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The “Triangle of Relevancy” is used to describe the relationship between the text in a landing page, a sponsored advertisement and the keyword or phrase that’s entered into a search engine. Google places a premium on relevancy as it endeavors to ensure visitors have a positive experience by getting search results relevant to their search terms. I will outline specific steps an advertiser can take to maximize their landing pages and sponsored advertisements effectiveness in their search engine marketing endeavors.

Relevancy with Landing Pages
The product, if you will, of any search engine is the resulting landing pages. The page’s relevance to the search terms determines whether the page will show up in a search and at what position. Google’s algorithm scores each page and/or sponsored ad’s relationship to the keywords or phrase and uses this information to assist in determining the order in which the landing pages and AdWords ads are placed. The algorithm also monitors the amount of time a visitor spends on a page and includes this in the score.

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques such as placing keywords in the page’s title and throughout the body of the page can sometimes affect the position of a page in the search results. But of greater importance to Google’s algorithm is whether or not the keywords are located on the landing page and whether they are randomly included simply to increase the density of the keyword on the page.

A common scenario is for Web developers to design a number of landing pages for the same product specific to certain keywords. Using this method you can end up with 10 or more landing pages for each of your products. This can be expensive, time consuming and difficult to maintain as regular updates are required on each page.

This can be much more efficiently accomplished by using a product entitled Search Chameleon. This product uses scripting on a landing page and a related sponsored ad to adjust the text in the landing page in REAL TIME according to the keywords entered in the search bar. The scripting can be used in the page’s title or anywhere in the body. This not only saves development time but makes page updates much simpler since you’re only working with one page.

It also assures your page will be relevant to the search regardless of the search term entered. This can be a compelling factor in a visitor’s decision to spend more time on a landing page. An advertiser is then able to maximize on the relevancy of their landing pages by automating previously manual processes.

Relevancy with AdWords and Sponsored Advertisement
The “Triangle of Relevancy” would not be complete without the search terms being included in the title and/or body of your sponsored ad. Google and most search engines will highlight the search terms in the sponsored ad anywhere it shows up. This allows your ad to stand out and draws attention to the visitor that your ad is relevant to their search.

So, in stead of loading your Adwords campaigns with numerous non-relevant keywords, your best bet is to use a single keyword or phrase that’s relevant to your ad allowing it show up in both the title and the body of the ad. This means you should write several ads specific to a keyword or phrase for your Adwords campaigns. This not only makes your ad more relevant but it pre-qualifies your prospect as the ad contains the specific key terms they’re searching for.

Another way to really boost your sponsored ad’s visibility is to have the keyword or phrase in the destination URL at the bottom of the ad. If you’re using an affiliate link, you may not get as good a click through rate as with a non-affiliate domain, because people will respond more favorably to your ad if they think you’re the product owner.

The best way to show you’re a professional is to use your own domain name as a redirect to your affiliate site. You can use the keyword or phrase in a successful ad as the domain name and your keyword will be highlighted in the title, the body of the ad AND in the destination URL!

The second best way to show youâ re a professional is to use a keyword as a sub-domain for a domain you already own, i.e., keyword.MyDomain.com. Notice the keyword is in front catching the eye of the prospect first. An alternative would be to add the keyword as a landing page name, i.e., MyDomain.com/keyword.htm. Using these two methods works best when you have a generic domain name like 123.com which will work with any product and does not conflict with the keywords.

In Summary
The “Triangle of Relevancy” is the most important aspect of a successful search engine marketing strategy. Google is very careful to ensure their visitors have a positive experience with their search engine so they reward the more relevant advertisers with a higher position in the search results and their AdWords ad placing. Both the landing pages and the AdWords ads should focus on specific keywords or phrases for maximum relevancy.

The search engine marketing landscape is continually evolving as new technology is introduced. Search engines are continually updating their processes as developers learn how to counteract them. One thing that probably won’t change is the triangle of relevancy with the search term, the sponsored ad and the landing page. People will always want specific answers to specific questions.

Author:  Sydney Nelson is a Microsoft Certified Professional and has a Bachelor in Information Technology. More articles on search engine marketing are available at http://blog.PromoBlackBoxZone.com

The web is a new medium, and opens up avenues of communication with customers around the world. It’s a medium for artistic expression, and allows you to express a sense of personal style. When the Web was new, a decade ago, that sense of style was cobbled together from all kinds of things, and has resulted in some old practices that should be abandoned, and have a stake driven through their hearts.

First and foremost, remember that the T in HTML is for TEXT. Unless it’s your company logo, never use graphics of words. This is important for a number of reasons. First, text can be selected and copied and pasted by your visitors. Graphic headers cannot. Second, your graphical headers won’t change size to match whatever resolution your target’s browser is set up for, while a font based system will. Third, a lot of browsers still give the option to shut off graphics, particularly those used on mobile devices, to save on download bandwidth.

While we’re speaking on graphical design for your web site, resist the urge to use fancy fonts. Your site is meant to be read; there are several fonts that are designed to be read on-screen with minimum eye strain, among them Georgia, Verdana and MS Times New Roman. Similarly, to make your life easier, be sure to set your fonts in a cascading style sheet, or CSS file. This allows you to make one change to a font list and have it affect all the fonts on your web site - most modern web design tools will handle the CSS stuff for you; how much you want to get into it is up to you.

