How to Build an Impressive Social Networking Presence, Beginning with Facebook

Author: Deltina Hay (c) 2008

Professional and social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and Squidoo are effective outlets for finding new readers, but it is easy to find your message spread thin if you don't choose the right strategy. Many businesses settle for sparse profiles on various sites, never discovering the other powerful marketing tools many of these social networking platforms have to offer - most of them for free.
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To avoid the scattershot approach, choose one or two social networking sites that fit your business well and invest the time to maximize your presence in them. Let's explore what that might look like if Facebook is one of your choices.

Prepare Your Best Information Before You Start

Avoid the "I will go back and fill that in later" trap. Have all your necessary information on hand, ready to copy and paste on the spot. Complete a worksheet containing:

1. Key Terms:
Make a list of your best key terms and weave them into the rest of your worksheet items. Key terms are one, two, or three word terms that someone might use if they were searching for your business in a search engine.

2. General Information:
Your Name
Business Name
Email Addresses
URLs
Instant Messaging screen names

3. Biographical and Descriptive Information:
Short bio (50 words)
Longer bio (100 words)
Short company description (50 words)
Longer company description (100 words)
Business mission statement

4. List of Products

I based these worksheet items on a typical Facebook profile and page. If you choose a different social networking site, examine some completed profiles and base your worksheet items on them.
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Create an Account and Thoroughly Complete Your Profile

If you haven't already, get a Facebook account. Completely fill out your profile using your worksheet. Under the relationships tab, choose "networking." You can skip the personal and education tabs for business profiles, but there is no harm in filling them out. If you have an existing account, upgrade your profile information using your key terms.

But don't stop there!

Facebook, like most good social networking platforms, offers many marketing opportunities for businesses - some for free. You can find these by clicking the "Advertising" link in the footer of the Facebook site, or by following this link: http://www.facebook.com/business/.

Since I can't cover all of the marketing tools in one article, let's focus on my favorite: The Facebook Page. It's my favorite not only because it is free, but because it makes use of the many diverse Facebook applications.

Facebook pages are specifically for marketing a business or a product. They offer a way for a business to represent itself to the Facebook community in an authentic way. Facebook users can search pages the same way they search for people within the network community.

Create your page by going to "Page Manager" in the left sidebar of your Facebook profile, or by following this link: http://www.facebook.com/business/ and choosing Facebook Pages. Choose the best category for your business.

Use Key Terms in the Name of Your Facebook Page!

It seems that the actual page name is the only text on a Facebook page that is used in a search. With that in mind, use at least two of your best key terms in your page name.

Populate your page with all of your best worksheet information. You may have only a few seconds to catch a reader's attention, so put your best key terms forward.
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Once your page is in place, add applications to help represent your company in your own unique way. To find applications for your page, click on "Applications" in the upper left corner of your page, or search for them here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/.

Applications are not difficult to install and are usually very easy to set up. Use this general rule of thumb when choosing an application: If you can't figure out how to set it up after the second try, find another one. There is often more than one application available to accomplish the same task.

Applications Top Picks:

My Flickr: Display photos from your Flickr account using this application. These photos can include logos, product photos, photos from events, etc.

Upcoming: Add all of your events to upcoming.org, and you can easily display them on your Facebook page with Upcoming's Facebook application.

YouTube Box: Allows visitors to play your YouTube videos right on your Facebook page.

Simply RSS: This allows you to display up to eight RSS feeds on your Facebook page and display the feeds from your business's main site and newsrooms.

Implementing these applications creates an interactive page that also gives visitors a personable look into your business. To see all of these applications in use on one page, visit Dalton Publishing.

Note: If you use a particular application regularly, consider donating to the application's creator - they do not get paid to develop these applications.

Promoting Your Social Networking Presence

Now that you have invested the time in creating an impressive presence on Facebook (or whichever social networks you chose), go the extra mile and research how you can promote your new presence both inside and outside of the network. Here is a link to Facebook's promotional guidelines.

Of course, invite everyone on your mailing lists to join your network and visit your sharp new page!

Don't Turn Your Back on Your Investment

Remember: The social Web is a fickle place! You need to keep your content dynamic and interesting in order to encourage people to return to your page, or to recommend it to their friends. Do this, and you will see better results than those who just move on to building their next profile. Once you have a good, healthy presence in one community, use your experience to move on to your next successful presence.

About The Author :
Deltina Hay is the principle of the companies Dalton Publishing and Social Media Power. She has worked in programming and Web development for 25 years. Ms. Hay's graduate education includes computer science, applied mathematics, and psychology. To discover the power of Web 2.0 and social media tools, visit SocialMediaPower.com.

How To Create Your Own Perpetual Traffic Machine

Author: Titus Hoskins (c) 2008

The Internet is such an unknown commodity anything is possible. One of the most intriguing questions concerns the idea of a perpetual traffic machine. Create a website and design a system of automatic programs (both interior and exterior) that delivers content and backlinks to a site that updates itself automatically and keeps growing without any help from the creator. In the process you build a flow of traffic that never stops, even if the site is abandoned or not touched for a couple of years or never again.

Is such a perpetual traffic system really possible?

Before you conjure up pictures of HAL and creepy talking computers in distant space... realize that question may carry more weight than it would seem at first glance. But is it like its predecessor, the perpetual motion machine - just more an illusion than actual fact?
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For curiosity's sake if for nothing else, the idea of a perpetual traffic machine does require further investigation. Such a system would have special interest for millions of webmasters whose main task is acquiring traffic for their sites, not to mention the potential for monetary gain a PTM (rhymes with ATM) would produce. Some credence was given to the idea recently when Tinu Abayomi-Paul, a well-known online free traffic expert, produced with the help of Marlon Sanders an info-product entitled "The Evergreen Traffic Machine."

Tinu's story is very interesting. Tinu had built up a whole array of sites and optimized them successfully for countless keywords in all the major search engines. She had built up a steady flow of traffic, resulting in thousands of visitors "a day" to her sites. This in itself is not that extraordinary, but that's not the full story.

Because of a personal illness she abandoned or left alone most of her sites for over a year or more - only to discover the traffic systems she had put into place didn't just dry up, they still kept producing tons of traffic even though the sites weren't being updated.

The traffic was still coming. The traffic was still fresh.

Tinu basically built her perpetual traffic system around three major areas: High Profile Article Marketing, Exact Keyword Focus and Blogging/RSS Feeds. Tinu's system proves you can create a traffic system for a year or two, but the real question is will it still produce traffic five years from now? Fifty years from now? How about a hundred years?

The real question: how long will such a system work without fresh input of unique content like the viral articles and blog posts now feeding it? This question is even more tantalizing when you consider it is now possible to create fresh content on your sites with RSS feeds, blog comments and user contributed content.

What's more intriguing is the fact that all aspects of a website can be automated, including payment for all renewals: domain, hosting, autoresponders... as well as the collection of revenues such as affiliate commissions and advertising fees.
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Are we at the stage where the Internet will be filled with these automated human-less web sites drawing traffic/visitors and slowly building and expanding on their own for eternity? Many cynics would argue this is already the case with the majority of sites on the web.

In case you like that idea and want to fully embrace this brave new automated perpetual Internet, here are a few tips to create your own eternal traffic machine:

1. Build lists and pre-load your AR system with follow-up messages to keep visitors coming back to your site. You can rotate these messages and ask your subscribers to opt-in to different lists on related subject areas. Always ask your readers to recommend your content to others.

2. Use social bookmark software or links so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content which brings in both new links and new traffic. Simple programs like the one offered by Addthis.com will get your visitors building your backlinks for you, bringing in fresh visitors who in turn will also bookmark your content.

