they can expect from your site.
Meta Tags have lost their importance to the search engines however it is still helpful to place your keywords in your meta tags. In your source code they look something like this: <META NAME="description"......
8. Do I need to submit my site to the search engines?
The simple answer is - no. Search engine spiders are always out there doing their job and collecting information. Every time you update your website, add content, or change your keywords, the search engines capture the information and record it. However, if you want to be listed on a directory, like the DMOZ Open directory project, then you will need to submit to those.
9. What are spiders?
Search engine spiders are also called web crawlers or bot. They're basically automated programs which scan websites to provide information to search engines often for the purpose of indexing or ranking them.
10. How does content help my SEO?
Content is one of the best tools to improve your search engine ranking. It is a great place to emphasize keywords, encourage linking to your site, and increase traffic. The key to content is to make sure you're offering quality content and you're updating your website and your content frequently. Content can be provided in many forms including:
* Blogs
* Forums and chat rooms
* Articles
* Reviews
* Case studies
* Reports
* How to guides
* Tutorials
* e-books and much more.
Source by:
Jeremy Gislason - Want to know proven ways to dramatically increase membership sales? Want to take membership marketing to a whole new level of overflowing profits? Build high-earning membership sites like a pro by going to http://www.membershipmillionaire.com.
Sunday
The Cunning Brilliance of PageRank
A few weeks ago I found myself in the subway of New York City. Posters and billboards from a prominent bank promoted credit card decaled the underground landscape.
These well-crafted advertisements promised ten dollars back for every $100 spent on subway fares. It gave the current economic crisis and recession as the explanation for their incredible generosity and compassion.
Everybody around me seemed thoroughly impressed by this overwhelming gesture of selfless charity; many discussed in earnest how they were planning to sign up for this card to enjoy these charitable savings. It seemed I was the only one, the Christmas Grinch of the crowd, who perceived this advertisement strategy as more cunning and brilliant than selfless and generous. What an ideal time to hook people on yet another credit card, especially with the holiday season already upon us. Obviously the long-term interest this credit card company was anticipating far overshadowed their likely short-term promotional costs.
Indeed it was a cunning and brilliant strategy, much the same, I thought to myself, as Google's page rank system.
At first glance it seems a very wise, fair and indeed brilliant system for determining positioning within the search ranks. On closer inspection, however, it is even more brilliant and cunning than most are giving it credit.
In the past, creating good, unique and newsworthy content, coupled with intelligent onsite optimization strategies, was at least enough to get your website found. These days are now gone, regardless of what some naïve or misleading SEO experts might still tell you.
Page Rank has now become the single most important factor in having your site found in the organic search results of the leading search engines. Page Rank is determined by the quantity and quality of websites that are linking to yours. Each website link acts as a kind of vote for the site it links to, and passes some of its own page rank to this site. The higher the page rank, and the more relevant the content of the site, the more significant the affect will be.
Since search engine bots cannot view your site in the same way a human views it, this strategy allows user popularity to have a significant affect on the algorithm these search engines are using. The belief is, of course, that the more quality and relevant sites that are voting for yours, the higher the probability that your site is a good one, and therefore deserving of a higher position.
Of course, this system is not perfect, and for obvious reasons, but it is certainly superior to deciding the importance of a site purely on onsite content. The reality is, there are thousands if not million of webmasters who can write unique, quality content. There are even more who know how to optimize this content for the search engines. However, millions of sites cannot be number one for a single keyword or phrase. Page rank must decide the difference.
The problem, however, is that the top search engines have now leaned so far away from onsite optimization, in preference of offsite optimization (i.e. page rank), that you are likely to find all kinds of lousy content and add riddled sites at the top of your searches. Putting a greater importance on links, however, plays significantly in Google's favour. This is especially true today, as reciprocal and 3-way link exchanges have now been significantly devalued, along with paid links and link directories.
Google's intent is that links should be entirely organic, occurring naturally when other webmasters like your site enough to add a link to it. This way of achieving links however, can take a very, very long time, as most Internet users do not know that they are supposed to do this. Most Internet users add the sites they like to their favourites, they don't create a keyword rich link to it from their own highly relevant site. Nevertheless, this is just one of the many ways Google favours older more time-proven sites over newer, get rich quick sites. The fact is, unless the content of your website has just revealed something of tremendous news importance, it could take years before your quality site acquires enough natural, keyword rich links from relevant sites to significantly boost you to the top of the search engines.