CSS is also a great way to avoid two other common sins of web design from the late ’90s: The use of needless tables and tiled backgrounds, usually in garish colors. CSS allows you to specify backgrounds that flow around text, without choking the browser on tables and the like. While it was the rage in web site design to make your page look like it was printed on parchment, with a tiled background, it’s certainly not the way to go now. Most web pages should have either a light gray, white or “gray blue” background, because that’s the easiest for text to be read from. While it’s very chic, try to avoid white text on a black background. If you must use a dark background, use text that’s somewhat larger against it, because of the way optical illusions work with text on a dark background.

Avoid animated GIFs and the Blink tag. The things Animated GIFs did are better handled with CSS and Javascript rollovers, and again, most good web design software will handle this for you, so you don’t have to be a coding guru to do this yourself. GIFs in general, due to their low bit depth, should be avoided. Use PNGs instead if you need one with a transparent background or an animation; PNGs combine everything you’d want from a GIF with the color depth of a JPEG.

Think about how you’re organizing your web site - make sure that every page has a way to get back to the site map or home page, because people will mostly hit your web site from a search engine result. While it’s tempting to do massively search engine optimized landing pages to get your page ranks up there, remember you’re writing for human beings first, not for web spiders. It doesn’t matter how search engine optimized the text is if people read three sentences that are utter gibberish and hit the back button.

Author:  Visit Jason Smith today for an in depth XSitePro Review, and see XSitePro’s exclusive bonus pack.

Good analysis and research is the main criteria when it comes to sorting out your keywords. Easier said than done though in the great majority of cases. Engaging an expert is possibly one of the best moves you’ll make, as they’ll run rings around any amount of work you’ll do on your own. The difference between the best keyword analysis software and the freebees can be colossal. The best tools will unearth some real eye openers you’ll never have thought about.

One elementary yet very common mistake is to gather together a bunch of keywords and to copy them across an entire website. This will drastically reduce the effectiveness of pages. If instead you focus and carryout research upon 2 to 5 words per page the results are likely to be much better.

It’s worth remembering that keyword spellings can obviously vary from country to country. If we consider some of the most outstanding differences between English speaking nations such as England, the US and Australia, a whole new batch of keywords may be worth further analysis. Not only are spellings possibly different but also entire words will have their alternatives (eg pavement and sidewalk). Complete phrases may also be regularly used and understood in one country but not in another. Particular phrases can even vary greatly on a much more local level, especially if we consider popular sayings and slang. That said one of the best policies you can adopt is to check your keywords regularly. All things web related tend to change fairly quickly. What works today could be desperately out of line tomorrow. Once you feel you have a good set of keywords together, you’d be best advised to carryout some basic search engine tests. Testing will illustrate:

• If keywords are correct for the niche of the page concerned.
• Competitiveness of keywords and the strength of the competition.
• If sites ranked for particular keyword searches are really competitors or have any relationship to the area in which you compete.

OK, now’s the time to hit you with a big one - Latent Semantic Indexing otherwise referred to as Latent Semantic Analysis. Gosh where did that one suddenly come from? Well it’s possibly too much to adequately detail in this brief article, but worth mentioning nevertheless. If you want to get serious about your keywords and SEO in general, then some additional research around LSI will do you the world of good. Wikipedia lists LSI as a “technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analysing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms”. Well no one ever said it was simple, but basically from a search engine performance point of view we are interested in the relationship, grouping, positioning and variation of terms. Occasionally the right mix can just be stumbled across but most web designers wouldn’t really be aware they’d got it right or wrong. First understanding and then using this mix intelligently can set your pages leagues ahead of the competition.

As pointed out at the start it’s perhaps best leaving the whole business of SEO and keywords to the experts. This is assuming you can find someone who’s competent and has your best interests in mind. If your budget is only small or you site performs so badly that anything is an improvement, then the best advice is to keep it simple. Sorting out your keywords for a site that has previously coped reasonably well without will make a big difference. Don’t expect overnight success. The top search engines move at their own pace, so it’s not uncommon for site modifications to take several weeks to filter through to an improvement in search positioning.

Author:  Paul Coupe is lead designer / developer with Zoom Online.
Zoom Online - Providing total online solutions. Contact: paul@zoom-online.co.uk

I am often asked to find reasons why a site is not ranking? That’s a pretty broad question that requires a lot of investigation to get to the bottom. The best way to start is to determine which page is being optimized for that specific term. Take the URL and enter it into a search query. If no match comes up, the page is not indexed by the search engine and therefore cannot rank for that term.

In situations like this, I start to go through my mental checklist of things that could be preventing the crawling and indexation of a page. Here is my checklist in order of importance:

Robots.txt Protocol Exclusion
Pages and directory folders excluded via robot.txt will never be crawled because the file tells the crawlers not to read the page. A robots.txt file is the first file a search engine bot calls and if it excludes a page, it will not read or index it.