3. Write viral articles, reports and ebooks that have your backlinks in the resource boxes. Likewise, viral software programs can help bring a constant flow of traffic to your site. If your content is of a high quality and your themes universal... new sites will pick up your content and build your backlinks, creating fresh traffic. The search engines will also index these new links and your rankings will increase, bringing in more traffic.

4. Use blogging and RSS feeds to get your content out there. You can also use these RSS feeds to bring in new fresh content to your site. Creating new content will be your main obstacle to creating perpetual traffic... you can get new content from feeds but will it be unique? Comments in your blogs could bring in unique content but if you're not monitoring them, you must have solid software in place to fight against spam.

5. Have "Tell a Friend" forms on all your content. This will bring new traffic to your site, which can be self-refreshing as new people discover your content.
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6. Encourage user generated content such as articles, comments, posts... you can even have a community monitoring system where your site's members monitor this new content.

7. Form JV alliances with webmasters in your related field. Do co-registration so that you help build each other's lists and traffic.

8. Likewise, if you have products to sell, create an affiliate program to get your affiliates to build your traffic for you. Affiliates are an excellent source of permanent traffic.

9. Automate all aspects of the running and managing of your website. Set up automatic payments for your AR system, hosting, domain renewal, PPC payments... thru PayPal or credit card. Likewise, receive affiliate commissions thru PayPal or direct deposit. Many advertising programs like Google Adsense offer direct deposit.

10. PPC Traffic - While we have mainly looked at free traffic systems, don't forget creating a PTM is relatively easy with Pay Per Click advertising if you know what you're doing. Target less competitive keywords to keep your costs down, tie this traffic into a good squeeze page for feeding your AR system with leads and have a good landing page that converts. You can create a system that delivers perpetual traffic and pays for itself from your affiliate commissions and advertising fees.

In summary, the argument for the existence of the PTM mainly relies upon the quality of your content or site. Is it unique enough to draw in new visitors? Does your topic have universal appeal that people never tire of? Does it solve or offer advice on a common human problem? Will or does it have a viral "word of mouth" element to it?

As we move to a more and more automated world, all the automated programs and hardware are in place for the creation of such perpetual traffic machines.

Computers, autoresponders, content management software, RSS feeds, viral marketing, direct deposit, automatic payments... and the list goes on. If we haven't already created the perpetual traffic machine - we are getting tangibly close to doing just that.

About The Author :
The author is a full-time online marketer who practices what he preaches. Get a Free Perpetual Desktop Calendar. Read a review of Tinu's Traffic Machine at BizwareMagic.com
2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Do-It-Yourself SEO - A Beginner's Checklist

Author: John Metzler (c) 2008

There have always been do-it-yourselfers succeeding at web promotion and search engine optimization. In fact, many of the established businesses offering web services today came from humble beginnings, perhaps nothing more than a college student with a laptop, an internet connection, and too much free time. The Web evolves as the result of the innovation and experimentation of individuals. The sharing of knowledge. The do-it-yourself attitude.

As text link brokers and mass link networking decrease in value and use of social media increases, it becomes more important for companies to have an internal approach and awareness of search engine marketing. Don't get me wrong; outsourcing to SEO firms is still a smart option. That said, making the most out of Web 2.0 usually requires some level of cooperation between SEO firm and site owner. You don't need to be an expert to know the basics of good SEO practices, and that added knowledge will be agreat advantage whether you're working along side an SEO team, or promoting your own site in your spare time.
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So if you're on a "need to know" basis with SEO, the following points should illustrate what an overall plan should include:

1. Create Search Engine-Friendly Content

Unique web content is your most valuable asset, and ensuring search engines can read it is crucial. Text embedded in images or Flash cannot be read, so make sure you use important keywords, headings, and hyperlinks in plain text form. Instead of using images as navigation links, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) makes it easy to format those links to look more like 'buttons', thus creating powerful anchor text as well as making it visually appealing. Use heading tags properly and don't try to hide keywords or text by making it the same color as the page background or shrinking it so it can't be seen. Make sure the keywords you wish to rank high for are used frequently in the page copy but within reason.

Now that you've created good content, is it actually being crawled? Copy and paste a page's URL into a search engine to see if it has been indexed. If you've just created the page, it may take a few days to show up. Aside from age, many factors can lead to web pages not being indexed by search engines, such as duplicate content (ie. a printer-friendly version of a page might be indexed and the normal version not, or vice versa); links generated by JavaScript instead of HTML; poor site architecture (ie. using too many sub-directories); lengthy, dynamically generated URLs using special characters; and orphaned pages.

2. Choose Your Keywords Wisely

One of the first steps of SEO, this one needs to be done properly the first time or all your future efforts and promotion could end up being wasted. Start by writing down general terms that describe your products, services or web content. Use keyword research services to investigate word and phrase variations. Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, and the Google AdWords suggestion tool are good starting points. The goal is to find those niche phrases that your target market uses to find sites just like yours and optimize your site for them. If the phrases do not get enough use by searchers, your profits from ranking for them will be low. At the same time, stay away from general terms that are tougher to rank for (ie. like "art", "computers", "business", etc.) as a great portion of the traffic will be irrelevant and you'll break the bank attaining such competitive phrases.

3. Get Others to Link to Your Site

In theory there are countless ways, some traditional and some quite innovative, to get other web sites to link to yours. In practice, it can be easier said than done. Google defines a link as it pertains to rankings and SEO as a "vote" from one site to another. The more quality votes your site receives, the greater chance you have of ranking well. If a well established site links to yours, that link carries more weight than one would from a mom & pop shop or less reputable page.
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If your site has useful content and is doing something unique, you're already ahead of much of the competition. People need a reason to link to your site, as very few will do it out of the goodness of their heart. Trading links can work, but link exchange networks have decreased in value and won't be of much use in competitive fields. Buying links, if you haven't heard, is a big Google no-no. While entire articles could be written on this topic, here are a few popular methods of acquiring incoming links:

* issuing company press releases with a link back to your site

* submitting to reputable business directories such as Yahoo! and Business.com

* be active on related blogs by commenting and exchanging ideas

* if you have clients with web sites, ask if they would mind adding your link in a "partners" section

* participate in relevant forums and discussion boards with a link in your signature

* write and submit original articles to web publications in your field with a link in your bio

* get involved in social media and bookmarking

4. Join the Social Media Revolution

The collaboration between Internet users and the development of online communities is at an all-time high. Social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Furl, Reddit, and Technorati offer users a way to store their favorite pages and media online, and share it with others. These services also provide a way to promote your own content or create a buzz over a product or service. Creating a Myspace page or Squidoo "lens" is also a way to network and share information.

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However, if your goal is to generate sales, then you must offer something without the promotional hype. The reality of social media is that popularity is based almost entirely on public interest. If your information or media isn't unique or of interest to anyone, you cannot force success using social media communities.

The key to using social media and bookmarking sites to your advantage is to not be shy. Getting your entries and content to the popular pages on these sites requires some hard work. Network with other users, bookmark and share useful content, create eye-catching titles for your entries, and tell your friends and co-workers about the content you have on these sites. However, don't force your employees to vote your entries up - this is social media fraud. If you have great content and simply share it with as many people as you can, it will see success naturally.

These four points are a general guideline to follow for SEO. Search engine optimization experts and firms are a good outsourcing option in competitive markets, while the DIY attitude can yield great results for web site owners with smaller marketing budgets. If you're in the latter group, hopefully this helps get you started.

About The Author :
John Metzler has held executive positions in the search engine marketing industry since 2001. He is the Founder of FreshPromo, a Canadian-based search marketing firm and updates his blog regularly.

