Article Categories

• Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogs & Podcasts
• Branding
• Business
• Cloud Technology
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Google
• Keywords
• LinkedIn
• Linking Strategies
• List Building
• Local Search
• Marketing
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile Applications
• Page Rank
• Pay Per Click
• RSS
• Sales Copy
• SE Optimization
• SE Positioning
• SE Submission
• SE Tactics
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking
• SPAM
• SPN Featured Articles
• Technology
• Video Marketing
• Virtual Office/Telecommuting
• Web 2.0
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Webmasters
• Website Promotion
• Website Traffic
• WordPress
• Writing

SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

Achieve More Leads, Clients & Greater Profits Without Spending a dollar

By Lei Wang in Featured

Imagine advertising a full page advert in a magazine which will cost in excess of $5,000, not to mention the cost that may come from hiring a professional marketer to compile a reasonable advert to get you 5 seconds of the readers’ attention.

You are much better off to promote through “education” than putting together a banner or an advert and hoping someone will take notice. You do not need to be a brilliant writer or rocket scientist to get published. Just be genuine, and offer useful and interesting content to your reader. Most importantly don’t sound like an advertisement; be helpful, practical, and your effort will eventually pay off.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

If you would like to write for a specific magazine, before submitting an article to be considered, take time to do the research first and get to know the publication. If you take the hit and miss approach, you will be spending a lot of time and see no real result. Go to the newsagency, grab hold of the publication, read through it and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Frequency:

Is the target a bi-monthly, monthly or a quarterly publication? If you submit something now and gets accepted, it will not appear in the next issue. Magazines often work 3 to 6 months in advance, so get prepared in advance.

2. Topic/theme:

Flip through the magazine and see what topics they cover. If they already covered staff retention, it’s very unlikely they will consider the same topic again for a while. Also look into their archive and see what they covered in the past. If you can take a new approach to an old topic you’ll still have a good chance.

3. Target audience:

The best way to determine their target audience is by looking at the advertisement, you may not always trust what they say in an ad, but you can be certain they have done their homework in researching the demographics.

4. Length of an article:

Editors prefer an article between 600 – 850 words. Only for a feature article, they will consider something between 1000 to 1500 words.

5. Tone/style:

Some publication prefer a formal approach in the third person, other publication may prefer a more conversational style. For journals, it is always very formal and academic. For magazines, they prefer to use case studies to illustrate a point.

After doing all the home work and before sending your article to be considered, pay 100% attention to the title and the first paragraph. If the first paragraph is not compelling enough, you can certainly expect that the editor is not going to look further.

Author:  Click here to access our newly updated report: “How to build your brand and generate more profit with zero advertising budget” by Australia’s leading article marketing expert Lei Wang. Discover the single most important factor behind long term brand success, and the one fatal mistake consultants make in getting free editorial coverage. Plus the proven method to convert leads into sales. http://submit.novusdecor.com.au/phantomwriters_1.html

Google Adwords Top Tips – Part 4

By Dave McEvoy in Featured

Welcome to part 4 in this 5 part series of top google adwords tips.

Google AdWords is one of the best advertising tools on the Internet, but only if you know how to implement Adwords properly to achieve maximum potential. So what exactly should you be doing to ensure that you get the best possible results from Adwords? We have put together the following tips to help you get those all important click throughs and conversion rates.

1. Avoid ‘Casual Clickers’

Because clicks equal costs, it’s important to make them count. To that end, it’s just as important to discourage ‘casual traffic’ as it is to encourage proper customers. To do this, include text that stops people from clicking your ad at random, while simultaneously encouraging potential customers.

For example if you include a price in your ad, lookieloos may think it is too expensive for them in the first place and therefore not bother clicking the ad at all. Serious customers, on the other hand, are more likely to click on an ad with all the relevant info displayed.

2. Be cautious of content-based Ads (The Content Network)

Some people find that the quality of traffic that comes directly from a Google search, as apposed to from content-based ads, is far more likely to converting into a sale. This is something you want to keep an eye on for yourself, particularly in the early stages of your AdWords campaign. Our advice would be to NOT use the Content Network initially unless you know what you are doing.

3. Drop the WWW

That’s right, make sure you drop the WWW at the start of your display URL. This gives you more room for those all-important trigger words and keywords.
Example:
www.storefront.com/trial.asp – BAD
StoreFront.com/FreeTrial – GOOD

4. Understand the Google broad match

What’s broad matching? From the horse’s mouth: ‘If you include general keyword or keyword phrases – such as tennis shoes – in your keyword list, your ads will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms.’

Google will often show your ads when people search for similar or related topics to the keyword in question using synonyms or much more general terms. It will also show your ad on totally irrelevant searches. You will still get clicks on these, but not very many.