“No Index” Meta Tag
If a page has the following Meta tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />, it essentially does the same as a robots.txt exclusion file. The page will not be indexed.

Duplicate Content
Two pages with unique URL’s are often filtered out of search results and sometimes one is removed from the index for the simple fact that a search engine would not allow their search result quality to suffer by showing the same information one after the other. This is often the case of why people cannot get a specific page indexed.

Multiple Canonical URL Versions
Much like duplicate content, multiple URL versions of the same content act in the same way. While search engines are constantly improving their algorithms to avoid this issue, it may still cause indexation problems.

Dynamic URL’s
Dynamic URL’s tend to provide the same content on a unique URL string which can trigger duplicate content filters. This works in the same way as direct duplication of content and multiple canonical URL versions.

Algorithm Compliance Problems
Simply put, if you do something the search engines don’t like such as use black hat techniques, they can easily de-index a page or remove your entire domain from the index.

Replicating Title and Meta Tags
I have noticed oftentimes, when two pages have similar content, and the title and Meta description and keywords tags are replicated between the two pages, the page if often not indexed because it has triggered a duplicate content filter.

Programming Language Usage
Search engines generally only read HTML. They are making advances into indexing JavaScript and Flash but they still have a long way to go. With that, a page comprised of only JavaScript, Flash, or images may have a hard time being indexed because the search engines don’t have anything to read.

Page File Size
Google recommends a page file size of under 99k. I try to abide by this and have noticed that larger pages can cause indexation problems.

Table-based Layout
Nested tables often cause search engine crawlers to skip over sections of a page and not index certain content. If they miss your important stuff, they may not index you at all.

Navigational and Linking Structure
It is vital to get the crawler to the page. This must be done with standard HTML text links preferably without rel=”nofollow” attributes on those links. Further, some links on pages with over 100 navigational links may not be crawled and followed to index. Every page should be no more than 3 clicks deep off the homepage. This can often be accomplished using sitemaps, CSS navigation bars, breadcrumb links, and cross-content interlinking. At times search engines still may have a hard time indexing some pages. In such cases, I recommend direct sitemap feeds via means such as XML.

Time
I often see people simply being too anxious to see indexation. Search engine resources are limited and they will devote them in direct correlation with how important a site is. Importance if usually determined by link profiles and fresh content. If a site is deemed to be less important, the crawler may come around less often and not dig down through as many links to index new pages and simply not index all of your pages because your site does not provide enough value to index.

I’m sure these are not all of the possible reasons why a page might not get indexed. Can anyone comment on other possible reasons?

Author:  Gennady Lager is the Senior SEO Specialist for SendTraffic.com, a full service online marketing firm specializing in Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. In addition to the SEM and SEO offerings, SendTraffic provides Paid Inclusion and Feed Management, Website, and Phone Sales Analytics. Our People, Process Proprietary Technologies and Pricing make SendTraffic the leader in providing Online Marketing solutions.

If you have a small business blog, or are thinking of starting one, you should be aware of the ways you can use your blog to drive traffic to your Website. It’s simpler than you think.

The first thing to understand about your blog is that each entry is counted as one Web page. Even if you have your blog set to display 10 blog posts on the same page, each of them is counted as a separate Web page by the search engines. That’s why it is important to treat each blog entry as an SEO tool. The following tips should be kept in mind for each blog entry in order to optimize them for the search engines and drive more traffic to your Website from your blog:

1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword

2. Make sure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning

3. Use subheads with or tags that also use your keyword

4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts

5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword

6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize certain keywords and phrases

7. Be sure to ping the directories

8. Include tags for all of your blog entries

9. Use categories effectively

10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your Website.

Because each blog entry is a separate Web page, the search engines will crawl them and index them just as they do your Web pages. Optimize each one heavily around a specific keyword related to your Website and that’s an extra doorway into your Website for each page indexed at the search engines. Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal Web pages of your Website you are improving the SEO effect of your blog entry. A poll of top SEO experts by SEOmoz revealed that a majority of those SEO experts said these type of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking Web pages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text.

You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. Those tags will be used by the search engines to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it and this makes it easier to share among their social group.

Your blog category should indicate an important element of interest as well. Unlike tags, you should only choose one category for each blog post. Don’t use “main” or “uncategorized.” Those are too generic. Use a specific keyword-related category as that will make your blog posts more crawlable by the search engines.

There are more than 100 blog directories that you can ping to let them know you have updated your blog. I suggest you do this every time you update your blog. With WordPress, and several other blogging software platforms, you can input each directory into a field and the software will send out an automatic ping each time you update your blog. If you are not using WordPress you should go to Ping-o-Matic and use it to ping your blog for free.

Finally, if you sign your blog posts with a keyword-rich signature that points to a relevant internal page of your Website, this will make your Website more crawlable and give you another anchor text link. Use something like, “Find Out More About Keyword.” Then add another link that points to your home page.

The important thing to remember about keywords and links, whether on your blog or your Website, is to make them appear natural. The benefits are enormous.

Author:  Caroline Melberg is President and CEO of Melberg Marketing. She has over 20 years of experience creating exciting marketing campaigns for some of the most successful companies in the world. She publishes the popular eZine, “Blue Chip Tips: The Secrets of Blue Chip Marketing…Revealed!” Learn more today at www.melberg.com.

