SiteProNews

If you are an experienced webmaster then you probably know that creating back links to your website is one of the best things that you can do to improve your Search Engine Ranking Placement (SERP). Google openly discusses the importance that their algorithms place on back links and even recommend that webmasters who want to increase their traffic use back links. Both Yahoo! and MSN are starting to talk openly about the importance of back links in their search algorithms as well.

There are a number of strategies that you can use to create back links to your website. Some of these strategies include emailing webmasters and asking them to place a link to your website, submitting your site to directories, distributing free reprint articles, and paying for links. All of these have their pros and cons, and some have a better success ratio than others.

How Many Back Links Does Your Website Have?

Take a look at your website and see just how many back links you actually do have. Do not do this for only one search engine, but for all search engines where you are trying to get good SERP results. To check your backlinks, simply type into the particular search engine’s box link:http://www.yourdomainurl.com/ . Of course you will replace the “yourdomainurl” with the name of your own domain.

The more back links that you have to your website, the better off you are. Not only do back links help your SERP, but also the visitors of pages where your back link is listed may just choose to visit your site.

A common mistake that new webmasters make is that they create back links, but they have all of these links pointing to their home page. It is great that you have 50 back links pointing to your home page, but take a look at other pages on your site. How many links are pointing to these pages? The answer is probably zero unless you have utilized deep linking in your link building campaigns.

What Are Deep Links?

Deep links are links that go to specific pages within your website. For example, let’s say that you have a home improvement website that has a large number of pages and articles on it telling people how to do projects. If all of your back links are pointing only to your home page and you have none pointing to specific article pages, then you are not getting the full benefit of your linking activities.

Think about it this way, if I go to your website and find a piece of information that I find particularly helpful or interesting and I want to tell other people about it, how will I do it? When I tell all my friends on my blog about this great page of yours, am I going to link to your home page? No, I am going to copy and paste the actual webpage address out of my browser, into my blog. That is deep linking and what is considered to be natural linking by the search engines.

What Are Natural Links?

Natural links are those links that are created by people other than the website’s marketing team. Suppose I posted a link in my own blog that said that the “most easily understood tutorial, I have read, for creating a php-xml parser” was: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-xml-parsing-rss-1-0 , and I put my quoted text into the link. That is a natural link, because I created the link with no prompting from the management at SitePoint.com.

Difficulties In Creating Deep Links

There are a few problems that you will run into when trying to create deep links to your site. One problem is that if you ask a Webmaster of another site to link to you, they will most likely just link to your home page. When you submit to directories, the vast majority of them will only allow you a link to your home page, not a deep link. Even if they do allow you to submit a deep link, they will not allow you to submit 10 deep links.

Success Tips For Creating Deep Links

Deep linking is quite a bit easier when utilizing free reprint articles as a part of your link building campaign. This is because you can put whatever link you want to put in the “About The Author” box. The About The Author box is required to stay intact in all websites that are using your article. If you intend on writing a large number of articles to promote your domain, then you will want to optimize your results by putting a different deep link into the About The Author box for each of the articles that you write.

Another method of doing this is free and easy, but requires a bit of time. Take keywords in each page of the text on your website and make a hyperlink on that word or phrase to another page on your site. This is very easily done if you know how to do basic HTML. The ultimate goal here is to have every page of your website linked to, at least once, by another page on your site. You will want to spread these out among your domain’s web pages, instead of having just a couple of pages linking to the other 50 pages.

Another reason to spread your links across all of the pages of your domain, is that users are likely to be turned off by a page that is almost all hyperlinks; those pages often appear spammy or cluttered. A good idea for any Webmaster is to create these internal deep links when you create a new page. It is much easier to spend a couple of minutes from the beginning, rather than trying to go back and do all of them at a later date.

Incorporate Deep Linking Into Your Linking Strategies

Deep linking is as important a consideration as back linking! It does not matter which page visitors use to enter our websites. If they like what they read on our internal pages, they are more likely to view other pages on our websites. If they view other pages on our website, they are likely to find our homepage, and we will get a chance to tell them why they should buy our products or services.

Deep links to our website help to ensure that the search engines will have good cause to show our internal web pages as well as our homepage. For every page in our website that gets great SERP, our chances of getting a sale are increased significantly.

We have 15 pages on our website, eight of which provide real content to our prospective clients. All eight of these pages have a significant number of back links pointing to them. 48% of our visitors land on our home page. 37% of our visitors land on our internal pages. As a result, 85% of our traffic lands on our website as a result of our back links, either directly or through our natural search placement in the search engines. The remaining 15% arrive on our website through bookmarks, personal referrals, and paid listings.

Deep linking works. Give it a shot.

Author:  Trey Pennewell is part of the Links and Traffic writing team. Though their program, they produce off-site link building campaigns, designed to advance their client’s rankings in the search engines. As any honest SEO purveyor will tell you, a webmaster should understand that those results will not magically appear overnight, but 4-6 months down the road. Yet, if you do nothing, you will be in the same boat six months from now as you are today. Learn more by visiting: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com

Did you know that publicity is supposedly seven times more effective than advertising? And it is free – that is if you do it yourself. If you know the elements of writing a good media release to capture the attention of journalists, you can cash in on no cost editorial coverage. Here’s a few tips to help you write a media release.

The Beginning

The first and most important thing is to have something interesting to say. Consider your USP – just like in sales. It’s your unique selling proposition. After all publicity is “selling”. You are selling a story idea to the media. I like to call it the unique shining point. It really needs to stand out, shine, be compelling – not an advertisement, not a boring product plug.