The Search Landscape Reflected In Paid Results

Author: Dave Davies (c) 2008

It's important to note that the writing of this article occurred on July 17, 2008. I mention this only to insure that you can put it into context and also so that those who read this article in a day or week or month from now aren't confused by my noting of Q2 reports and references to "today".

Any of you who have read some of my past articles or who have visited Beanstalk's services pages will know - I'm not a PPC guy. Quite honestly, it's not in my primary skill set and it's something I would definitely prefer to leave to the experts. Now that said, following Google and it's health (which is tied directly to AdWords and AdSense) is something I'm keenly interested in. To this end, recent changes in Google's paid search display and ranking systems will have huge impacts on advertisers and, more important for the purpose of this article, on Google itself.
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A couple weeks ago a friend of mine, Richard Stokes from AdGooroo sent me a PDF entitled, "Search Engine Advertiser Update - Q208" . With this document they outline the changing trends in the paid search marketplace and many of the stats are surprising. If you're a PPC manager they're obviously directly important. For those of us in the organic optimization world they are still both interesting and important. They're interesting for reasons which will become clear below and they're important because anything that affects the economic health of the search engines affects the search landscape both inside and outside of the paid search realm.

Paid Search Market Share

What could be more important to the engines than their percentage of the paid search arena. Does Google really care about being the dominant search engine as far as organic search goes? Let me put this a different way, if Google was standing in front of their shareholders - would they prefer to announce that they held 80% of all worldwide searches and reported revenues of $7.8 billion dollars for the quarter OR would they rather stand up and say they hold 20% of all worldwide searches and reported revenues of $8.7 billion dollars? Organic results drive traffic which in turn results in clicks on paid ads. From a business standpoint that's the only reason that organic search even matters.

So which engine has the healthiest paid search environment? According to AdGooroo, Q2 results show a different world than one might guess (which is why I noted that it is interesting).

Over the past twelve months advertiser growth (or lack thereof) breaks down as follows:

Google: -8.5%
Yahoo!: +9.8%
MSN: -6.7%

Advertiser counts have also changed (i.e. the number of advertisers on the engine). Yahoo! leads in this area as well with a growth of 0.03%. Google dropped by 6.4% and MSN dropped by almost 20% (good thing they have their OS revenue to fall back on).

And A Drop In Ads

To go even further, Google has increased the importance of quality which has resulted in a reduction of nearly 40% in the number of ads that appear on a results page. 6 months ago ~6.5 ads appeared per page whereas now that number is closer to 4. This has the potential to significantly help or significantly hinder Google's revenue.
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As Richard Stokes points out and I completely concur, this places Google in an environment where one of two things will happen:

1. Advertisers will realize that their clicks are converting much higher, search marketers will spend more time and resources creating more and more relevant ads and landing pages and advertisers will be willing to bid more as the conversions increase, or

2. The competition for the top spots will be reduced and so too will the average bid prices.

Google's Q2 Report

And what inspired the writing of this article was actually the release of Google's Q2 report earlier today. After reading it I immediately had to contact Richard and let him know that the results confirmed some of the predictions noted in his work. He writes:

"... the auction-based bidding system makes this a double-edged sword. As the number of advertisers declines, so does the competitive pressure for higher bid prices. If advertisers don't step up to the plate and bid more aggressively for placement, then it's possible that search revenues could stagnate."

Google revenues were up only 3% over Q1 of this year and revenue from paid clicks was down by 1%. This is the first time in Google's history post-IPO that I can remember them showing reductions in revenue in one quarter over the previous. It appears that this new paid search model in not quite as effective at pulling in money as the old.

Now, to be fair, the new system of requiring higher quality scores and better ads and landing pages is new - only a few months old at this point and so there are likely still bugs to be worked out, but Wall Street did not react favorably to the announcements today and I suspect that the situation isn't going to look better for Google at the close of day tomorrow (though what do I know about stocks).

What Does This Mean?

So what does this mean? This means that Google has a lot of work to do and those in the paid search space need to pay close attention (even closer than normal) as shareholders don't like to see losses and Google is going to need to make moves to recover and show significant gains by the time their Q3 reports come out.
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One might guess that this also means that Yahoo! is gaining ground (which is true) but it's definitely a case of too little too late. Also earlier today (it was a busy day in search) Yahoo! released a letter to its shareholders that on one hand referred to the alliance between Microsoft and Carl Icahn as a destroyer of shareholder value for Yahoo! and then went on to say that they would be willing to sell the company to Microsoft at $33/share (which is what Microsoft has offered previously and which is more than $10 above their current market value).

It seems that one can't look at the stronger relative results in the paid search area that Yahoo! has achieved as a win when they seem to be backsliding on their initial position regarding the sale to Microsoft.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

For one thing, watch closely. Monitor resources such as AdGooroo's research library, and the Clix Marketing blog. Pay close attention as we're going to see a lot of changes to what's going on and these changes are likely going to have effects on both the paid and the organic results as Google strives to provide the better results they're targeting through paid search now but at the same time increase their revenue.

This may involve adjustments to the quality scoring (I can pretty much guarantee that one) and may involve adjusting how paid ads appear on the page with the organic results. All we can really do is watch, wait and adapt.

About The Author :
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc. Dave has been active in the SEO industry since 2001 and provides SEO services to companies around the world. A special thanks goes out to Richard Stokes and his awesome keyword research tool and competition analysis system for the excellent data and forthcoming attitude.

How to Create Killer Landing Pages

Author: Kalena Jordan (c) 2008

In the field of online marketing, a landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search engine result link. It is sometimes known as a lead capture page and usually displays content that reinforces the message contained in the ad or search snippet.

Types of Landing Pages

There are two main types of landing page:

1) Reference Landing Page

Reference landing pages deliver information relevant to the visitor. This could include text, images, links or other elements not requiring interaction.
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2) Transactional Landing Page

Transactional landing pages ask visitors to complete a transaction such as clicking on an advertisement, filling out a form or downloading a file with the aim being immediate or eventual conversion of that prospect to a sale. To aid the capturing of new leads, transactional pages generally seek visitor contact details such as a name, email address and/or a telephone number.

A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is known as a conversion. Landing page quality can be measured by the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action (the conversion rate). Since the Return on Investment (ROI) of pay per click campaigns is often determined by the conversion rate, advertisers should be constantly testing, tweaking and improving their landing pages. We will discuss testing methods available, such as A/B testing and multivariate testing, in a later lesson.

Why Are Landing Pages Important?

In pay per click (PPC) and search marketing campaigns, the landing page is usually customized very closely to the advertisement which triggered it. In PPC campaigns, landing pages are vital in order to "close the sale" and encourage visitors to take the action you want them to take. By adding a parameter to the landing page URL (and therefore forming a tracking URL), advertisers can measure the ROI on their PPC ads based on relative click-through rates.

While enticing ad copy is very important in order to attract clicks, effective landing pages are vital in order to "close the sale" and encourage your visitors to take the action you want them to take.

Landing pages often determine whether you make a conversion or not. Using landing pages on your site also means that some visitors will never see your home page. First impressions have never been so important, so you need your landing pages to represent your business, product or service in the best possible light.
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What are the Goals of a Landing Page?

Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that a conversion is the main goal of an effective landing page. But attracting and capturing qualified leads is an easier and more important goal. Why? Because you can always "sell" to visitors later. Grabbing their contact details ensures you have captured them at the height of their interest.