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity. Web designers don’t really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand don’t like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive. You cannot have just one of the two either. Without optimization your site is invisible to the search engines, hence to your potential customers. On the other hand, without a good design your site, although not invisible, will get nothing but hits. Web users are picky and if they find nothing of interest on your site they will just surf to the next site.

Having a beautiful website no one can find is like having a store and keeping the doors locked. You know it is there, you’ve done a great job decorating it, the products are waiting for the customers, yet no one comes in.

When you pay for web design don’t automatically assume that by paying thousands of dollars on a layout you’ll be a hit on the Web. The Web is a highly competitive place. There are already thousands entrepreneurs who, just like you, invest in design and hope to become the new “it.” Without online marketing (SEO being an important part of the discipline) all these entrepreneurs will remain in the shadow, with their beautiful websites closed to the world.

SEO is the key to that virtual door you need to open for your customers. It is important that you consider this tool when you first conceive your site. Web design and SEO don’t need to be enemies. There are enough professional agencies that employ both web designers and SEOs who work together to develop a good business website, a site that is SEO ready, accessible and readable with any browser. You just need to take your time, research and send a few inquiries. Then choose the company that answers your questions in a timely manner, basically choose the company that proves a clear ability of designing with W3C standards and a clear understanding of the online trends and realities.

Then balancing content with visual appearance shouldn’t be such a difficult task. Aside graphics and artwork you have to choose proper font types, in a readable size, with colors that harmonize with the layout of the site and so on. If your site is not SEO ready from the first stage of the project you’ll face additional costs after you launch. SEO ready means a site that is properly coded (errors in the HTML code might stop some search bots from crawling and indexing your site correctly), with good navigability and good internal linking structure.

On the other hand, SEO and appearance are not the only traits of a good site. Brand conscious companies should look at the broader picture: instead of debating what is better online entrepreneurs should ask themselves what works best to convert visitors into clients.

Studies show that an over optimized page might hurt the user-experience of people with disabilities. For example, many SEOs stuff the image alt attributes and their alternative titles with keywords. Blind and other visually impaired people who use screen readers to access the Web and read the pages cannot see the images and, instead of listening to a relevant image description, they’ll hear… nonsense.

Usability and accessibility are equally important as design and optimization. Strangely enough images are better for usability. They give focus to the design and when properly optimized they provide for less cluttered website content. The problems appear when the images slow down the loading times, but with the use of CSS loading times should not be a big concern.

As search engines prefer fast loading sites it is easy top understand why good coding and optimization are so important. Poor coding raises many other problems aside loading times and might increase costs when you need website updates, especially when your website administrator is not the one who created your site.
Author:  Mihaela Lica used to be a military journalist, worked six years as a freelance reporter for the Romanian National Radio Station (ROR) and four years in the Public Relations Direcorate of the Romanian Ministry of Defense. Since 2002 she is a PR consultant in Germany. For more SEO articles visit ewritings.

Article marketing has been considered a useful method of promotion on the Internet, since the very early days of the Internet. By writing an informative article, writers have been able to get their sales message read by millions of online consumers, through their resource box that follows their articles. Until 2005, the whole point of article marketing was for the purpose of attracting huge numbers of readers as a result of the articles being published in ezines that had a large reader base.

A New Kind Of Article Marketing For Link Popularity

In 2005, Jason Bradley, owner of Article Dashboard, released his free article directory software. Websites that use his software are commonly referred to as AD sites.

During the same time frame, people began turning to article marketing in droves, based on its promise for building link popularity with Yahoo, MSN, and primarily Google. Most people who jumped on the bandwagon in 2005 to endorse article marketing for link popularity purposes promoted a very limited view of this promotional technique.

Their thoughts went along the lines of “the only purpose for article marketing is link popularity.” There was no other role for article marketing, they said. And since one only needed to type enough words to get a link into an article directory, the most common recommendation was that articles should only be 300-400 words in length.

It was also commonly recommended that most article directory owners do not review the content submitted to them, so it was not important that the article made sense or pleased the article’s readers. After all, the recommendation being made was not for the possibility of generating traffic from articles; it was only for the purposes of influencing the search engine algorithms, which are not capable of actually reading articles for grammar or understanding.

People flocked to this new kind of article marketing, and they were more concerned with “quantity than quality” – quantity of links that is.

Software Developers Rallied

With the mass deployment of websites under the Article Dashboard software, and others since, programmers jumped through hoops and developed new article distribution systems that relied on computers instead of people for the distribution process.

Soon, these programmers had systems in place to mass submit articles to the new breed of article directories. They told the new article directory owners that if they would add a simple script to their website, then the submission service would populate their directories with article content.

Hundreds of directory owners flocked to this new kind of article distribution system.

Early on, people who used article marketing to promote their businesses were elated. They were getting links all over the place.

The Realities Of Article Directory Management Sank In

In September of 2005, one company bought nearly 200 domains and installed the AD software on all of them. By May of 2006, their operation had never actually gained a foothold in the profit sector of the Internet, so they sold their domains to another company. In early 2006, I had documented a list of 180 websites owned by this operation. On a recent review, I was unable to locate a single one of these 180 AD sites still running the AD script, and most were offline completely.