Another element that will really hook the journalist in is to consider the ESP the emotional selling point. Often it is the human element in the story that will capture the reader’s attention therefore the attention of the media. Think about what your story is. What is your background? Have you overcome any obstacles to get where you are today? Any achievements or milestones? Where is the human interest?

What’s more compelling? An announcement about a wedding limousine service, or the 30th anniversary both in marriage and business of the couple who run the service? This is a story I helped someone uncover in a seminar I conducted. The couple later went on to get a full page color photo and editorial story in a wedding supplement in their local paper – for free, just by working out the human element of interest to readers.

WIFM

What’s in it for me? Or what is in it for them. How does your product or service help others? You media release needs to state that key element. How will the reader benefit?

It’s uninteresting to just say, “Jones & Smith Accountants today announced the launch of their revolutionary new accountancy software package… Better to state – small businesses now have a better way to measure, monitor and manage the costs involved in running their business, thanks to Jones & Smith’s new online measurement & analysis accounting system.

The Heading

Write a catchy headline with a short, punchy phrase. Observe how headings are written in newspapers and magazines. You need to grab the reader’s attention. Of course that is if you are planning to post your media release snail mail with your product sample or full media kit. But most releases these days are emailed. However, the same principles apply. Use a compelling subject heading or the journalist will simply hit delete. Make it provocative.

The Content

Have a bright opening; start with your strongest point first. Instead of the conventional “today announced that” lead, you should make your release stand out from the crowd with a strong, compelling lead paragraph. As editors and journalists get so many releases every day, you only have seconds to grab their attention. The first paragraph is where your important information goes but it needs to be written in an exciting, creative, interesting way.

Consider the 5 W’s – Who, What, When, Where, Why; This is an easy formula to remember when writing your release but it is still not enough without some “zing” or compelling elements to “hook” the reader in.

Again - how does it help? Remember the benefit to the reader and perhaps include some “how to” tips on whatever your product or service is.

Use memorable quotes; either of you or someone well-known who can endorse your product. Quotes are often used by the media as they make the story more “real” or personal. A good quote can include why you’ve started this business or developed your product or how it helps your target audience.

The Format

Title it “Media Release” and always include the date. Include your contact details of telephone, mobile, email and website address. Use letterhead and keep the content to one page – any more and you will lose the journalists’ attention. When using email, cut and paste into the body of the email – don’t send an attachment.

The Contact

Send your release to the appropriate person – be sure to do your research. Check that the “food editor” is still just that and not now the “finance editor”. Find out the name of the person and their direct email.

Always follow up with a phone call or email and keep your media liaison consistent. If you provide good information you are not a nuisance, you are providing a service. Journalists and editors need our information to fill their newspapers, magazines and radio shows.

Supply a creative photo or suggest a photo opportunity that will add to the impact of having your information publicized.

Gaining publicity in the media will help you become known as an expert in your business field; it will enhance your image and reputation and help you to grow your business.

Author:  Sue Currie, the director of Shine Communications Consultancy and author of Apprentice to Business Ace – your inside-out guide to personal branding, is a business educator and speaker on personal branding through image and media. Sign up for free monthly tips on personal and professional PR at http://www.shinecomms.com.au/contactmanager/default.cfm and learn more about how you can achieve recognition, enhance your image and shine.

Create a website and in no time at all you will be receiving visitors, right? Wrong. It can take time before a search engine finds and indexes your site. Once it does, it is by no means any guarantee that you will be one of the first sites listed under your subject. Search engines index billions of pages and even the most obscure subject can have thousands of pages. For example, the American Wirehair cat is extremely rare – only twenty-two were registered with the Cat Fancier’s association in 2003. Yet, when I type in “American Wirehair Cat” into Google, it gives me 220,000 pages to choose from. That means there are about 10,000 pages for each cat! Yahoo gave me fewer choices - only 99,100 pages.

So how do you put your webpage at the head of the pack? It all comes down to search engine optimization. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the term used to describe methods and tricks used that will help improve how search engines rank your page. The higher that your page ranks, the better chance your page will be selected by someone searching, resulting in more traffic to your site.

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo! use complicated, highly guarded algorithms to rank your website that can be so confusing Einstein himself would have trouble figuring it out. Instead of focusing on those issues, let us instead focus on a few basic areas that will help improve your websites ranking.

One final note about search engines: The most popular search engine in July 2006, according to Nielsen NetRatings, was Google. Almost half of the individuals they surveyed used that search engine. Yahoo! came in second with about 24% of users followed by MSN (10%), AOL (6%), and Ask (3%). All other search engines share about 8% of the market. For that reason, this article will focus mainly on Yahoo! and Google.

Keywords

Choosing the right keywords for your page is the most important step in SEO. In actuality, “keywords” usually key phrases since you will be choosing about three or four key phrases for each page of your website and rarely focus on a simple word. It is important that you are specific when picking your phrases. You need to stay away from generic terms such as “cat,” “television, ” or “car.” Pick phrases such as “American Wirehair”, “plasma television”, or “Chevy Corvette”. The more specific you can be the higher that your page will be ranked, and the better chance your page will be found by your target audience.To pick the right phrases, think about what words you would type in when looking for your site. Ask your friends and family members what they would type into the search engine. Understand that television and TV are two different words and not interchangeable in the minds of search engines. Going back to my example of American Wirehair cats, I might choose the keywords of “American wirehair cat”, “Caleb’s Cattery”, and “rare cat breeds” for the fictitious site for Caleb’s Cattery. Keyword phrases should only be about three to four words long.