The conundrum, however, is that nobody will find your great content, and thereby link to it, unless you are on page one or two for at least one keyword or phrase (one that gets searched for that is). So if you do want to acquire natural one-way links, you pretty much have only one choice. You will have to advertise.
Google now provides the best online advertising available. Not only is it inexpensive, it is targeted towards your keywords.
This means a much higher conversion rate. People will find your product or service when they are looking for it, not when they are looking for something else. And with around 80% of North American searches done on Google, it just wouldn't make sense to concentrate your efforts anywhere else (unless your loyalty lies elsewhere).
Knowing this, guess who will reap the largest rewards of this new lean towards offsite optimization? The reality is, if you want your internet site to one day make it to the top of Google (and Yahoo and MSN) for an important keyword or phrase, you will have to acquire a substantial number of natural links. Since this could take years, as most webmasters are selfish and don't link for nothing, and most Internet users don't know to do this, you are bound to spend a small fortune with Google before your site is able to stand on its own. Of course Google won't make as much of a profit from you once your site is on the top, but there will be millions of others who will still be vying for this position.
The bottom line is, you will need to spend money if you one day want to make money.
The only question is how much money can you afford to invest? Or should I say gamble, because no matter how much money you spend, there are no guarantees.
The results, of course, are purely organic, and Google's algorithm can change at any time. Besides, by the time you're actually on the top, your content and unique features will likely be outdated and not that impressive anymore.
Google insists that you cannot purchase or pay for the organic results located on the left side of the screen. If you are caught purchasing links that are intended to indirectly improve your search engine ranking position, you will either be significantly penalized, or removed from Google entirely. However, the only significant way to increase naturally is to pay for advertising on the right side, so people can actually find your great content and unique features, and provide you with these natural links.
Of course, there are some other ways to promote your site, such as blogging, posting on forums, and creating videos on Youtube, etc. The catch is, however, that if you're not careful, you will be penalized for spamming (excessively promoting your site where you are not supposed to). This is why most forums these days have the no follow meta tags added to their code. Otherwise, you will just have to get creative in achieving and maintaining high PR links that are relevant and keyword rich.
Unfortunately, if you do find a way to attain these links in any way that Google considers unnatural, it will eventually update its algorithm and ensure you are penalized for your imaginative endeavours.
Personally, I've never seen so many people work so hard at what is considered cheating. Couldn't we at least give them part marks for creativity? After all, you won't even let them see the marking rubric.
Source by: Jack Strawman is the cofounder of Late Night Chat and HookUpCanada Chat and Dating, both sites intended for late night encounters.
Getting Backlinks For Beginner
For example, if you are a member of Coachville, and somebody is searching for a coach, so it is potential that this individual views your list in the Find a Coach? section and clicks a link to your web site.
This is a backlink from Coachville to your web site.
Many of the links that coaches have on their website are planned to take visitors from the coach's website to another websites. These are usually located in a link section or a resources section. These are also named forward links or outbound links.
The important thing to note is that a backlinks get visitors to your site. One Time visitors come to your website, you can turn them into customers, product sales, newsletter readers, commissions and more.
Getting traffic to new web sites was always difficult thing to do. Waiting for website to be indexed and having high place on google and others "big" search engines takes months, but there are some things that help you with this.
Ways to make backlinks:
Blogs - One of the great ways of creating one-way links for your site is through the bill of comments in blogs. Just include the URL of your website while posting comments in blogs and soon you will build a great many number of one-way links for your website.
Forums - Posting in forums is also an excellent way for building backlinks. But don't post your URL directly in the discussion rooms or else the spam busters would make you banned and taken out from the forum. The best way to do it is through your signature. Include the URL of your site in your signature and then whenever you post a comment in the forum you will be going behind a link to your website along with your name.
Social Networks - Since the development of WEB2.0 social networking sites like Myspace, Friendster, Tagworld etc are the hottest zones on the Internet today. Billions of people visit these websites everyday for making friends or for promoting their products or services. You may also register at such websites and send links to your website along with the comments that you create at your friend's profile. In this way you may create great list of backlinks for your site.
Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is other area where you could make one-way links to your website. Just bookmark your websites in social bookmarking websites like Delicious and if your site is interesting enough, others will add your website to their list of bookmarked websites and shortly you will garner a large list of one-way links for your website.
Articles- You may write articles on various topics and send them in article websites such as this one and include the URL of your website in the resource box or in the author's bio section. There are some websites which frequently publish articles from various such article websites and along with the article they also release the auhor's bio which contains the link to your website. If your article is informative and interesting, so it will soon be released in many other websites and newsletters. This way you will have a large number of backlinks pointing to your site.
Press Release- As shortly as you some up with a new feature on your web site, do a press release on it. Press releases are very efficient for website publicity and also for making oodles of one-way links. Write a press release about any different feature of your website and take the release in several press release websites. Press release websites regularly syndicate their content through RSS and Atom feeds and some leading news sites fetch their content from every these press release websites. So you may expect a very good response from doing a single press release.
Directories - Submit you website in as many web directories as you can. These web directories draw a large number of visitors daily and so you may take a great number of visitors from such directories. Submission in directories also helps in building quality backlinks for your website. Believe submitting your web site in leading web directories such as Dmoz.org
Link exchange - Though it is a very old method for building traffic and backlinks, link exchange still works. Exchange links with quality and relevant sites for building backlinks.
Source by : Evytaar is author of Busby SEO Test site dedicated for blog and seo tutorial
Thursday
Break Through the Frustration of Optimization
"I am an artist," the man proudly proclaimed. "I don't care," the critic proudly responded. "The frame is too large, the colors are dark and it will not match my furniture," the critic further explained.
Many times web developers experience a similar scorn but not always from humans. A site has been designed with an interface that pops with beautiful GIFs and JPEGs, dazzles with Flash and functions like a charm with JavaScript. The search engines do not care. The content, the keywords and the tags do not correspond with the criteria of the search engines. Therefore, you are ignored.
It is a struggle between art and science that frustrates many. The responsibilities of web developing -- the art -- clash with the role of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- the science. That is why some companies and development firms are designating web developer and optimizer as two distinctive jobs.
Yet many smaller companies and shops still have the web developer fulfilling both roles. The problem is that optimization is becoming challenging and competitive. So here is some information to help start the optimization before, after or during the developing.
Content
It's all about the text.
Remember that optimization is all about the text. Search engines are text driven but there are still some basic HTML tags to keep in mind (i.e., h1, h2, meta tags, title tag). SEO helps improve search engine results but does not guarantee top ratings.
Patience and realistic goals will keep the frustrations low. Search engines have to crawl a site to determine what a site is about. This takes time, usually about a month, before crawls and indexing are completed by the various search engine spiders.
Take time to think (a lot) about the purpose of the website. Write down a lot of stuff in a word processing program even if it sounds silly at first. Then edit what you wrote. Edit some more, get some feedback and then start working on the keywords and keyphrases that identify the unique quality of your website.
Keywords and Keyphrases
Keywords used to be easy. Those days are gone. Keywords are highly competitive. Using two-word or three-word, maybe even four-word, phrases makes optimization less frustrating. A keyword phrase (keyphrase) helps identify the uniqueness of a website.
The keyword "game" will generate about 1 billion(!) results. The keyphrase "card game" will generate about 50 million results. That is a difference of approximately 950 million. The keyphrase "magic card game" will generate about four-million results. Time will need to be spent finding unique keyphrases but the benefits of narrowing the results, with multi-word phrases, provides a better chance of being noticed.
Keyword Density
The density formula is D = WC/KC (D = density; WC = word count; KC = keyword count)
For major keywords target 3-7% density
For minor keywords target 1-2% density
Keyword density measures how relevant keywords are in a page. The formula density = word count divided by keyword count will provide a general idea of the density percentage. For major keywords try to keep the density between three and seven percent. For minor keywords keep density between one and two percent. Try to optimize between five to ten keywords per web page.
Avoid the unethical practice of keyword stuffing. You will be penalized and possibly banned from the search engines which is worse than doing no optimization at all. Keyword stuffing uses various techniques but it is basically stuffing a page and/or meta tag with several occurrences of a keyword or keyphrase.