A very low CTR is usually an indicator that your ads are being shown for unrelated searches to people that aren’t interested. It may still be a good keyword to bid for, but remember: bid appropriately!

5. Focus on your best keywords first

This is especially true when you have a small or limited budget. Often, it can mean dropping or reducing the general terms like ‘Stereos’ or ‘Sound Systems’ in favour of specific terms relevant to your site – these more specific terms often convert into sales better. For example, use ‘Sony XC 2000′ as opposed to the broader terms.

6. Optimise your landing page

People will leave instantly if they don’t perceive your site offers what they want ‘at a glance’. Furthermore, there are a myriad of techniques that can be followed to maximise your chances of a conversion by getting your landing page to act more like your Number 1 sales person. The landing page should effectively: sell your product, explain the benefits and make things clear in order to easily complete that conversion.
Keep checking back because we are putting together some easy to follow quick tips for landing pages.

7. Include keywords in your Ad Text

Include your keywords in your ad text (especially the title) to show users that your ad relates to their search. If your ad shows when a user searches on a keyword in your Ad Group, the keyword will appear in bold in your ad text. In addition, remember that users tend to search for products and services, so avoid using your company name in the ad title unless your goal is brand/company name recognition. To do this you need to split your keywords around tight themes and show a relevant ad for your top keywords.

8. Create simple, enticing Ads

What makes your product or service stand out from your competitors? Highlight these key differences in your ad, and be sure to describe any unique features or promotions you offer.

9. Use a strong call-to-action

Your ad should convey a call-to-action along with the benefits of your product or service. A call-to-action encourages users to click on your ad and ensures they understand exactly what you expect them to do when they reach your landing page. Some call-to-action phrases are: Buy, Sell, Order, Browse, Sign up and Get a Quote.

10. Make your website a fully-optimised conversion machine

Ultimately, your website determines how well your ads convert. Be sure it is designed to let users complete the action you want them to take.

Typical internet users decide quickly whether to stay on a website or move on to another. When users click on your ad, they should arrive on a landing page clearly displaying the information or product offered in your ad. If users do not immediately find what prompted them to click on your ad, they are more likely to leave your site without converting.

Check out the final tips for optimising Google Adwords in Google Adwords Top Tips Part 5

Author:  Dave McEvoy is an Adwords expert with years of experience in ppc management. For more information please come and visit our site.

Seven Guidelines for Website Usability

By Tony D. Baker in Featured

Usability, as you hopefully know, is all about making sure that the people who come to your website can find the information or product they want, and ensuring they can find it quickly, efficiently, and with minimal hair-tearing.

Unfortunately, some people just don’t know the guidelines, or just don’t follow them. This can lead to a lot of frustration on the part of the user, and if users are frustrated, then chances are good they won’t be back to your site. Whether you’re building a new site or redesigning an old one, here are a few usability tips you should be keeping in mind.

Website usability tip #1: Consistency

Consistency is one of the most important aspects of usability. The page style, text style, colors and navigation should be consistent throughout your entire site. Not only does this help with usability, but it will also help with building your brand online. By using those visual cues throughout your site, people will know exactly where to look for the links they need, and they’ll always know for sure that they’re still in your site.

Website usability tip #2: Navigation

According to Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, a good navigation system should answer three questions for your users:

Where am I?
Where have I been?
Where can I go?

Keep your navigation consistent throughout your site, and this is one case where it’s okay to be redundant. Provide multiple ways for your users to find what they’re looking for, such as text links, graphics links, a clearly marked search function and a site map, just to name a few. Also, cookie crumbs (home > products > Product Name > features) are a good way to let visitors know where they are on your site and how they got there, so it’s easy for them to go back if they need to.

For more on useability, check out this post from Midwest Business Tips:
http://smbtips.blogspot.com/2007/08/website-usability.html

Website usability tip #3: Content

Yes, pretty pages are a plus, but if there’s no meaty content to the pages, there’s no reason for users to come back. Don’t dump big blocks of text on your site. Break it up into smaller paragraphs, and organize your content with headings and subheadings so that people who are skimming the site can quickly find what they’re looking for. Giant text blocks only serve to give people headaches.

Either stick with a light background and dark lettering, or a dark background with light lettering. Contrast is the key here. Use a sans serif font (like Arial) for the regular copy, and don’t make it too small. Don’t make your information difficult to read, unless you really want to drive people away from your site.

And proofread, proofread, proofread. Nothing will damage your credibility quicker than blatant grammar and spelling mistakes.

Website usability tip #4: Images

Yes, you’ve got that gorgeous flowery picture that you just HAVE to have on the background of every page. But did you ever stop to consider how distracting it could be, or how the color changes in the picture could obscure the text on top of it? Unless you really know what you’re doing, steer clear of background images.