Domain Name

If you have not picked a domain name, it is best to pick one that uses at least one of your keywords in it. Use dashes to help separate the words, if desired. A website named http://www.calebs- cattery.com or http://www.calebsca ttery.com is better than http://www.caleb. com. For even better results, choose something like http://www.calebs- wirehair- cats.com. That said, it is believed that search engines may rank domain names with more two or more hyphens lower because they are usually associated with lower-quality or spam-ridden sites.Anchor Tags

Anchor tags, also known as anchor text, are the visible hyperlinked text on the page. Search engines typically weigh them heavily. Make sure that your anchor tags contain as many of your keywords as possible. Also, they should not be too long, although there is no limit, and be a clear indication of what the user will find by clicking on it.Headings

When designing a webpage for search engine optimization, it is important that you use headings (, , ) for your titles instead of graphic images. Search engines weigh headings heavily as an indication of what content to index your pages. Therefore, it is important that your page have headings that include your keywords. Pages without any headings rank lower in search engine results.Meta Tags

Meta tags help search engines index a website correctly. Although there are quite a few meta tags to choose from, the two most important are description and keywords. If you do not place these two in your heading section of your website, search engines will decide for themselves, usually by taking information from the first text it can find. Here is an example of each of the meta tags.

1. meta name=”description” content=”An introduction to search engine optimization, or SEO, including how to pick and use the right keywords, use meta links, title tags, alt tags, image names, site maps, links, and headings.
2. meta name=”keywords” content=”search engine optimization, SEO, webpage design, choosing keywords, anchor tags, headings, meta tags, title tags, alt tags, image names, site maps, robots.txt, keyword spamming or stuffing, web content development.

The description should be about 170 characters long and never exceed 200 characters– including spaces and include all the major keywords for the webpage. Notice that commas separate the keywords and there is no comma after the last keyword in the sequence. Also, try not to repeat a word more than twice in the listing. A lesser important meta tag is the author tag. While it will not help your website be ranked higher, including it will help your company or your name be recognized.It is critical that your description and keywords are accurate and relate to that page. Listing words or phrases that are not included in the text of the page lowers their relevance ranking. Search engines will rank the relevance of terms based on how many times the term occurs on the page, the position they are located in the document, the length of the document and the “weight” of the search term. Weight is determined by how often and the location of the keyword. Words that appear in the title, headings, and tags are considered heavier than other terms.

Title Tags

Technically, the title is a meta tag but because it is probably the most important one, it is listed separately. It is also what search engines list first, so it should be carefully thought out. Make sure you have a unique title for each of your pages.The title tag is placed in the header section inside. Most people simply place the name of their site in the title tag, which is not good SEO. Instead, place your most important keywords phrases inside the title tag without listing them. For example, instead of saying “Caleb’s Cattery” say, “Caleb’s Cattery - Home of the finest rare American Wirehair cats in northern New York”.

Length is also important. Google displays 66 characters of a title tag, cropping between words. For example, in the above example, Google would simply list the title as “Caleb’s Cattery - Home of the finest rare American Wirehair cats.” Yahoo! allows much longer titles, up to 120 characters. Therefore, you are best to include a title that is at least 66 characters long and subtitle that is an additional 54 characters long. You also want to consider what will be displayed by web browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, and what would be displayed if a visitor bookmarked your site or on browser indexes. Explorer displays the first 95 characters at the top of the page, the first 48 characters on its tabs, and the first 60 characters in its bookmarks. Mozilla Firefox displays at least 130 characters at the top of its pages, 55 characters on its tabs, and 43 characters on its bookmarks.

Alt Tags and Image Names

Search engines only index text. However, they do index the alt tags associated with images. This is why you should label each image on your website with tags that use your keywords whenever possible and relevant to the image. Do not include alt tags that are simplistic. If Caleb has a picture of a new batch of kittens on his site, the alt tag should list it as “American Wirehair kittens from Caleb’s Cattery” instead of “kittens”. Be as specific as possible without going overboard.File names are another great place to include keywords. While you cannot include spaces in a file name, you can separate your keywords with hyphens (-) or underscores (_), which will be perceived as spaces by search engines. Going back to the above picture, instead of naming it “image1.jpg” list it as “american_wirehair_kittens.jpg” or “wirehair_kittens.jpg”.

Site Maps

Site maps are documents that can be submitted to search engines that help them learn the structure of your site. You need to set up a site map that has a direct link to every page on your site and place a text link to that site map on the index page of your site. You can also submit this site map to search engines such as Yahoo! and Google.Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a file that you place on your web server that instructs web robots which directories can or cannot be crawled. A robot is a program that searches the web hypertext structure looking for websites to index. They are also known as web wanderers, web crawlers, or spiders. Robots.txt implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which allows the web site administrator to define what parts of the site are off-limits to specific robots. The very basic robots.txt file will simply contain the text:
User-agent: *
Disallow:This signals that any robot can search all of the pages on your website. If there is a page on your site that you do not want robots to index, simply insert a backslash and list it after disallow. For example, if you want to exclude the page “www.calebscattery.com/friends.html” you would place the following in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /friends.html

Once you have created and uploaded your robots.txt file, you can make sure it is valid by going to Robots.txt Checker [http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml].

Keyword Spamming or Stuffing
Keyword spamming, also known as keyword stuffing, is when irrelevant keywords are included on a webpage in the hopes of attracting unsuspecting surfers to the site. This can be done in a variety of ways such as listing phrases at the bottom of the page, including hidden text on the page, or other methods. This is also the most popular of the “black hat SEO” methods, or unethical search engine optimization.Search engines are good at recognizing these tactics. Sites that employ these methods are either ranked lower or, in extreme cases, removed altogether from the search engine. Even if the web robot does not recognize your methods, your competitors might and then report you.