In order to fully understand the job of the article directory manager, the manager must manually approve or reject every article submitted to an AD site. Many AD directory owners realized that the approval process was a long and tedious affair, especially when they were receiving hundreds of articles per day from these automated distribution systems. For testing purposes, I had set up my own AD site and subscribed to receive articles from these automated systems. I let go the approval process for one week and returned to find 800 articles waiting for approval. It does not take long to get overloaded with articles that require manual approval.

After only a few months of operation, many Dashboard sites stop approving articles for one of two reasons: 1) it took too much time to manage their article directory website, or 2) the amount of income generated from the process did not match the time requirements of the directory.

The Clash Of Titans
Things really began to change in the AD directory ownership game a few months into the project. Directory owners began to realize that in order for them to profit from their article directories, they must do something that brings readers to their websites and encourages loyalty from their site’s visitors.

Since most article directories rely on advertising to drive their revenue stream, the directory owners had to do something that the other directory owners were not doing. They had to distinguish themselves from the masses.

The AD owners who have survived the early explosion of AD sites have generally taken the attitude that they should focus on “quality over quantity”.

This one step has set the goals of the software developers’ article distribution systems and their customers (quantity over quality) in conflict with the best interests of the article directory owners (quality over quantity).

Directory Managers Began To Implement New Submission Rules

Early on, many of those article directory owners who were intent on survival took actions to reduce the garbage flowing into their directories. Directory managers noticed trends in the articles that consistently failed to measure up to their new standards.

The owner of Invisible MBA, an educational article directory, told me that he had to review ten articles to find one he wanted to use. He also regularly complained about people who did not follow even the simplest instructions about appropriate content on his website. He eventually resorted to banning 70% of the people submitting articles to his website, including the automated article submission services, because they simply could not follow his category guidelines for submission.

His whole issue is a common complaint among the article directory managers. They insist that writers should take the time to appropriately categorize the articles they submit. Since it takes so long to approve articles manually and to select the correct category, directory managers have resorted to deleting articles instead of categorizing those articles for the writer.

Article Dashboard, Article Garden and many others have taken the step to prohibit the submission of articles that only point to affiliate websites. Article Express had gone one step further to prohibit affiliate links, even if the affiliate programs are advertised from the writer’s domain.

Across the board, directory owners have stomped on Private Label Rights (PLR) articles. When article directory managers began to realize that their websites housed dozens of copies of a single article, each of which had been signed by different people as the stated author, they realized that they had a serious quality problem. They instinctively knew that those PLR articles created a trust problem with their readers. When one article has been claimed to have been written by twenty people, it makes one wonder how the website owner can claim to have a quality website. And if the trust factor has already been raised as an issue, why would the reader want to trust anything else on that website?

Lee Asher who owns Articles-Galore and a couple of other AD sites was one of the first to come down hard on software submissions to his website. His guidelines state in no uncertain terms that if someone uses software to send articles to his websites, the person will have all of their articles removed from his website.

Some AD site owners have implemented minimum word count guidelines as a measure to break some of the junk article peddlers. After all, the people focused on writing articles for link popularity are driven by the concept of 300-400 word articles. I have seen word count restrictions that include the minimum of 500, 600 and 700 words. 80% of what is submitted to my AD site does not even have the number of words I require.

Proper Category Placements Is A Consistent Issue For Article Directory Managers

Article directory owners want to impress their readers and the search engines. But, they need the properly categorize articles primarily for their human readers, who are looking for specific information on their website.

In order to help their website visitors, the directory managers frequently update their category arrangements. For example, on my AD site, I provide several well-defined subcategories for the health category. In the cancer subcategory, there is a wide range of cancers that needed their own child categories. Since the AD software only shows 30 articles per listing page, and since there is one writer who has written more than 400 articles just on the topic of mesothelioma, it made sense to subdivide my cancer category so that it was not an advertisement for only one writer.

One of the main problems with the auto-submission software is that the software does not accurately address the up-to-date category hierarchy for each article directory. This creates a real quality issue for the directory owner and managers. In order for the directory manager to stay true to the formatting of his or her directory, he or she must either complete the category selections for the auto-submitters or delete the articles submitted through them. Manual deletions take as much time as manual approvals, unless the manager has to choose the category for the article, then it takes longer.

Article Marketing Still Works For Those Who Care About Quality Over Quantity

If you still like article marketing for its ability to get your business seen by ezine readers, then it is as effective as it has always been. If you only like article marketing for its ability to influence your link popularity, it can still be effective, if you do it right.

It is true that those automated article distribution services can get your article to a lot of websites, but on a percentage basis, how many of those submissions are getting approved?

For my own use, I use my own article distribution service to reach ezine publishers. And for mass directory submission, I prefer to submit articles to the directories by hand, because hand submission permits me to get the category right every time, which in turn permits my articles to get approved more often.