So the main goals of a landing page are:

1) To Attract Prospects (primary goal) - grab email address and/or phone number

2) To Produce Conversions (secondary goal)

Features of an Effective Landing Page:

The ingredients for an effective landing page include:

* Reinforced Ad Message
* Punchy Headings
* Short Paragraphs
* Enticing Copy
* Few Distractions
* Value Proposition
* Compelling Images
* Little or No Navigation
* Calls to Action
* Few choices
* Simple Language and Concepts
* Important Content "Above the Fold"
* Testimonials
* Establish Visitor Trust
* Foolproof Conversion Process
* Test, Tweak and Test Again

Landing Page Case Study

E-Consultancy recently published a case study from Marketing Sherpa about the effects of a landing page redesign on a marketing campaign.
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The study followed the experiences of a company called Multimedia Tutorial Services who hired a landing page consulting firm to improve the conversion rates of their paid search marketing campaign selling video tutorials for mathematics.

The company had originally been directing persons who clicked on their ads to a lead generation form offering a free sample math video tutorial. They had some success with this, but sensed that more tailored landing pages would result in more leads being generated. So the company hired landing page design experts to custom-build pages designed to encourage more consumers to request a free sample and increase the number of leads for the company's call center to approach.

The result? The revised landing pages converted 139% more consumers into sales leads than the original landing page. You can see why if you view the pages below:

Original Landing Page

New Landing Page

New Landing Page Targeting Algebra

New Landing Page Targeting Geometry

You can see that the new pages include many of the features of an effective landing page that we described above.

More About Calls to Action

When it comes to encouraging your visitors to take the action you want them to take, focus on one primary action per screen. Don't stuff too many products onto one screen. Make your call-to-action button clearly visible without having to scroll, don't bury it under pages of information. Consider using tabs or a pop-up box to consolidate information.

Taking Prospects by the Hand

When visitors are on your landing page, you need to make it easy and painless for them to take the next steps. In a virtual sense, you need to take them by the hand and lead them through the process. How do you do that? Tell visitors why they should buy from you. According to the Marketing Experiments Journal the "Clarity of your value proposition is the most important factor in determining whether a customer buys from you or not."

To evaluate your value proposition, ask yourself the question: Why should I buy from this site?

Tracking and Tweaking is key

With Pay Per Click campaigns, you have so much more control than you do with SEO campaigns. Why? Because you have nearly full control over how your listing appears, what keywords trigger it, where on the page it appears, how much you pay per lead and what page your ad links to.

Don't waste this knowledge! You need to consistently track results from your campaign, track click-throughs, ad quality, conversions and ROI. If you want your campaign to succeed, you can't have a "set and forget" mentality that (unfortunately) many advertisers have. PPC campaigns require constant tracking and tweaking. Later in this course we discuss ways of testing your landing pages and ads to consistently improve your conversions.

About The Author :

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

How to Dominate Google Rankings; Easy as 1, 2, 3!

Author: Scott Jason (c) 2008

Search engine optimization has changed a lot over the years. What worked a few short years ago can get your site banned from Google today.

Actually, let me rephrase that... Search engine optimization tricks have changed a lot over the years. But in truth, good solid SEO practices have remained stable and work better today than in years past. Why better? Because so many others keep trying to win with tricks that Google hates. This leaves you to reap the rewards of methods that Google loves!

The most important thing to realize is that Google, and other popular search engines place 90% and MORE of their ranking preferences on content and links. Keywords are still important, but only in the content of your pages; not in META tags like the old days.

It's that simple. And just as simple is how to accomplish that top ranking...

1.) First you need to find the best keywords and place them just right in your page's content.

2.) Next you need to find, get and manage great inbound links.

3.) Last, you need to closely monitor your progress (and your competition!)

Goal 1: Find the Best Keywords

Let's use Google's own keyword database to see what search terms are best to target. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enter any keyword or keyword phrase you think your future customers are looking for. Now get ready for a LOT of great results!

INSIDER TIP: Use specific and "long tail" keyword phrases whenever possible. One of my clients is in national floral delivery. Here's a real example of how my business partner and I put that business at number one ,on Google with the perfect keywords...

The client had been paying per click for the term "flowers" and barely breaking even after spending tens of thousands of dollars per month in PPC costs. We not only gave him much better targetd keywords for his pay per click campaign, at one tenth the cost, but also made jim number one for his new primary keyword using the methods described later in this article. Before we go too deep however, let's look at the new keywords and the logic used to get there...

Instead of just the word "flowers", which has 233,000,000 competing pages on Google, we looked at what he really wanted to attract visits for. Although there are lots of possibilities, we will stick with just one example that saves him about $35,000 per month in PPC expenses and gives him another $100,000 per month in profit. We first evaluated "send flowers", which has 1/10th the number of competing pages. Then we asked him to try "think like people speak" (I.E./ I'm "sending flowers" to my mom.) As it turns out, a lot more people are searching for "sending flowers" than are searching "send flowers" and "sending flowers" has less than 1% of the competing web pages as the search term he started with, "flowers". Now that's impressive!

Use this method of keyword determination (get exact and use longer keyord phrases when appropriate) and you have will have an instant advantage over about 99% of your competitors.

Once you have your keywords selected, take the top three or four and list them in order for best to second best and so on.

Goal 2: Develop the Best Possible Content

Content is King! The ability to create search engine friendly web content, optimized for real people, is the key to your success. Modern search engines (especially Google) can read a page just like any person would thanks to natural text algorithms. Now Google can tell in nanoseconds if your web pages were pages for real people or just to get better ranking. With the following tip, you can easily do both!

Step A.) Call a good friend and tell him or her what you want to tell your web visitors. Then immediately write it down as close as you can remember it. If you can record the conversation, it's even better.

Step B.) Now simply review your text and place your top keyword as close to the beginning of the opening sentence or two as possible. Then place your next most important keyword someplace else toward the beginning of that same first paragraph. Try to get your third keyword into the last sentence or two of your first paragraph or at the beginning of your next paragraph if it fits better.

Step C.) Now place just one instance of each keyword in the next few paragraphs, anywhere they fit well. So if you have six more paragraphs before the final, each keyword should be three times total (once in paragraph 1, twice in the remaining 6 paragraphs with one mention of a single keyword in each paragraph.)

Step D.) For the last paragraph, do the opposite of what you did for the first paragraph and place your least important keyword toward the beginning of the paragraph and your most important toward the end. This shows the search engine consistency of topic.

Step E.) Last but not least, don't repeat any keyword more than four times per page and always let the text flow naturally.

Part 3: Get Great Links and Monitor Your Site

Getting and maintaining high quality inbound links typically accounts for more than 75% of today's search engine optimization success on Google. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top and keep you there! But you also need to monitor your progress and your site's status (not just ranking but how search engines REALLY see it). This will tell you more than just where you are but also where you are likely to be. Back in the day we did all link work and monitoring by hand. And I can tell you that it took a long time (My business partner and I spent about sixteen hours each week, per site!) My advice to you is to do what we did and find a good SEO tool that does the heavy lifting and time consuming work for you. Buying the right product is easily the best money you'll ever spend on your site's marketing and publicity.

As for products, there are some good ones out there. I used one called WebPosition Pro for a couple years. I ended up switching to another called SEO Elite because it has automated linking, which is the most time-consuming aspect of my SEO efforts. However, both are fantastic products for tracking and reporting.

Number 1 Pick: SEO Elite

Cost = $167 (lifetime free upgrades and no annual fees)

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

Favorite Features: Finds the best link partners, including special "Authority" link partners that count for more with Google; Automates link process; Provides great Site Monitoring

Comments: I bought SEO Elite in 2005 and have used every upgrade (all are free.) I got rid of my other products since this one did a better job for me and does not have any ongoing fees.