Keyword stuffing will result in being banned from the search engines.
Meta Tags
The meta tags are important although some will disagree. Meta tags have fallen out of favor because these tags used to be the magic solution to optimization. Not anymore. Keywords and content are more beneficial in getting a web site in top rankings. However, meta tags are still important. Meta tags are a part of the HTML and are used by most search engines to find a description of your website.
Therefore, no question about it, use the meta tags for description and keywords. Place these meta tags below the title tag on your page.
<title>~</title>
<meta name ="description" content="~" />
<meta name="keywords" content="~" />
The keyword meta tag helps you keep track of the keywords and having these meta tags give a small boost to search engine ranking. While it is true that meta tags do not perform the magic they once did it is better to have the tags than to have none. Think of meta tags like vitamins. Vitamins are not necessary for being healthy but vitamins do provide a healthy boost.
Title Tag
The title tag should be unique for every page because every page will or should have different information regarding your website. Therefore, some pages will have some but not all of your total keyword list. For example, let's say that your web site provides information about card games; one page has data about magic card games and another discusses bridge card games.
The title tag of the page with information about magic card games could have a title like Magic Card Games available at ourwebsite.com. The bridge card games page would likely have a title of Bridge Card Games at ourwebsite.com.
The name of pages should also have keywords like magic_card_games.htm or bridge_card_games.htm.
Developing websites is fun. Optimization can be a chore. Yet by focusing on content, keywords and tags you have a good start to decreasing the frustration of optimization. Granted there is more to optimization than the items addressed in this article but these are the items that can be and should be tackled first.
Source By :
Lawrence Roth in an independent web developer who owns and maintains rothline.com. Lawrence has worked on various e-commerce and website projects. Lawrence writes articles and stories to submit to online publications.
10 Free and Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking
If you want a more technical definition, Alexa explains it like this:
"The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)."
http://www.alexa.com/site/
In April 2008 Alexa revised its methodology so as to "aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users".
http://awis.blogspot.com/2008_
How accurately this method reflects the actual surfing patterns of all Internet users is open to question. However, if you bear in mind that by the end of 2005 the toolbar had been downloaded well over 10 million times you will realize why many people still think that Alexa offers one of the best approximations that we have of website ranking, especially for the top 100,000 or so websites.
That is why Alexa remains an important measure of a website's status and is used as a quick way to assess the popularity of a website by advertisers looking for the maximum exposure for the their money. Websites with a higher Alexa ranking also tend to be trusted more than those with a low ranking, so it is in the interest of website owners to get their sites ranked as highly as possible with Alexa.
Here are some quick and easy tips to help you do that without spending a single dollar!
1. Install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as your homepage.
2. Copy and paste an Alexa rank widget onto your website. You can get the widget code at http://www.alexa.com/site/
3. Create a customized version of the Alexa tool bar, Then place a link on your site to the download page and invite your visitors to download it. You will also earn Amazon commissions every time a user shops on Amazon via the toolbar link.
4. If you have a Wordpress blog there is a plug-in for Alexa Ranking (wp-Alexa-redirect-0.3plug-in) that you can use. Editor's Note: This plugin may no longer work.
5. Submit your site to web directories. Although a lot of directories charge a registration fee, you can still find many that are willing to líst your site free of charge or in exchange for a reciprocal link. A lot of the webmasters who browse web directories have the Alexa bar installed, so if they clíck your link it will help your Alexa traffic rank.
6. Become an active participant on Internet marketing and SEO forums. Again, a lot of those forum participants are already webmasters and a high percentage will use the Alexa toolbar when they surf. Place a link to your site in your signature and your rank will improve when any of those people clíck through.
7. A lot of Asian and Australian websites feature in the Alexa top 100,000 and you can bet that a lot of website owners will have the Alexa toolbar installed, so it makes sense to join social networking sites that are popular in those regions, such as:
- http://www.orkut.com - Orkut is owned by Google and is the second most visited site in India.
- http://hi5.com - Hi5 has an Alexa ranking of 17 at the time of writing this article.
8. Become an Alexa expert and post articles that discuss Alexa ranking and SEO tips. This will attract people to your site who may be interested in downloading your toolbar, or people who have already done so. Either way, it will be good for your Alexa ranking. You could even build a whole category of articles on your website devoted to this theme.