Web Content Development

Each page of your site needs to contain at least 250 words, although 500 words would be better. When web robot visit, they will read your site from top to bottom, left to right. For that reason, try to include your keywords very early on in your text and then a few more times within your text. Do not list the words or repeat words

It is also important to note that web robots “count” any html, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript or other code listed on the site. Learn and use external style sheets to remove it from your page. It is believed that most robots will only look at the first 80-100 lines of code–including any blank lines you may have included. If your text is buried at the bottom, it might not get included when they index your page.

Spending the time to optimize your site for search engines is as important as developing quality content when it comes to finding and keeping visitors. Having the best site in the world does no one any good if it cannot be found. Good SEO should not change the content of your page or alter it significantly. It will only alter its ranking by search engines.

Author:  Omaro Ailoch is a senior software engineer, an entrepreneur and the founder of OC IT Services http://www.ocitservices.com/ a highly skilled California based web development, design, and search engine optimization firm. Omaro has been helping businesses and organizations become more efficient by custom developing solutions to streamline their business processes. He also helps businesses by providing them with professional web presence and helps them achieve high search engine ranking. For more information visit http://www.ocitservices.com/services.php

Once you know how Google measures or evaluates your links then you will be in a better position to conduct a more effective link campaign. Before I explain the current pattern of link evaluation let’s take a stroll down memory lane to see how far things have come.

In The Beginning A link Was The Equivalent Of A Thumbs Up Vote!

The original premise of the internet was to have a bunch of related resources (websites) linking to one another in a natural pattern of progression. Thus someone on a website focusing on gorillas for example would then naturally migrate from that site to one that listed gorilla safaris. Thus quite soon links became (and still are) the standard with which to measure a website’s relevance.

The thinking behind this was that the more popular a website was the greater the likelihood that people would link to it; and since people would only tend to link to sites that offered useful information then it naturally followed a large number of links signified quality…at least that was the idea.

The Birth of Link Spam!

Soon enough wily webmasters realized that they could manipulate the linking concept to their own advantage and make a handsome profit while they were at it. Instead of waiting for people to link to their new sites (a process that could take forever) why not form link directories whereby one, for a certain fee, could amass a large number of links in next to no time at all!

Booming Link market

Getting a new website indexed by Google used to be a task of Herculean proportions. Quite often new websites would languish in obscurity for ages, but those in the know realized that the process could be accelerated. By linking a new website to an established website or webpage with a high page rank (typically page rank (PR) 7 and above) that new website could be indexed by Google within days or a matter of hours depending on the PR value of the webpage on which the link was located. However getting a link from a high PR webpage did not come cheap and it was not uncommon for webmasters to fork over $800 for a one month link on a PR8 webpage!

Debut of The Link Farm

The link market trade flourished for a while, making a mockery of Google’s system of assessing the importance of any given website or webpage. However, a lot of webmasters in a hurry to see their websites scramble up the search engine indexes could not afford the hefty price commanded by a link from a high PR webpage and thus link farms came into being.

Link farms were the poor man’s solution to the hefty priced, high value links typical of high PR webpages. The premise of the link farm was as follows: instead of paying an outrageous sum of money for one link from a high page rank website why not pay a small fee for thousands of low PR links? In essence the link farms abided along the principle of the sum amounting to greater than its individual parts!

The Obsession With The PR Band!

Google thoughtful as ever, made it possible for anyone to determine the relative importance of a website at a glance. This they did by the introduction of the PR band, a small line atop one’s browser fittingly entitled with the word “PageRank.” The pagerank band scaled from a low of zero (PR0) to a high of ten (PR10). The greater the value that Google attributed to a given webpage the higher its designated page rank. In little to no time at that little green slash (PR band) became the highly effective unofficial publicist for the flourishing link market trade.

Webmasters obsessed over the PR band even though in truth the page rank value of a webpage plays little to no part in determining the position any webpage will attain on the SERPs (search engine index results pages). However savvy marketers used the PR obsession of the day to great advantage…using it as a tool to establish credibility and ultimately sell their wares to the less savvy.

However somewhat on par with the abuse of the linking system, the page rank concept soon became equally defunct. In no time at all the Google index was awash with spam sites topping its front page! Something had to give; and it did!

Fast Forward To Today…New Link Evaluation Parameters!

Oh how times have changed!

The search engine algorithms have gotten so much smarter that even blackhat SEO (shady search engine optimization techniques) these days is more trouble than its worth. With the continued abuse and manipulation of the system Google furiously tackled the issue of how to maintain website relevance and quality in its index in an increasingly spammy world.

Since its embracement by the public, the internet has seen its fair share of SEO manipulation from blackhat techniques such as multiple-blog-creation software following the debut of blogs (principle behind this system was that one could create thousands of instant one-way backlinks through the instant generation of thousands of blogs) to whitehat techniques such as the widespread dissemination of articles through article distribution software or services.

Some of these techniques still have value today while others have been effectively nullified such as the mass generation of backlinks through the creation of instant blogs.

How Google Currently Evaluates Links.

It used to be that if the PR band of your website/webpage was gray then this signified that said webpage had been banned. That is no longer the case. All new websites/webpages start off with a grayed out PR band. This band will remain that color depending on a number of factors before it turns white (indicating that the probationary period is over) and eventually transforms to green with establishment of page rank above zero. Link Aging Filter / Link Probation Period

To counter the widespread habit of acquiring links for a short-term period, say a month, so as to get a website indexed or attain page rank quickly, Google now subjects every link to a probationary period in which time the link is identified by Google but not accorded any value. Although such a link is recognized by Google, typically it will not be registered as a link associated with the website to which the link points for a subjective period; for that to happen the link needs to mature, and the rate at which a link matures is dependent on a number of factors.