In the end, it is a karma thing – if I treat the directory managers right, they will treat me right by approving more of my articles. Since it is not uncommon for me to spend six to seven hours to write an article like this one, it makes a lot more sense for me to spend the extra time to get a wider reach for my articles, by honoring the desires of the more substantial article directories.

Author:  Bill Platt has offered article marketingservices at The Phantom Writers, since 2001. If you are interested in guaranteed link building services, utilizing articles as the foundation for the links, then Bill’s team can help you with that as well. If you have questions that only Bill can answer, give him a call at (405) 780-7745, between 9am-6pm CST, Monday through Friday.

Sometimes in the online world when approaching a project people seem to classify the issues facing a website as a technology issue. It’s as if building a web site is this mysterious thing wrapped in so much technology it’s just too much handle. Just sitting in the office of a technology provider gets nerve wracking; hearing all the techno geeks spitting out acronym after acronym and having no idea what any of it means - html, Ajax, XML, HTTP, Java, ASP, .NET, Web services, Web 2.0, what all does it mean?!

I’m here to tell you not to worry about all those acronyms, phrases, and geeks telling you what to do, do what you know. Websites are nothing but a different way of doing your business; bricks and mortar are the traditional way, but they both have something in common and that’s people. In this article I’m going to discuss community sites since they’re a growing influence on the web and generating plenty of interest.

Community; what do you think of when you hear community? Think of community as your own home town. Anyone who’s played Sim City should have some concept of what it takes to build a community. If you remember from the game, you had some cash to build houses, roads, and services. Now let’s look at that on the web, you have some money to build a site, network connection to the Internet, and some functionality to the site. The site is your community and to build it, you need to provide some place for people to live.

In the beginning in order to grow your community you have to provide a place for your users to live. Granted a site that is mostly static is nice to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there (sound familiar?). You have to provide something on your site to encourage people to want to live there. There are the usual features like forums, weblogs, profile pages and the like, that’s a good start, it gives a person a place to live.

When you add these “living spaces” for your users, consider what they provide, at a minimum they should provide your user community with the ability to express themselves. As in any community whether offline or online people want to express themselves and distinguish themselves from others in the crowd. They build this identity by the clothes they wear, cars they drive, and people they associate with. Online they do something similar; they create avatars, profiles to help them connect with others that have similar interests. And just like in the physical communities people go to churches, community activities, and other places to develop relationships with people that have similar interests. They’ll do the same on your website, but you need to provide them with a means to do. So when shopping for interactive applications ensure that they will provide mechanisms for your users to build those relationships.

As a community grows it needs leadership and this is the same online. For example, if your site becomes popular and has forums, usually you’ll see a few of your posters become pretty prominate in their activity, posting frequently. By providing them with moderator privileges or some special designation you allow leaders to step up, and provide the community with people who appear to have some connection to the site and help build community and participation. You could extend the moderator concept to enable your users to host online chats, or even participate in podcasts or weblog posts.

As time goes by your site leaders will come and go, and it will be up to you to monitor activity within the site and find leaders. This further enhances the community aspect and allows your community to be dynamic.

Another thing to foster growth and participation is to have periodic contests, contests that allow for some user contributed content is ideal. For example some sites have users submit stories, graphics like humorous graphics, basically anything that builds content for your site, but still enables your population to contribute to the site. The cost is relatively low, and if you have the traffic you may be able to work relationships with sponsors to provide the spoils to the winner.

The main idea to take from this article is community sites are not about technology, they’re about people. Find out what people like and enable them to “own” your site. If you do this your site is sure to grow and prosper. Good luck!

Author:  Patrick Santry has been conducting web and eBusiness strategy for over 13 years. He has authored numerous books on web technologies, and is a sought after speaker on web topics. His current project is helping his daughter on JonasBrothersFan.com which is a community for fans of the band The Jonas Brothers.

Would you feel confident buying a high-performance car from a street-corner vendor?

If you are like most people, you would much rather buy the car from a dealership that sells other cars, has a good reputation and employs many people. This is the same logic your online customers follow.

The web has empowered individual entrepreneurs to provide professional services and products that match those of large corporations - but most potential clients would still rather do business with a large company than a sole-proprietorship. People who are searching for products and services online constantly look for indicators of reliability, quality and trust in vendors’ websites. Visitors will examine your website for these indicators beause it is a substitute for examining your wares and visiting your offices. You can dramatically increase the number of casual browsers that you turn into clients by incorporating those indicators into your site. This article will show you how to achieve this.
Reliability

You can convey reliability through your site by giving the impression that your company has good customer service, a bureaucratic hierarchy and that it’s large in size. Showing these qualities can be done by doing the following:
For one-person companies, classify the owner as a “General Manager” or a “Chief Technician”. This will explain to clients why their inquiries are handled by a single contact, and will imply that there is another person in the company who is the “Owner”. This already increases the perceived number of people involved in the company twofold.
All companies should have their telephone, email and mailing address proudly displayed. Lacking a mailing address or a phone shows visitors that you are not a legitimate company, nor reachable when needed. Many contractors and owner-operators who work from home are reluctant to post their address online, but the chances of being visited in person (without prior contact) are slim compared to the benefit your address gives to the “tangibility” of the company. One approach to decreasing the chance of someone actually visiting is to classify the address as a “mailing address only”.
Providing a guarantee gives another boost to your company’s perceived reliability. This guarantee does not have to be substantial, though, and may be as vague as “we guarantee the most professional customer service treatment”.
Finally, a mistake that many small business owners make is using a free email (Yahoo! or Hotmail) as the company email. This sets the alarm bells ringing in visitors’ minds - real companies have email addresses at their domain. There is no reason why your company should not have its own email addresses, as even $7/month hosting plans provide this capability.
Trust

Encouraging visitors’ trust mainly involves showing to them that your company is “real” and “tangible”, not a fly-by-night operation.