Number 2 Pick: WebPosition

Cost = $389 WebPosition Pro or $149 Standard (plus $99 per year subscription fees for either)

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

Favorite Features: Site Monitoring; Great reporting; Site Critic

Comments: I stopped using WebPosition because there were no automated linking capabilities and did not want to continue paying the $99 per year in ongoing fees. I did however really like the reporting.

That's about it. Now you're ready. Good luck!

About The Author:
Scott Jason has been an SEO professional since 1999 and is the founder of BestSEOcopywriting. Over the past nine years he has worked with hundreds of clients he has secured thousands of top placements on Google, Yahoo, MSN and more.

You Got Pants, Facebook Has People

Author: Jason Lee Miller

People who wear pants

Just because a social network is popular doesn't mean it's so easy to monetize, as News Corp. found out after its purchase of MySpace. Analysts have tried to extend MySpace's trouble to other social networks while balking at Facebook's $15 billion valuation. But after speaking with Facebook's Kent Schoen about the social network's fairly precise ad targeting, skeptics could be won over.

Schoen, who serves as Facebook's product marketing manager, gave WebProNews a tour of the recently launched Facebook Ads program. The advantage of social media marketing over search marketing, Schoen tells us, is the advertiser's ability to connect with consumers over a longer period of time and in a more meaningful, targeted way.

"We know we're going to see a person the next day or the day after," said Schoen, which is a far cry from the one-hit-wonder world of search. Or, if you're not looking for just anybody to click your ad—as is likely to happen in the broader search ad world—you can target Facebookers based upon their stated interests or associations. "We've targeted people who work at Oracle in the past," Schoen gives as an example.

Facebook Ads is an auction system similar to AdWords. Advertisers bid on keywords with a maximum daily budget, or they can bid on CPM basis as well for display ads. Ads, based on contextual relevancy, will appear in various places on the site: in member news feeds, along the side of pages on the site, on user photo pages, et cetera.

But also, advertisers can select their target audience, down to the pants they wear. Bonobos, for example, a high-end men's pant retailer, makes a $120 pair of royal blue slacks with a white belt any man with a discerning and caring significant other would prevent him from buying. But Bonobos isn't targeting that guy, they're targeting Cubs fans*.

When Bonobos set up their account, they were able to select the target geographic location (Illinois), age group, gender, and education level. All this information, of course, is available via Facebook profiles. They then targeted specific keywords like Cubs, Chicago Cubs, and Baseball.

As you can see, this is a bit more specific than the large net one has to cast into the vast search ocean. This kind of targeting can be enhanced, of course, with widgets advertisers can create for Facebook. Schoen uses a coffee shop as an example of a business creating a calendar of events for their own page, upon which Facebook users can sign up as "fans" of the business, which also extends the brand.

The next step beyond this type of audience targeting for Facebook, then, seems fairly obvious: behavioral targeting. Schoen said that while there were no specific plans currently on the table regarding behavioral targeting, Facebook was still considering behavioral options as part of their long-term strategy.

About the author:
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.

Technorati Tags:advertising, social media, facebook ads, facebook
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Microsoft's Yahoo Interest: Patently Paid Search

Author: David A. Utter

Way back in the pre-publicly traded days of Google, the search advertising company settled a patent case with Yahoo. Four years later, that settlement may be key to Microsoft's interest in Yahoo's paid search business.

The paid search/bidding for placement technology patent known as '361, developed by the company that became Overture (later acquired by Yahoo), loomed out of the past. It spurred a lengthy post about the Microsoft and Yahoo discussions from past to present, and a perquisite conspiracy theory remark by Valleywag.

The long post by Usman Latif hit Slashdot and other points around the Internet. His contention: Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo gives it control of that valuable patent. While that doesn't threaten Google's business, it could expose some nebulous deal Google and Yahoo made when the two sides settled a dispute about the patent, just ahead of Google's IPO and subsequent stock market rise.

Google and Miva both challenged Overture in court over the '361 patent, even as Microsoft, Yahoo, and others licensed the technology. Amid the development of rival technology, and despite owning the patent, Latif contended Overture wanted to be bought out by someone.

Microsoft said no, but Terry Semel at Yahoo said yes, in a $1.63 billion stock deal. That gave Yahoo control over Microsoft's paid search efforts in a way, pending an outcome of the Google/Miva litigation against Overture.

Google settled with Yahoo, as Miva did later, but Latif alleged only a portion of Google's settlement actually applied to the '361 patent. He cited Google's annual report from 2004:

On August 9, 2004, the Company and Yahoo entered into a settlement agreement resolving two disputes that had been pending between them. The first dispute concerned a lawsuit filed by Yahoo’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Overture Services, Inc., against the Company in April 2002 asserting that certain services infringed Overture’s U.S. Patent No. 6,269,361. In its court filings, the Company denied that it infringed the patent and alleged that the patent was invalid and unenforceable.
The second dispute concerned a warrant held by Yahoo to purchase 3,719,056 shares of the Company’s stock in connection with a June 2000 services agreement. Pursuant to a conversion provision in the warrant, the Company in June 2003 issued 1,229,944 shares to Yahoo. Yahoo contended it was entitled to a greater number of shares, while the Company contended that it had fully complied with the terms of the warrant.
As part of the settlement, Overture dismissed its patent lawsuit against the Company and has granted the Company a fully-paid, perpetual license to the patent that was the subject of the lawsuit and several related patent applications held by Overture. The parties also mutually released any claims against each other concerning the warrant dispute. In connection with the settlement of these two disputes, the Company issued to Yahoo 2,700,000 shares of Class A common stock. The Company used the $85.00 per share price of the initial public offering to arrive at total settlement consideration of $229.5 million.

Google derives virtually all of its revenue from online advertising, and a substantial chunk of that comes from its paid search business. Compared to Google's multi-billion dollar revenue stream, that $229.5 million settlement is on par with Bill Gates getting IBM to license DOS on a non-exclusive basis decades ago. It's a remarkable value for Google.

Latif suggested Yahoo's control of '361 continued to impact Microsoft, which has struggled for years to approach Google and Yahoo in paid search business. "It is quite possible that the size of the royalties Microsoft is paying to Yahoo are forcing Microsoft to neglect its paid search operations in order to minimize payments to Yahoo, and to minimize the size of an eventual settlement with Yahoo," he said.

It's been known for years that Microsoft and Yahoo have discussed possible deals from time to time. Nothing's ever come of them, but Latif's theory suggested why the two sides continued to meet over the years.

This also highlighted why Microsoft made an alternative bid for Yahoo's search assets, something which they publicly reconfirmed interest in this week, should Yahoo's board receive a makeover favorable to Microsoft. A deal puts an end to license fees, and any restrictions Microsoft may feel it has with its AdCenter paid search service.

Latif also made a veiled suggestion in another post that Google's widely-publicized firing of Mark Jen in 2005 for blogging about the company was somehow connected to Google's deal with Yahoo. Our followup request to Latif for more information had not been answered by press time.

About the author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Follow me on Twitter, and you can reach me via email at dutter @ webpronews dot com. Why not Mixx or Sphinn this article while you're here?

Technorati Tags:search, advertising, yahoo, legal, 361 patent, microsoft
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B2B Opportunities Exist On Google

Author: David A. Utter

Selling a massive piece of machinery should be as much a part of search marketing as selling a consumer good like the iPhone.

A few years back when we talked affiliate marketing with eBay, we ended on a note about industrial and similar businesses that could make more of their online marketing efforts, but for myriad reason did not. Search marketing offers potential returns a B2B firm should consider.

The KoMarketing Associates blog showed seven ways search marketing, with Google as the central theme, promise so much for the business to business market. For starters, they recommend a B2B company enter its products into Google Base.