Factors That Hasten Link Maturity Or Reduce Link Probationary Period

1. Keywords: The keyword incorporated in any given link is going to determine how long that link will be under probation. The more competitive the keyword the longer will be the link’s probationary period. In reality this link probationary system has superseded the Google Sandbox, which was/is Google’s technique of ensuring that super-optimized new sites do not zoom uncontrollably up the SERPs, quickly overshadowing long established websites. With respect to the Google Sandbox concept, if a new website was/is targeting a very competitive market already saturated with millions of sites, then that new website would spend a longer period cooling its heels in the Google Sandbox.

2. Volume of Traffic Across A Link: The more trafficked a link is, the quicker it will attain full SEO-value recognition by Google. This is a relatively new system in play and basically what it means is that a heavily trafficked low PR link will bestow far more SEO influence to the webpage it points to than a little trafficked high page rank link. In essence Google has pretty much nullified the system whereby webmasters could purchase links from high PR webpages in hopes of improving the SEO status of their own site. The application of this system explains why some newer webpages attain PR before older more established webpages on the very same website.

3. Links From Topically Related Sites: A links that comes from a website or webpage that has a comprehensively topical relationship to the destination webpage will have greater value than a link that does not. For example, say your website is about internet marketing, getting a link from another website that focuses on online marketing software would definitely fall under the category of topically related sites.

4. Utilizing Different Keywords In Links: Having the same keyword incorporated within all the links pointing to your site will tend to set off red flag alerts, which means that those links are not going to attain full SEO-value recognition by Google for a longer duration. Another link strategy you should employ is to have your links pointing to some of your inner pages as opposed to all your links pointing to your home page. Having links spread across multiple webpages registers as a more natural link strategy to the Google algorithm and the premise of this algorithm tweak was to nullify the system where webmasters would purchase links from link directories.

Remember anything that appears suspicious to the Googlebot is ultimately going to decrease the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. There’re many more factors that play a role in determining how high and how fast your website will make it up the SERPs (Google of course doesn’t spill all the beans) but if you conduct your link campaign with these few tips in mind you won’t go far wrong.

Author:  Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com

Did you notice the sweeping changes happening on the online business scene? Web 2.0 Marketing is slowly taking control over the traditional means. It’s growing and Web 2.0 Marketing can’t be ignored anymore.

You need to take serious note of this. Your present Internet marketing strategies need to re assessed. Know that most of the big gurus are quietly focusing on Web Marketing 2.0 and they know “something deeply beneficial” to online marketers is lurking behind it and they are at work in perfecting their new Web 2.0 Marketing Plan just to be in the race.

But the intriguing question is, what is Web 2.0 Marketing and Social Media Marketing and how to craft a result oriented Web 2.0 marketing plan.

But with the arrival of Web Marketing 2.0, this controlled process is threatened as the power shifts to the consumer. The interactive ability among the customers to propagate mass opinions can have an impact on the future of a product!

Simply put, Web Marketing 2.0 is all about establishing contact with your prospects through:

• Social Bookmarking. For e.g. websites like del.icio.us, furl
• Blogging with sites like Wordpress, Blogger etcViral marketing where word of mouth and sharing of materials
  ultimately results in more traffic
• Effective use of Social Media sites like flickr, picasa,
• YouTube where Photos & Video are shared
• Social Networking websites like MySpace
• Setting up RSS feeds of your content
• Interactive online forums

Making our websites more interactive with the site visitors is Web Marketing 2.0, where they can add content, air opinions and the like. It’s about a site being simple and plain where visitors can interact and collaborate with others through simple interfaces. It’s about that indefinable addictive ‘Halo’ effect beaming from your site!

Social Media Marketing also facilitates in building YOU-the-Brand! It enables you to make your individual presence felt through Web 2.0 sites which has the in built ability to elevate your business to a higher scale way beyond traditional methods! It’s time to consider these new emerging, customer driven and marketing arenas for your own future!

Let’s explore a few of those waiting to be tapped in the Web 2.0 Marketing plane. They are there and they do exist, once you realize the potential of these Web Marketing 2.0 methods. No matter what online business you have now!

1. Build Your Individual Brand Constantly: YOU have the option of building your personal brand with Web 2.0 Marketing technologies. They empowers you to create a group of exclusive communities, which you can effectively use as a platform for viral marketing. Be the starter to propagate and speed up the process. The best form of publicity ever found is word of mouth publicity!
2. Swiftly Dart Your Messages To The Right Target Group: Fuse content from different information sources by leveraging the expertise of your group or community and distribute new knowledge!
3. Team Up With Others & Release Extra Profit Streams: Social Media Marketing facilitates person-to-person contact that can be used as an extremely potent lead generation weapon and an affiliate building tool for expansion of your business.
4. Fast Way To Build Your Online Credibility: Once you are sold, your companies is sold. And once your company is sold, your product is sold! Web 2.0 Marketing let you do exactly that - becoming the a known expert in your sphere.
5. Show-Up At The Right Places At The Right Time: As an Internet marketer, you know the value of the initial advantage over others. You must be there where your target group assembles before your competitor get a whiff of it. Web Marketing 2.0 empowers you to do exactly that!
6. Attract Search Engine Traffic: These new Web 2.0 sites somehow enjoy high search engine rankings. Setting up back links from these high PR Web 2.0 sites to your site can potentially help you get higher page PR’s. More over, you are also setting your website for search engines to crawl your web site regularly.
7. Take Advantage of Other’s Social Networks: Leverage the time and money of your contacts for mutually beneficial actions. This can put you in the seat of no-cost marketer who does not spend money on advertising.
8. Dip Into The Multimedia Wave: YouTube have started it and many video-sharing sites have sprung up and they are free. Create short videos and upload them! The marketing effect of videos and audios are proved to be ten times more! Use them to your advantage.
9. Be The Great Guy/Girl Around: Interesting, unique and riveting material will always be consumed. Social Media Marketing enables your visitors to bookmark them and share them on/or offline. From then on, viral marketing effect takes on. Interesting ideas, content, videos, audios and your products gets spread all over the Internet giving you residual profits for years.