Regardless of whether this is exactly what your company is, there are several ways to make it seem otherwise:
Do not use generic stock images. Customers are constantly bombarded with generic pictures of smiling people, computer racks and skyscrapers - why should they trust someone who’s pictures they’ve seen on another site?

Create your own pictures, or take the time to choose unique and appropriate stock images.
Give visitors a glimpse into the “guts” of your company: post short employee or manager profiles, with their pictures. Show pictures of your offices or worksites - and ensure that they look authentic. When they see these two things, visitors know that a) your employees are real b) you have an actual location. If you have neither employees nor an office, post a good picture of yourself working at a computer or answering a phone (but make sure that your workplace is tidy and does not look like a home office).
A great way to make visitors feel secure about giving you their contact information is to have seals of approval posted next to your contact form. This has been researched and proven to decrease “abandonment” of your online forms. The best way to acquire seals of approval is to get them from organizations such as the Better Business Bureau, TRUSTe, and other approval organizations. A less expensive substitute is to be certified by a smaller niche-agency or post a membership seal from a professional association.
The final element of building trust is to have a privacy policy, and to address visitors’ concerns openly. In the text of your site, openly state that you value clients’ confidentiality, understand their needs and hold each employee accountable for their ethical conduct.
Quality

Showing the quality of your products and services is related to showing that you are serious about your business. Because your site visitors cannot touch your product or experience your service, they have to resort to evaluating your website itself as an indication of the care you take in your craft. This makes it very important that you take care in the way your site is built.
First of all, the look of your site matters greatly when it comes to showing quality. If your website looks like it was made in 1997 (big and blocky, misaligned, flashing animated GIFs) then you will not impress any web surfers - regardless of whether you are the best company in the offline world. Invest in bringing your site design up to date visually.

This does not mean being on the cutting edge, just having tasteful design.
Also, you should ask a third party to review your website for spelling mistakes. As we do more business online without seeing our counterparty, we rely more on things such as spelling and grammar to assess intelligence, intentions and background. For a client, shoddy copywriting means shoddy workmanship on your end.
The final indicator of quality - testimonials - comes from the realm of Sales. Having testimonials indicates to potential clients that others have successfully used your services, and were satisfied. Place testimonials in areas of your website where visitors will start doubting your product or service’s quality - such as in “product showcase” pages or on sign-up forms. The more authentic your testimonials feel, the better. It is always better to place a scanned image of a written testimonial than to retype it into a webpage.
Honesty

Something that you should remember as you integrate these indicators of reliability, trust and quality into your site is to never lie. You should never place pictures of nonexistent employees, locations or testimonials. You should never misrepresent the quality of your wares, exaggerate your achievements or provide a fake address instead of your home office address.
Your ultimate goal is to turn visitors into inquiries, and inquiries into customers. If you initially misrepresent your company, the truth will always come to light once you begin a business relationship with the customer. There is nothing more embarrassing than having your clients find out that you lied about yourself mid-project, withdraw the project and complain about you to the local business chamber.
Most of the approaches outlined here put your existing business in a better light. Once website visitors begin inquiring through email or phone, you should frankly and openly discuss your company with them. You should explain that “your location” is your home office, your “team” is actually made up of subcontractors and professionals to whom you outsource on occasion and that you are the Owner as well as the “Manager”. Honesty is very attractive. And once a potential client hears that you are honest and knowledgeable, they will feel that there is a real person interacting with them. There will no longer exist a cyber-chasm that you need to bridge with your website, and you can begin selling your product or service on its own merits.
Conclusion

Potential clients who visit your company’s website feel that your site reflects on your company. Because visitors cannot touch your products, hear your voice or visit your office online, they have to rely on certain factors in your website to decide whether to do business with you. Through better design, better communication and genuine imagery, your website can show that your company is reliable, trustworthy and provides a quality product. If your website can convey those qualities, then it’s clear that your company is worth doing business with.

Author:  Jacob Filipp is the owner of the Toronto-based Powerspirit SEO company. Jacob draws on 7 years of experience as a programmer and web developer.

A few years ago I wrote the article Ten Steps To Higher Search Engine Positioning. The article was well received due to the breakdown of the core requirements for ranking a website being reduced into simple steps. Well today we’re going to break it down into 5 steps. Is it even easier to rank a website today than it was a few years ago? More straight forward? Yes. Less time consuming? Not a chance.