A huge benefit comes from having products uploaded to Google Base. At the top of the search results for a relevant query, just under the paid search section, one's listings might appear as part of Google's Product Search.

For placement purposes, making it to this section means a lot more people see it, and since those viewers searched for terms related to that B2B product, they may have a strong interest in closing a deal.

Using YouTube to promote a company by demonstrating products and providing other information serves as a complementary way of marketing via search. A query for how to manage a piece of machinery, answered in an authoritative way with a video on YouTube, helps reinforce brand authority for the viewer.

That's a powerful marketing prospect, one that firms should be loathe to overlook. The arrival of universal search, where videos and images mix with text links in search results, means such videos stand a chance of showing up in Google's heavily used search pages.

KoMarketing Associates also noted the virtue of promoting a B2B appearance at a trade show through both SEO and SEM. With search marketing, a clickable ad that leads to an appointment at an event may carry through to a sale.

They also stressed the importance of marketing for export, as well as for local markets. A B2B customer in one's local market makes for a valuable commodity, one that a little SEO strategy should help capture.

Size doesn't matter in B2B, as a company with products and a market in demand for them benefit from connecting. If competitors already embrace search marketing to capture this, a firm that isn't doing as much needs to play catch-up to help with profitability.

About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Follow me on Twitter, and you can reach me via email at dutter @ webpronews dot com.

How To Use Twitter For Marketing

Author: Darren Olander (c) 2008

Twitter is a relatively new web 2.0 site that is starting to gain a lot of popularity. That means that a lot of people have heard of it, but it is also quite common to run into people who haven't heard of it.. yet. Twitter.com is this social site that encourages users to post often about what they are currently doing.

A lot of people are using it to improve their marketing reach, by being an active twitterer they gain followers who are interested in what they have going on. This means people being exposed to their updates on a regular basis. For example, if you have hundreds of followers in Twitter and you decide to post an affiliate link, that means hundreds of people have instantly been exposed to your offer. In this article, I will discuss ways to maximize Twitter for your marketing as well as a big mistake you need to avoid.

In order to have a fan base per se of followers in Twitter, you must be able to keep their interest in you and what you are doing now. "What are you doing?" is the whole foundation of what Twitter is about in the first place. Make sure to post daily, if not several times throughout the day, updates about what you are doing. The magical thing behind this is that many of your contacts will be able to feel like they know you so much better, will trust you more, and feel much more comfortable about working with you. On the other hand, when you follow others you can learn about them and their possible needs.

The big mistake to watch out for is only posting affiliate links or offers on your Twitter page. This looks like Spam and many people will see you as just abusing Twitter for your personal gain. Think of it this way, if you would not want to invite your friends or family to keep up with you via Twitter, then you are going about it all wrong. As with anything you send out or provide, ninety percent should be content and ten percent (at most) advertising.

So this concept is quite simple... constantly post throughout the day what you are doing.. it is usually very simple and only takes a few seconds to post! Secondly, if you write articles or provide content online, provide a link for those in your Twitter posts. You may post many things within one day, but the last thing you post for the day is usually the most important because it will be there the longest. This means that your last post for the day should contain a link that you want your followers to see before your start Twittering again the next day!

Another part of Twitter is contributing. As with any social site it should be a give and take relationship. Notice that give comes first... the more you give the more people will want to work with you and the more attention you will receive. Make sure to read and follow other users in Twitter. If you read something interesting or helpful, then make sure to reply and say so, or even put a link for it on your Twitter so that you are directing others to more quality content. This can also be as simple as connecting with other users. If they know you are reading their Twitter page, they will be much more likely to check out what you have going on too.

To get started in Twitter you should first invite contacts who aren't using Twitter and also find contacts who are already using Twitter so that you can start following them and also start getting people to follow you. Twitter has a nice invite and find feature that makes this incredibly easy. To grow your reach even more you can start following people who follow or are followed by the people who follow you.. or that you follow. You might need to read that sentence again.. but basically you can find other users to connect with that are already connected to other users.

Now for a big tip. If you really want to maximize the potential with Twitter, you should make sure to take advantage of any plug-ins or sites that support Twitter. Here are three, but I'm sure there will be many more in the future if not already.

Squidoo allows you to input your Twitter account info into your Squidoo account and then it can automatically post updates to your Twitter account when you create or update Squidoo lenses.

Facebook has an application called Twitter, that automatically updates your Facebook status when you make a Twitter post.

The other tool is a free WordPress plug-in called TweetMyBlog that allows you to create a two-way connection from your blogs to Twitter. TweetMyBlog allows you to use a widget on your Wordpress blogs that will display your current Twitter feed.. that way all visitors to your blog can look at the widget and see a running feed of your latest Twitter posts. If they clíck on that, they will be brought to your Twitter page. In addition, when you make a new post to your blog, TweetMyBlog will automatically make a post to your Twitter page with a link to your latest blog post. Imagine the extra exposure you can receive by using these tools that help people see more of what you are doing.

Lastly, have fun! Twitter is a social site... so interact and enjoy!

About The Author:
Darren Olander is dedicated to teaching others how to create a success online through internet network marketing strategies. He is a site owner, article writer, coach & marketing consultant enjoying the benefits of working full time from home. Learn more about him at DarrenOlander.com.

Full RSS Feeds Won't Get You Banned

Author: Jason Lee Miller

Toads cause warts; new clothes on Easter bring good luck; and Google penalizes sites for having full RSS feeds. MentalFloss.com issued a "never mind" on that last superstition after Matt Cutts dropped a little science.

Pay any attention at all in this industry and you'll find desperate Web marketers and publishers grasping at any explanation of why their site has suddenly been delisted from Google's search rankings. As all of us know, that's the Power of the Goog.

MentalFloss found a correlation and went with it: Friendly experts suggested their sudden demise in the search results was because of their use of full RSS feeds, which made it easier for scrapers to grab content, post it on their splogs, thus creating duplicate content, thus ending in a serious delisting penalty for MentalFloss.

The explanation was sent to RSS readers along with notice that articles appearing in the feed would only carry a headline teaser and a link, thanks to Google's aggressive treatment of duplicate content. That's an interesting assessment, to say the least. If scrapers can tank your site, WebProNews would have been offline long ago. Scrapers love us!

Turns out though, they missed an important email. Google's webspam captain, Matt Cutts, whose job lately seems to involve a lot of mythbusting, commented his team had sent MentalFloss an email on July 7th explaining the penalty:

The reason that Mental Floss was gone from Google’s index was because we believed that the site had been hacked. We tried to send you an email to that effect on July 7th to let you know that because of the hacked content on Mental Floss, we were temporarily removing the site from Google.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with RSS full-text feeds. I happily use full-text feeds on my personal blog, for example, and recommend that others feel free to do the same.

Thus ends one debate and opening another about which are better: full RSS feeds or partials. Cutts joins the expert camp who preach a lot about full feeds being better for the end-user. The other side note how much full feeds reduce their traffic, ad visibility (unless an ad is slipped into the feed itself), and ability to track readers.

From this RSS reader's perspective, I like partial feeds. I'm a headline scanner who will gladly pop open 15 tabs to read the rest of articles that grab my interest. Full feeds, with their scroll, scroll, scroll your screen, get in the way of my scanning efficiency.


About The Author:
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.

Look Beyond Google: Meta-Search Engines Can Help Online Marketers

Author: Bill Platt (c) 2008

For businesses that market wholly or partially online, it may seem that three words are the only way to get more customers: search engine optimization (SEO). Typically, the search engines being referred to are: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These three engines have almost become interchangeable with the phrase "do a search", so much so that the word "Google" has entered the English lexicon as "find information".