To sum up, with Web 2.0 Marketing you can think creatively, interact with your target group in real-time and then arrive at on good marketing choices. The new Web Marketing 2.0 scenario offers much more options than the earlier Web 1.0 methods.

In any case, Our responses to the fast changing nature of the Internet decides our future in a Internet based business.

Author:  S. Kumar is the webmaster of http://learnhomebusiness.com, Visit his “71+ Super Web 2.0 Marketing Tools Bonanza” for a personal verification: http://www.learnhomebusiness.com/paid/web2/index.htm

Ever since the beginning of search engines there has been the discussion of key wording. Obviously your web page has to be about something and you want the search engine to reflect that in its results. In the early days of search engines you could put words or phrases anywhere on a page and show up in the results. People who just wanted traffic would get list of the most popular used keywords and just put them on a page. The page could have been about toilets but show up in search results about Hollywood celebrities. In those days finding what you wanted was a daunting task. So the search engines started looking at natural language. Each year they have become more sophisticated about how they look at natural language.

The first thing they did was to stop looking at keyword meta tags. Too often people were putting keywords in that did not match their page. Next they started punishing people for putting strings of key words together, such as baseball baseball baseball. Next they paid attention to whether or not they were used in a sentence. Then they started evaluating the content of the page to see what it was about. Buy this time they were getting really accurate in their search results. But as long as there are search engines people with try to fool them. For the last couple of years search engine optimization people have promoted keyword stuffing. This is where you put the keyword in the text as often as you could fit it in.

A new generation of natural language algorithms has been developed by the major search engines to combat this. Now for the first time we are hearing the use of the term natural language. Now search engines look at the way that a term is used. They compare the use of the term in the context of how it is used. This example is a little extreme but we have all seen pages written like this.

“I bought baseball cards for my friend the baseball card lover. He was so happy to get the baseball cards and he looked at baseball cards. Then he showed these baseball cards to all his friends that had baseball cards.”

This is an example of how the term baseball card was used outside of natural language. In natural language you would not refer to your friend as the baseball card lover. In later uses you would have used the term “them” to describe the baseball cards. The sentence would look like “He was so happy to get them that he took the time to look at each one”.

It is still important to get your keywords or keyword phrases on the page regularly. Care needs to be given on how they are used. It is important to have them in compete sentences and not in an abnormal place in the context of a paragraph. Here are some guidelines you might consider. No one knows the exact algorithms that the search engines use and they all have different ones. But one is to presume that they are based on the natural use of language so the following recommendations are based on basic grammar and the normal use of language.
Here are some examples of natural use of key words.

1. It is natural to have your keywords in your title and description meta tags. These tell what your page is about and your page should be about the same thing as your keywords are.
2. It is natural to have your keywords in your heading tags. Heading tags should be used as chapter headings to different sections of a page.
3. In is natural to have your keywords in the first sentence.
4. It can be natural to have your keywords appear one in most paragraphs.
5. It can be natural to have your keywords appear more than once in a paragraph but not every paragraph. You need to make sure that it fits well and does not sound like it was just stuck in there.

Here are some examples of non-natural uses of keywords.

1. It is not natural to have your key words more than once in your title or description.
2. It is not natural to have your key words to show up more than once in a sentence. There are times that this could be natural but it would probably be better to make it into two sentences.
3. It is not natural for the same sentence to appear in several different paragraphs.
4. In a short paragraph it is not natural for your keywords to show up more than twice. In a paragraph over 6 sentences long this may not hold true. (I publish health related web pages and read hundreds of health articles a month. There are times that I will see a term used 3 times in a long paragraph and almost never in a short one.
5. It is not natural to have keywords used back to back in a sentence. It is not typical to have one sentence end in a word and the next sentence to begin with it.
6. It is not natural to have every sentence begin with the same word or phrase.

Following these guidelines may help you with the search engine positioning but it will definitely make your page more enjoyable for your visitors.

Author:  Rusty Ford Editor http://arthritis-symptom.com/

Site owners spend so much time and money on search engine optimization that they often leave conversion optimization to chance. They’re happy with a 1% - 2% conversion rate, the typical rate for smaller sites. Converting visitors to buyers is part science, part art. No one formula fits all sites but here are 25 tips that will boost conversion rates on most commercial sites.