As our company provides guaranteed SEO services for our clients, two things are necessary:

1. We need to know that our tactics work
2. We need to maximize efficiency so we’re not having to charge our clients unreasonably high rates

And so we’ve developed processes by which we can attain maximum results in the least amount of time through carefully developed stages. While we are interested in all the major engines, it is of course Google that we spend the lion’s share of our time studying (having never heard a client say, “I don’t care about Google, just get me ranking on Ask.com.”) Here are the steps we use to optimize websites (including our own) for Google.

Step One: Website Structure

The structure of your website affects the way search engine spiders see your site and thus, affects your rankings. I’m going to assume from the get-go that your site is in a position to be spidered and the internal links followed (i.e. none of the content is hidden due to poor development). This does not mean that the structure is optimized.

The way the code appears on your page affects the way the search engines prioritize specific content. For example, if your navigation appears higher in the code of your web page than the content then it is given a higher priority. The goal then is to make the core sections of your page appear higher in the code than the portions that are not critical to the optimization of each page. Generally the content area of your page contains the majority of the keywords and is more easily optimized and tweaked. For this reason, you will want the content of your page to appear higher in the code. This is especially true if you have image-based navigation.

The methods for doing this differ depending on how your site was initially built. If your website was built using tableless design practices (ideal) then the matter is “simple”. Now, I can’t get into all the details here as this is a huge area unto itself. There are many great sites, articles and forums on CSS that get into this area of structural optimization in detail and where you will find many helpful forum members willing to help out and answer questions. Or of course you could hire a professional developer who already knows how to do this in which case it will take a fraction of the time. This will depend on your resources, time and of course - whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer simply interested in learning another web development skill.

If learning a new development skill appeals to you, here are some useful resources you’ll want to check out:

• CSS Zengarden
• DezWozHere
• Designing Without Tables Using CSS

If your website is designed using tables the solution is actually much easier though less ideal. As Beanstalk’s Mary Davies wrote about in her article on Table Structures, with table-based designs the issue is resolved by simply structuring the cell layout in such a manner that the spiders “read” the content before the navigation and/or other, less easily optimized portions on your page. Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand words I’ll resurrect the one used by Mary to illustrate how this is done.

We can see that a blank cell is placed above the left hand navigation. Because a search engine spider reads from top to bottom, left to right they will hit the top table (the header) and then proceed to the table cell down and to the left. With the vast majority of sites this will be the left hand navigation however, if the table structure illustrated above is followed this will lead a spider to a blank cell. The spider will then quickly move to the cell on the right which is the main content area of the page. It is only after seeing the content that the spider will move back to the left, crawl the navigation and then proceed down to the footer.

The Point Of This
The goal with site structure optimization is to create an environment where the spiders will crawl the most important (and most easily optimized) content as early on the page as possible. This will give increased priority to the content that matters most.

Step Two: Content Optimization

Content optimization is, for our purposes here, the optimization of the wording and formatting of the page and site content to maximize its effect on a site’s rankings. There are three defining principles to this stage:

• Keyword density counts
• The formatting of content matters
• Overall site relevancy helps

So let’s discuss these in order:

Keyword Density

Keyword density is essentially the number of times the keywords are used on your page relative to the total number of words on the page. If you had a page that was 1000 words in total and you used your keyword 100 times you would have a keyword density of 10% (this is way too high by the way).

The optimal keyword density generally seems to hover around the 3 to 5% range. Of course the optimal level fluctuates with the algorithm however it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it leave this range. You will find sites that rank with higher and lower densities than this. Keyword density is not the only factor (or how easy would an SEO’s job be?).

If you want to check your density against the densities of your main competitors there are a number of tools you can use to do this.

• Beanstalk’s Keyword Density & Rank Checking Tool
• SEO Chat Keyword Density Tool
• Keyword Density.com

The Formatting Of Content

Content in header tags as well as bold, italic, anchor text and other formatting options increases the weight this text carries. Now, this doesn’t mean to run out and bold every instance of your keywords in your content but rather to make use of this as you are trying to draw the visitor’s eye to the important content on your pages. Logically enough, if you are targeting a phrase on the search engines then it is highly likely that you will end up wanting to draw the visitor’s eye to these keywords periodically on the page. This is more about usability and conversions than anything else. If a visitor enters our site using the term “seo services” we want to make sure that they find this phrase quickly when they land on the page. This will make the visitor feel more comfortable and help them more quickly find the content they are looking for.

If a page we are working on has an overall keyword density of 4% we would target to attain roughly 25 - 30% of this in some sort of formatting outside of the standard of the site. That said, the visitor is more important than the engines and if doing this will take away from the visual appeal of the site then it is not recommended. We can make up any loss in other areas.

Overall Site Relevancy

The relevancy of your entire site is going to impact the rankings of an individual page. If your entire site is about mortgages for example, you’re going to find it easier to rank for related phrases than if you have a general site with a single page about mortgages. This is because the cohesion of content among the pages of your site builds the overall relevancy of the site to that topic. If we think about it, when Google is trying to determine if a searcher if likely to find what they’re looking for on a site are they likely to believe a site with a single page on a topic is going to give the searcher the information they’re looking for or are they more likely to assume that a site with many pages on a topic is going to prove more useful to the searcher?

So we’ll resurrect the overused saying “content is king”. M