9. Set up a freebie page on your website and post a líst of useful tools to attract other website owners to your site. Include another link to your Alexa toolbar download page.
10. Get into the habit of using Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites to spread the word whenever you post a new article on your website or blog. Set up a group of fellow website owners so that you can have run reciprocal stumbling campaigns for better results.
If you apply these ten quick and easy methods you will definitely see an improvement in your Alexa rank and you should also start to attract more traffíc to your site!
Source by :
Darrell Howell is an Internet Marketer and Blogger. Visit his Blog at BlueRidgeMoney
Friday
VIRAL LINKING TAG
2. Please link back to the person who tagged you and PASS this tag to many of your friends
3. If you have more than one blog, please post this to all of your blogs, the more the merrier.
4. The use of NO FOLLOW on links is not allowed, Let's all be fair!
5. Remember to come back here at JENNY TALKS (pls don't change this link) and leave the exact post url so I can add you to the master list to help increase our rankings and improve our Technorati Authority.
6. Spread the virus.. oooopps I mean the VIRAL LINKING and happy blogging!
BLOGGERS:
#1. Scraps & Shots #2. Simply Jen 3. This and That 4. Fab & Chic Finds 5.A Slice of Life 6. Jenny Talks 7.Tech Stuff Plus 8. Food on the Table 9. Aussie Talks 10. When Mom Talks 11. Moments of My Life 12. My Crossroads 13. A Life in Bloom 14. Because Life is a Blessing 15. Digiscraptology 16. BLOGSILOG 14.Cherry's Comfort Zone 15. DigiScrapz: Captured Memories 16. Buzzy Me 17. Fab Finds, Etc. 18. Thinking Out Loud 19. Wishing and Hoping 20. PRC Board Exam Results 21. Jobs Abroad 22. My Blog Portfolio17.Race Corner 18. Mommy Talks. 19. Home and Health 20. All Kinds of Me Stuff 21. Ink Baby Studios 22.The Salad Caper 23. Winding Creek Circle 24. Aggie Scraps 25. Momma Stuff 26. We Are Family 27.Gandacious 28. Busynessworld 29. Folcreative 30. Swanportraits 31. Rumination Under The Clouds 32.Consciously Think 33. Sprawt 34. Healthy Skinny 35. Geekyology 36. When Mom Speaks 37. Rumination38. Amiable Amy 39. Captured on Time 40. Pit of Gadgetry 41. Me and Mine 42. Little Peanut 43. Creative in Me 44. Around the world 45. Pea in a Pod 46. For the LOVE of Food 47. Music of My Heart 48. It’s Where the Heart Is 49. Blog in to Space 50. A Mothers Horizon 51. Simply me 52. Whats Up 53. Comedy Plus 54.Lovin' Life 55.Ozzy's Mom 56. Apple and Candie 57. I was once lost in love 58. Pinay in Love 59. Pau's Big Thoughts 60. Twisted Angel 61. Hailey's Beat and Bits 62. Living A' La Mode 63. Bits and Pieces 64. Honey and Daisy 65. Pinay Ads 66. Great Kingkay 66. It's Naptime 67. Lisgold 68. Signe Says 69. Thomas Web Links 70. Thomas Travel Tales 71. Nita's Corner 72. Great Finds and Deals 73. Nita's Ramblings 74.Batuananons 75. Filipino Online Community 76. Healthy Living and Lifestyle 77. CompTechGadgets 78.Nita's Random Thoughts 79. Make Money Online 80. Erlinda's Wandering Thoughts 81. Kitty's haven 82.This and That 83. Shoppaholic girly 84. My Life in this Wonderful World 85. My Online World 86. Joys in Life 87. Journey in Life 88. Tere's World 89. Jean's Live it Up 90. Muzikistah 91. Maharot 92. SUPASTAH!93.Life is a constant journey 94.Amazingly Me 70. Treeennndddzzz 96. otwarteInfo’s 98. AdventureSage 99. in-Tech Revolution 100. LovingMore 101. From Melissa's Desk 102. denz Recreational 103. Network of Combined Ideas 104. Sheltered Not Shattered 105. Mommying on the Fly 106. Me, Myself and Darly 107. Stay at Home Mom 108. Harmony in Motion 109. My Happy Thoughts 110. Mommyhood is Thankless 111. Life is Random. SO.I.AM 112.Life's sweet and spices 113. Rainbow Colored Me 114. My Oweini Life 115. All About Mye Life 116. Is it Bedtime Yet 117. Super Coupon Girl 118. My Life.... My Journey 119. Project Wicked Blogs and Reviews 120. Life According To Me 121. WilStop 122. I Love Pixels 123. Cellulitic Bliss 124.Underneath It All 125. Momstart 126. Pinaymama's Diary 127. My Heart 4 Him 128. 1StopMom 129.Random Chronicles 130. Maeyonnaise 131.Blessings in Life 132. Survivor Mom 133. Sharing my Thoughts134. Beautiful Language 135. Medical Updates 136. Living in One Income 137. Mommy Elvz 138.elymac&frendz 139. BeinG mYselF 140. Love's Haven 141. Mi Mundo Del Amor 142. Budiawan Hutasoit. 143. BlogGendeng 144. Kejadian Yang Aneh 145. Ridwan 146. T1to English Version 147. T1to Indonesian Version 148. Type your Blog Here
{END Copy Here}
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I am tagging all of my friends who wanted to increase their blogs traffic, PR, Technorati Authority and even backlinks.