1. Keep it simple. The simpler it is for visitors to complete a purchase the more purchases (and fewer shopping cart abandonments) you’ll see. Make it simple to find the product and go through the checkout process.
2. Provide complete contact information including a telephone number. Buyers want to know you’re real and they want to know how to reach you in case of a problem.
3. Provide encouragement throughout the checkout process. The best way to do this is to let buyers know what stage of checkout they’ve reached, and to provide them with highlighted signage to let them know what to do next.
4. Use product pictures in shopping carts. This reminds visitors what’s in their carts. It also reinforces, in the visitor’s mind, the reason(s) for the purchase.
5. Link back to the product page. After an item has been placed in the shopping cart, the visitor should be able to click on the item and be directed back to the product page in a new window for example. This makes buying comparisons easier and ensures the visitor has the right item for his/her needs without leaving the shopping cart.
6. Don’t keep shipping costs a secret. Nothing kills a conversion faster than a $19.95 shipping and handling charge on a $10 item. Provide shipping cost information on the first page of the checkout.
7. Is it backordered? The visitor finally reaches the end of the checkout only to discover that the item isn’t in stock. Do you think they’ll come back when the item comes in? They won’t.
8. Provide complete product information including sizes, colors, styles and other product descriptors. This will cut down on product returns because buyers will know what they’re actually purchasing. Avoid hyping products for the same reason
9. Keep terms of service (TOS) simple and unambiguous. What’s your guarantee? What’s your return policy? Eliminate the boilerplate and give them the facts.
10. Provide a menu of payment gateways. Not all buyers want to pay by credit card. Some don’t even have a credit card. Buyers should be given the option to pay by debit card, personal check (snail mail), PayPal and other similar services, bank transfer and, if the want to stop by to pick it up, you’ll even take cash.
11. Never blame the buyer. When a potential buyer clicks on the wrong link, or forgets to enter all data fields, put up a message explaining the problem and how to fix it. The customer is always right and it’s always your fault. Period.
12. Offer gift cards. Some buyers just don’t know what to buy as a gift. A gift card solves the problem.   
13. Use real testimonials. If you’re doing it right, you’ve gotten good feedback from some buyers. Ask permission to use their testimonials. Don’t use fake testimonials signed by Diane E., California. It’s an obvious fake testimonial.
14. Provide a customer service line. Outsource it if it isn’t part of the budget but buyers want to know there’s help in setting it up, whatever “it” is.
15. Avoid distracting links. If your home page is crammed with PPC ads and links to other sites, it’s distracting and you’ll see a lot more bounces (visitors who never get past the home page).
16. Offer incentives. Free shipping encourages buyers. So do upgrades, i.e. “Spend at least $50 and receive 10% off your entire purchase.” Some buyers will do the math and figure out they’re getting something for half price.
17. Welcome repeat visitors by name. Your customer data base is filled with solid gold information including names, purchase amounts, items purchased and so on. First, welcome a return buyer by name. Then, offer suggestions for purchase based on individual buying histories. (See Amazon.com for examples of using data base information to boost conversion ratios.)
18. Provide a currency converter. Not all buyers will be using your country’s currency. Make it easy to convert from euros to drachmas to dollars.
19. Offer a free newsletter. Your regular buyers will appreciate it when they’re notified ahead of time of upcoming specials, new product launches and other site related information.
20. Add a forum. This is a great way for buyers to share information, make recommendations and complain. It’s also a great way for you to handle complaints quickly, with the resolution posted right there on the complaint thread.
21. Provide informational content on your site. This establishes your credentials and credibility as an authority, whether you’re selling kayaks or bake ware.
22. Learn from your competitors. Visit the sites of more-established competitors to see what they’re doing to convert. How is the homepage designed? Navigation? Checkout? You can’t copyright an idea so you might as well “borrow” from the best.
23. Improve site stickiness. In other words, give buyers a reason to return. Some suggestions? The Sale of the Day, Tip of the Day, Your Horoscope, This Day in History, etc. This keeps your site green and visitors returning.
24. Let buyers post product reviews. Nothing sells better than a positive review from another buyer. Of course, the converse is true, too. Nothing will kill a sale faster than a bad review. And if a product receives lots of bad reviews, drop it from your product line.
25. Target your site’s skin to your demographic. If you’re selling collectible knives, your site should have a certain “look” and that look doesn’t include pastels and prissy type. Big, bold and manly – that’s the way to go. On the other hand, if you’re selling needlepoint patterns, a nice pastel background with little flowers works perfectly.

Search engine optimization is designed to attract search engine spiders. It’s also intended to ensure that your site is accurately and completely optimized. But, once traffic arrives on site, conversion optimization takes over.

Keep it simple. Keep it easy. Keep it honest. Not only will you see a boost in conversion ratio, you’ll also see a nice pop in return buyers. And they’re the best buyers any web site owner could ask for.

Author:  Frederick Townes is the owner of W3 EDGE, a Boston-based web design company. W3 EDGE focuses on creating a high converting rate for your business. While getting your website found through high rankings is important, having a website that converts is the key to your success online. W3 EDGE undertands that and focuses their energy on presenting your message in a way that the search engines, AND THE VISITORS will enjoy.

Famous is as famous does and the famous get known through publicity. Yes, that’s right, fame doesn’t discover you, you create it through strategic campaigning. What’s more, the techniques for increasing your exposure isn’t as difficult to attain as you might think. A great publicity campaign starts with courage, then planning, and lastly, it succeeds through persistence. If your not sure why you should seek fame, consider fortune because the two go hand in hand.

Fame will bring your business into the forefront of your target audience faster than any advertising campaign can hope to do. It solidifies you as an expert and creates a deep, abiding confidence in the consumer. It makes you a shining star with infinite possibilities. So what’s are the steps you ask? Well paste a gold star to your forehead and let’s get started.

1. Press Releases: Increase awareness through a press release. Yes, I know, press releases have become quite the popular little tool around cyberspace with releases being blasted hither and there, but is it working? Probably not. Blasting your press release will bring blasted little results. Instead, thoughtfully put together a very dynamic one page press release and target publications that would be most interested in you and your business. Don’t drone out the details, make that press release sing your praises. Then send it to a real live editor and follow up with a phone call. In other words, let the press release be the invitation to your follow up phone call. Begin making connections with the media. Be polite, be excited, and be patient.