There are actually hundreds of search engines, not just the Big Three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) that many Internet users think of. By focusing only on the most well known search engines for your marketing online strategy, you may be missing out on as much as 30% of the billions of searches being done online every single day.

While not the oldest search engine on the internet, Google does have the reputation of being the granddaddy. However, it is worth investigating alternative search engines - niche engines, meta-search engines, and human-powered engines.

Niche search engines focus their searches on a particular subject matter, such as blogs or articles. Meta-search engines (DogPile, Widow) compile results from multiple search engines . Finally, human-powered search engines (Mahalo, DMOZ) are composed of directory pages with link and general information, put together by humans who search for the most relevant content. These alternative search engines tend to have pretty high page ranks, which give more credence to the fact that online marketers shouldn't overlook them.

There is also the fact that some Internet searchers do not want to use Google because of personal or political views. Because of Google's popularity, it can (incorrectly) be perceived as having a monopoly on the search engine market. That perception, combined with opposition to a seemingly growing "corporate world", turns off some potential customers and eliminates your potential to reach them, if you focus only on Google or other big search engines.

As part of SEO, using keywords to bring in consumers is all the rage. Businesses spend a great deal of time and money researching keywords, keyword density, and effects on page rankings in results lists. Guess what? It's not only a pain for the businesses to constantly be looking for which words may get them more hits and higher rankings; it's quickly becoming over done.

Consumers are fatigued with seeing keyword-loaded articles and websites tagged with anything that could possibly be related to their search terms. This online marketíng strategy may make sense in the short-term, but chances are good that by the time the strategy is perfected by your marketers, there will be a different trend altogether that needs to be learned. Marketing with the intent to only improve your page rankings, by any means necessary, is only a quick fix and could be quite expensive.

SEO tactics are starting to turn customers off. If SEO is the main priority of a marketing campaign and keyword-dense content was the impetus for the customer finding the website, this hurts the site's credibility with the consumer. Perhaps they'll buy from you once because you showed up at the top of the results page, but will they remember you next time or just do another search?

Another concern with search engines is the program spiders that crawl the Internet, looking for relevant pages for search results. Even the largest of the search engines can only cover a portion of the internet. According to Wikipedia, no search engine can search more than 16% of the net!

In addition, the spiders have a massive amount of searching to do, which can be a slow and taxing process on the sites they are crawling. By the time a spider finishes crawling the Internet, the information collected can be outdated - pages and links have either been deleted or new information added. Spiders are certainly not a perfect means of finding good results with one search engine.

Searching just one engine at a time is time-consuming and not very cost-efficient for searchers looking for the most appropriate information or businesses to suit their needs. Enter, meta-search engines. As mentioned earlier, meta-search engines compile results from multiple engines.

Among these, dogpile.com is probably the most well-known. The problem with dogpile, as I see it, is that it spits back the top 10 results from each of the Big Three engines. This results in a lot of sponsored results at the top of the result líst, followed by a mix of "normal" results and more sponsored results. The truth be known, I simply consider dogpile to be really annoying, so I avoid it.

In comparison, widow.com uses a different sort of math equation that sorts through search engine results for the most relevant information and ranks them in their results pages. In an unscientific but entertaining comparison I performed, I plugged in "celebrity gossip" to both dogpile.com and widow.com.

On dogpile.com, I felt like I had to search through commercials to find the content. The results on widow.com were much more relevant, giving me results with the desired content. Plus, I didn't have to look between the annoying sponsored results to find the information I wanted.

Utilizing meta-search engines can be very time-efficient and cost-effective for online marketers, especially when doing market research, even for keywords.

More importantly, if you can also rank in the meta-search and smaller niche search engines, you have a better chance of reaching the approximately 30% of searchers who do not use one of the Big Three engines, as their search tool of choice.

The niche audience may be smaller than the number of consumers you're exposed to on Google, but if you can gain an audience in the niche search engines, you are likely to find consumers intent on buying what you are selling. It's a good general marketing strategy to remember that "quantity exposure" does not always equate to "quality exposure". It's also a good general marketing strategy to not rely on only one advertising platform to help you reach your target audience.

About The Author:
Bill Platt has been helping online marketers promote their online businesses since 2001, through thephantomwriters.com . By using article marketing to promote his business onlíne, he has always been able to generate lots of traffic from inside and outside of the search engines. In 2007, his website generated 125,000 visitors from non-search sources and 119,000 visitors from 59 search engines. Learn Bill's secrets - get his ebook: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html

A Bakers Dozen: Ways to Increase Link Density

Author: Scott Van Achte

In today's race to the top of the Google SERP's (Search Engine Result Pages), there are a number of factors that can help you achieve those coveted spots. While certain techniques may weigh better than others based on your industry and level of competition, there is no questioning the power of links.

There are several methods, some common and some yet to be discovered, you can try out to help boost your link density and search rankings. While it would be near impossible to go into great detail on all methods (that would require a book) below I have outlined some of the more common techniques a web site owner can use to improve their site's popularity.

1. Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links used to be a huge asset and played a significant role. Today, fewer sites are employing this technique as it is thought by many to have no role in the eyes of Google. This is simply not true. While the overall value of reciprocal links has declined over the years, they can and will still help your rankings if done correctly.

The key with reciprocal links is very simple - relevance. If you trade links only with highly relevant sites, you will get value from this. There are some things to watch out for: ensure that the links returning to you are spider friendly, that they reside on pages with as few links as possible, and are contextualized, meaning the content on the page, and preferably the site as a whole, is related to the content of your link and site.

If you contact a relevant site to request a link exchange, keep the email personal to help grab the attention of the webmaster. Most link exchange emails are spammy automated submissions and are deleted without being read. Write the subject and entire email in such a way as to entice the user to read on, but keep it short. Offer to put their link up first, or even better yet, put it up before you contact them.

2. Purchasing Links
Google has been devaluing links, and in extreme cases, even penalizing sites for selling links, but there is no denying that this technique still works as many sites have skyrocketed to the top of the SERP's through the art of buying links.

Many high profile sites such as major and local newspaper publications sell text links, yet nobody seems to be penalized for it as the publications rank well with high PR and the site they link to ranks well as a result.

If you choose to take the gamble and purchase links back to your site, check out how they are linking back, how relevant they are, and try to get a sense of how their site is treated by Google. If you see other sites that appear to have purchased links from them, check their back links and see if the linking site appears (although it may not be displayed as Google displays very little of this information to the public these days).

It is thought that if penalties will arise from the sale of links, that only the selling site will be penalized. Even if this is the case, Google's policy could change at any moment, so be warned that this could potentially come back to bite you.

3. Industry Contacts
Get in touch with your industry contacts and ask them if they will link to your site. You just don't know, and the worst they can say is no. This is usually best requested in person or by phone if it is someone you have a good relationship with. It may include manufacturers or retailers of your products, or various business partners and companies you have a relationship with.

4. Good Old Fashion Content
Believe it or not it works. If your site is loaded with original, valuable content, you will get some people linking to your site on their own. While you can not base your entire linking strategy around this concept, as it could take forever to get enough links, rest assured knowing that if you build it, some will link.

5. Build a Blog
Everyone and their dog seem to have a blog these days, and for good reason - they work. Blogs help you create a neverending stream of content, and if updated regularly, written well, and interesting, you will find people will link to it. Not only that, others may pick up your blog through your RSS feed - this can result in a jump in both links and site traffic. Be sure to utilize your Digg and other social media accounts within your blog to help gain a little extra attention.

6. Social Media
Promote your site and your blog using various social media tools. When someone "Diggs" or "Stumbles" your article you can not only get a link back to your site from the media platform, but you can also see traffic generated by this. The more people that flag your article, the more traffíc you can get, and the higher the value of the link.