1. Linda
2. Anna
3. Budhe
4. Mig33
5. Ocim
6. Vinni
7. Danker
8. Wee
9. Julie
10. Alqoernia
11. Edhoy
12. Papazakiya
13. T1to Indonesian Version..
Wednesday
7 Steps to Building a Successful Web Presence
While following these steps will not guarantee a successful website, it is certainly an intelligent place to start.
1. Perform a Business Analysis.
What is a business analysis? Simply put, review your business requirements and your objectives. What do you want to accomplish? How does your website fit into your overall business plan? What... no business plan? Develop a business plan first before you go any further into the process.
Your business plan will be your roadmap to success, so make sure the objective of your website fits into your overall business plan. I'll say it again, BUSINESS PLAN, don't have one? GET ONE!
2. Perform some research, also known as, the Research phase.
Research your competition and industry sites. See what kind of competition is out there. What kind of marketing does your competition engage in? Don't look to "reinvent the wheel", take a look at how the current market works; develop a list of pros and cons about your competition and then make your web presence work better.
3. Develop a concept and a design.
Finally time for the creative and fun stuff! This involves the selection of specific content, the layout of the site structure and navigation and the overall "look and feel" of your website.
Remember to pay special attention to your navigational structure!!! If visitors can't navigate your website or feel lost when doing so, your "pretty" site will have been a waste of time; don't go there, keep the navigation simple and for SEO purposes, make sure your navigation is text based. Although Flash driven websites look cool, they are not SEO friendly and can create more problems than the "coolness" factor they express (we'll discuss Flash sites in another article ).
4. Develop your website.
When considering which technology to develop your website, think cutting edge technology, not bleeding edge. Make sure the technology you use, such as ASP, PHP, HTML, CSS, will be useful for the next three to five years.
Database driven website are ultimately the easiest to maintain through the use of a content management system, but make sure the CMS you use is SEO friendly. An SEO friendly CMS will utilize real URLs, not strange looking query strings with lots of strange characters and question marks. Search engines despise query strings and rank these site accordingly.
5. Choose a host provider and implement your website.
When deciding on a host provider, make sure the host is not only reputable, but has been in business long enough that you can be sure they will be in business next year. Also, ask about site uptime. If your site is down for any reason, this will not only affect your potential and current customers, but the search engines as well. If the search engines decide on a given day to spider your site and it is unavailable, it could cost you your rank.
6. Promote and market your website.
Register your site with the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Initiate other marketing activities such as an email blasts to prospective customers. Consider "Pay per Click" advertising with the major search engines and don't forget about a long term SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to your site.
7. Finally, maintain your website.
Probably the most important long term step is continuing to provide current and relevant information on your website. Keep your site content current to encourage return visitors and give them something to return for! Related to SEO, search engines just LOVE sites which provide new content on a regular basis and rank such websites accordingly.
Overall, remember, your website is not just a marketing tool, it's a business tool, and it should be generating a revenue stream for your business.
Source by : Matthew Mckernan