2. Create A Press Kit: A Press kit is basically an exaggerated press release turned into a package. It’s more complex, tells more about you and your company, and is all pulled together into a nice neat folder. Of all the questions I receive, first is, what is a press kit? Simply, it is a folder of information about you or your business. It should contain:

    A. An Introduction Letter
    B. One or Two Press Releases
    C. A Fact Sheet (This contains the facts about you or your business.)
    D. Bio Sheet (Which is a biography of you and your accomplishments.)
    E. Copies of Published Articles
    F. Company Literature
    G. A Business Card

Send your press kit when an editor, publisher, or producer wants to know more about you.

3. Newsletters Offline. Don’t forget that a whole world exists offline. Locate newsletters or smaller print publications offline and submit articles. This can be a very dynamic way to increase your exposure as well as add to your press kit. You can locate newsletters in your subject area by visiting the local university library reference section. Ask for a directory of trade newsletters and do your research. Once you have been published, it’s easier to step up to the larger publications. Fame starts small and then snowballs onto itself.

4. Speak Up! Yep, that’s right. Start giving speeches on your area of expertise. Start locally at civic clubs and local educational programs. Then find the local talk radio shows and make your case to the producer. It’s surprising how many talk radio shows are actively looking for new speakers. Once you have achieved Talk Radio, the opportunities will start coming to you.

5. Publicity Pitches: Put together several dynamic article ideas. Just the ideas, not the actual article. This is called a Publicity Pitch. Take those ideas and then pitch them to editors of targeted publications. This can work very well as it saves Editors time and puts the outline right into their hands. As a past Editor I know how well this works. Editor’s love ideas, especially ideas that are completely outlined and correct for their readership. This means don’t send pet article ideas to cooking magazines. Send pet articles ideas to pet publications. Seems like a no brainer, huh? But you’d be amazed at what editors see that don’t apply to their own publication.

Fame comes from planning and persistence. It has it’s rejections, but if you can learn not to take it personally, it will eventually work. Remember, once you start, keep going. Once you stop, you have to start all over.

Author:  Anne Marie Baugh is a noted publicist for cyber-stars such as Rick Beneteau, John Harricharan, Marty Lund, Rhoberta Shaler and more. She also owns and operates Write-Promotion an online business that works hands-on with businesses looking for promotional avenues and avenues to cyber-success! Please visit today at: http://www.write-promotion.com or write to: write@write-promotion.com We look forward to hearing from you!

Social Media Optimization (SMO) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are the latest buzz words amongst webmasters and marketers.  Everyone’s competing for that top spot on the search engine results page, but with so many racing to overtake the one in front of them, website owners are becoming desperate and are ‘clutching at straws’ to try to beat their competitors.

We have barely digested the term SEO and already we’re hearing new jargon such as SMO (Social Media Optimization) creeping in.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is simply a preview of things to come on the web. It’s already here and pioneering companies have already grasped the concept and are ensuring that their internet marketing strategy extends beyond traditional e-Marketing and into the area of Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Advertising and Social Media Optimization.

Pioneering companies will win: Sadly, few South African companies realize the significance of optimizing their websites for top search engine rankings and social popularity.  There are many extraordinary looking websites being launched onto the Internet daily, yet their splashy entry pages and dazzling creative’s seldom does the company any good. These websites occupy space on the web; however they are by no means optimized to attract the correct target audiences. Few web designers are taught the skill of optimizing the websites that they design for search engine rankings.  From the start of the web development project, companies should commission experienced search engine marketers or analysts to be involved in preparing the website brief for the developer by defining the essential elements that should be incorporated, if the website is to be positioned anywhere of significance on search engine results pages.

There are more than a hundred varying criteria that search engines include as part of their ranking algorithm. Website owners, web designers and marketers should take confidence in the fact that it is simply not good enough to publish a fancy looking website onto the Internet and expect it to start attracting and converting customers in the hope of producing income from its online presence.  It takes skill and careful planning to create a website that will be recognized by search engines as relevant enough to rank in the top ten results, and then to take this one step further by ensuring that the user experience is one that will convert a researcher into a customer.  And remember the modern customer is one that is in control.

Today’s consumer is in control: The new consumer is actively participating in social networks, they are Bookmarking websites on social search engines and they are blogging about you. Ensure that your website is optimized to generate publicity through social media, online communities and social networks.  There are websites that consist of user generated ranking systems.  Make sure that your website can be bookmarked, linked to and tagged easily enough by the user.  Create a company blog or user community within your own website.  If you create something that allows your user to engage with you, and it is compelling enough for them to spread the word and to bookmark you then you are half way there.

You can’t fake it until you make it: Getting ranked highly on search engine results is not a quick fix. It is a process that requires a great deal of planning, editing and monitoring in order to first climb into the top ranking positions and then to try to remain there.  With the algorithms changing at will, there is no one technique ‘cast in stone’ that will guarantee top rankings. If you want to reap the rewards, you need to invest time and effort into properly researching your competitor’s position, and then carefully plan a strategy that will hopefully outrank them, while at the same time attracting the long tail. Beware of companies promising to have websites ranked in the top ten results pages within weeks.

Although some websites do rank much faster than others, those companies practicing spamming techniques may get websites ranking in a matter of weeks but, in return they can expect to be dropped from the rankings – or even worse, be blacklisted by the search engines within as little as six weeks.

Companies should be careful to approach search engine Optimization from an ethical – spam free – perspective if they want to thrive in this very competitive environment.

Until such time that a website ranks highly, there certainly is a place for paid advertising (pay-per-click).

Author:  Gillian Meier: Blue Magnet Web Intellect is an Internet Marketing Training and Consulting company, specializing in Search Engine Optimization, Online Copywriting, PPC Campaign management, Web Design and Project management and Internet Marketing Strategies.  Visit http://www.bluemagnet.co.za