Creating company profile pages on platforms such as Squidoo, Facebook, MySpace, and even uploading photos and videos to Flickr and YouTube, can all count as back links to your site, so be sure to utilize these platforms to the fullest extent. Do not use these networks to spam them full of links, but rather to inform. Build unique relevant content and become a member of the community, and you will find your links will work much harder for you.

7. Article Syndication
When you write worthwhile articles, submit them to any known article aggregation websites in your industry or great general portals such as ezinearticles.com. When submitted to the right places you can drive traffic and increase your links. Again, be sure to include a link or two within your article that links back to your site when possible.

8. Press Releases
Press releases are still doing wonders. When your business hits a milestone, releases a new product, or has anything worthy of a press release, issue one through the services of PRWeb. You will get a link back to your site, and you may also get some targeted traffíc from those interested when reading your release.

If your press release is of significant news, you may also find bloggers and other writers referencing it and linking to it from their articles, providing even more value. Ensure that with any press release you include deep links back into your site. Links from within the bio are helpful, but those integrated into paragraphs of the release are worth much more.

9. Comments
I know I am going to get a hard time for this one, but if used wisely, it can help. When reading relevant blog posts, if you have something useful, constructive, and worthwhile to say, leave a comment and include your link if they provide the option. A comment like: "nice post" is inappropriate, but if you have something to add or contribute that others will find of interest then go for it. These links can add up, and they do add some value. Don't stuff your comment or name with keywords, keep it natural, and use your real name.

10. Form Posts and Signatures
This is an area where you may be able to grab a few links, but it is also one you need to be careful about as it can backfire. I do NOT recommend going out and wildly posting in random forums and including your link.

Where this area can be useful is if you establish yourself as a solid contributor to a particular forum directly related to your industry. Once you are established, and people know and trust your name, and understand that you are not there as a spammer, then you can consider adding your link to your signature file, and including the odd link in your forum posts when it is fully in context. This will allow you to get the odd relevant, inbound link. Check with the terms of the specific forum though before you start. Some do not allow links of any kind.

11. Testimonials
You see them on many sites offering products or services, and quite often they include a link back to the submitter's website. If you have used a product or service, don't be afraid to write a testimonial for the company. In many cases online businesses will post your testimonial along with a link. The testimonial helps that business instill confidence in their customers, and you get the valuable link back.

12. Directory Submissions
Yes, do still submít your site to the major directories. While DMOZ can be very difficult to get into, once you are there, it is like gold and will play a part in your top rankings. Yahoo directory has a high price $299US, but can also provide you with a valuable inbound link. Consider submitting to the major directories, as well as any industry specific directories. These links add up and will contribute to your site's well being.

13. Link Bait
We have heard this phrase thrown around for a while now, but the technique has worked long before the phrase "link bait" was coined. Why all the hype? Because it works.

Take a look at your web site, your business and your industry. See if you can think of some way to attract people to link to your site. Perhaps sponsor a contest, add an elaborate and unique tool, write a controversial article, provide something useful for free - whatever you do, do it well, and promote the heck out of it, and people will naturally link to you.

A Few General Rules:
Before you actively seek out a link from a specific site do some investigating to ensure that the site is not spamming or using any black hat techniques. If they are, run.

If the link you are seeking is merely for you to try and boost your link density, then also check out how they are linking to other third party sites.

Does the site use the rel=nofollow attribute? Are the pages your link would reside on blocked by the search engines, or do they use the robots Meta nofollow? Are they using other techniques that would not allow a spider to follow them (such as JavaScript, Flash, or frames)? If so, you may want to move on.

And a note on Google PR (Page Rank) - the PR you see on your toolbar is outdated. While it can give you some insight, just because it says 0, doesn't mean it is. Also what has a 0 or 1 today, could be a 4 or 5 tomorrow. Don't use PR as your sole means of deciding if you should obtain a link or not.

Summary
Using any or all of these linking methods will help you to improve your link density. There is power in diversification. Use variations on anchor text and descriptions, use inline text links within articles, and gain links in as many different venues as possible. By being diverse your site will stand the best chance of being around well into the future.

Today, blogs are huge and can be a strong asset, but what would happen if tomorrow Google decided to ban blogs? Highly unlikely, but it could happen, and if it did, would your site survive? By being diverse, your site has the best chance to survive change.

About The Author
Scott Van Achte is the Senior SEO at StepForth Web Marketing Inc., based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read more of Scott's articles and those of the StepForth team at http://news.stepforth.com or contact us at http://www.stepforth.com, Tel: 250-385-1190 TollFree: 877-385-5526 Fax: 250-385-1198

Search engine optimisation questions

Frequently asked Search engine optimisation questions

1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the Page Rank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of Page Rank?
6. What do you think of using XML site maps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you’ve written reach the front-page of Digg.com? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today’s world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. If the company whose site you’ve been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important “on page” elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn’t you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What’s the difference between Page Rank and Tool Bar Page Rank?
26. Why might you want to use no-follow on an internal link?

Search engine optimisation questions related to analysis

1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you’ve done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven’t been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do you help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay per click SEM?
9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results, how does this affect your work?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
Industry Involvement

Search engine optimisation questions ooops interview questions.

1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’, ‘Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?
3. Have you attended any search related conferences?
4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that’s a red flag).
5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? do you operate any blogs? do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
6. Of the well known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
9. Who are the two key people who started Google?
10. Who is Matt Cutts?
11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?
Open Ended

Search engine optimisation questions regarding SEO experience

1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get “xyz” company listed for the keyword “Google” in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and / or leaving any current projects?

This is some few SEO interview Questions? I like to Answers On this, Let us Discuss On this question.1) Give me a description of your general SEOexperience.
2) Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?
4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
5) Have you attended any search related conferences?
6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?
7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organicallyranking a site?
9) Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
10) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific back linkstrategies?
11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?
13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?
15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?
16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?
17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?
1 Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?
19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)
20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
22) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
Thanks to Rand at SEOmoz.org for this post on SEO hiring. It helped quite a bit in assembling this list. Any additional questions anyone can think of?
*** UPDATE ***
22) what is page segmentation? (Ever heard of VIPS?)
23) What’s the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?
25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
26) In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

Page Rank algorithm?PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.

Some More are:

One thing I have learnt quickly in this game is that it is always the best prepared candidate that gets the job. It is impossible to predict what questions will be thrown at you but a bit of preparation and research can go a long way. I came across this post today from http://forums.seo.ph/showthread.php?t=201 and had to share it here, sample interview questions to really test your knowledge and help you clinch that dream job:

1. What SEO results can you show?

2. What do you believe are important things to take into consideration when optimising a site?

3. Who do you respect in the industry?

4. What web analytics programs are you familiar with?

5. List On-Page SEO factors

6. List 5 link building techniques.

7. What is page segmentation? (Ever heard of VIPS?)

8. What’s the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

9. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?

10. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

11. What is sandbox?

12. How long does it take to get out of sandbox?

13. How can you track your rankings?

14. What services does the wordtracker offer, and how do they relate to seo?

15. What are the common factors between google/yahoo/msn?

16. How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search efforts on other (non pay per click) search engines?

17. What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine?

18. Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your particular product or service? Or, perhaps neither one is appropriate from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.

19. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

20. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

22. Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

23. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

24. Have you attended any search related conferences?

25. What SEO tools do you regularly use?

25. What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

26. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

28. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

29. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
blogs, rss, podcasting

30. Are you familiar with search arbitrage?

31. Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

32. Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

33. Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?

34. Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

35. Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

36. Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

37. What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)

38. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

39. Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

44. In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

45. What changes did you make and what ranking effect did it have?

46. What is sticky content?