For all images, make sure that you have appropriate ALT and TITLE attributes. This is the text that shows up in an image box before the image loads, or appears when you mouse over the image. Not only will this increase usability, especially for people using text browsers or site readers, but it will also increase your keywords, which makes search engine spiders happy.

Website usability tip #5: Custom error page 

It happens to the best of us. Pages get removed from sites. Links get changed. Sections get taken down and updated. People enter file names wrong. No matter the reason, it’s entirely likely that somebody visiting your site will click on a broken link. If you have a custom 404 error page, then you have a chance to let your users know what happened, redirect them to a page that might have what they were looking for, or just take them back to your home page.

Plus, that way you can keep your colors and branding consistent, even on the error page. It’s much more professional than having your site host’s 404 page show up when somebody clicks a broken link.

Website usability tip #6: Contact and feedback

You should have a clearly marked contact page, and there should be more on there than just a form “contact us” box. Let your users know who you are, where you’re located, and give them options other than just email for getting in touch with you. If you do have a form, clearly note what information you require and make sure you don’t require information, like ZIP codes, that international users won’t necessarily have.

Website usability tip #7: Testing

Not everybody using your site will be from North America, have a monitor with 1280 x 800 resolution, and be surfing via Internet Explorer. You’ll have international users, users with older, fullscreen monitors, users on dial-up, users on Macs, users on PCs with Firefox or other browers, blind users with site readers, you name it. That’s always something to keep in mind and a big reason why you need to test. There has to be usability across all platforms, not just the one you use to build your site.

Get real people to test your site so that you can get an idea of how users will experience it, and you can fix any problems before it goes live. Usability testing is the only way to make sure that your site fits both yours and your users’ needs. That way, you can find out what works and what doesn’t, and can adjust your site so that everybody has an enjoyable, pleasant experience browsing your site.

For a few more tips on optimizing your site, check out this post: (http://www.xeal.com/blog/index.php/2007/08/15/5_ways_to_optimize_your_website_for_univ) Five Ways to Optimize Your Website for Universal Search.

Website usability is a vast, important topic, and it’s nigh impossible to cover all the applicable points in just one article. However, one of the most important things to remember about these guidelines is that they are just that: guidelines. You won’t get in trouble with the Internet Higher Authorities if you don’t slavishly adhere to them. Just keep your users in mind with your site design. The easier it is for them, the better it will be for you.

Author:  President and founder of Xeal Inc., Tony D. Baker is Oklahoma’s leading Internet marketing expert with more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience. You can catch Tony on the Xeal Radio Show on Sunday nights on 1170 KFAQ Tulsa. Sign up for a free 25-point website evaluation and pick up crucial tips at Xeal’s free Thursday webinar at http://www.xeal.com/webinar

Google vs Webmasters and Google is Losing

By Paul Easton in Featured

The battle for top ranking the major search engines, is one that’s ongoing on a daily basis with a top Google ranking being the number one target.

There are whole business’ models build out of getting a top ranking in Google and to a smaller extent, the other major search engines.

You could say Google has unknowingly created billions in business turnover, from others trying to outwit them.

In the battle of getting rankings which has turned to the power of links, has launched full services around this concept. It’s not new just more obvious now especially due to the explosion of blogging.

Some of theses services buy and sell text links. In the same way Ebay does, it’s a matter of bringing together buyers and sellers. Now link pricing has been set in several ways: a single purchase cost using services like payperpost.com and reviewme.com blog post services, or a pay per month option which is used by other services such as text link brokers and many other providers.

Now most of the pricing is based on Page Rank of the pages the links are on. Recently Google updated its page rank and many sites took a major nosedive. Now we are talking about the dropping of a PR 10 down to a PR 6 which happened to a site called statcounter.com.

Statcounter.com is a free web based statistics program which allows you get good statistics on traffic for your website.

The best feature is being able to hide any display of its counter on your page. I recently found out that even if the counter display is hidden- it still creates focused text links back to its home page (that’s another whole story)

Now some quick research into statcounter.com after the PR drop- they still rank for over 500 different competitive 2 and 3 word keywords. So the PR drop would have no effect on traffic at all. They do sell text links and this has been suggested as a reason for the drop in page rank (to discourage this action)

The dropping of PR is most likely just an adjustment of its numbers- it’s happened before and will probably happen again- and quote a well known SEO company:

“My guess is that the toolbar PR penalty is just that — a lowering of visible PR in order to make a statement”

If sites keep rising in PR then it has no value. So it’s like a re-valuing of a dollar under inflation.

If you are not selling text links, it won’t really affect you. This fits together with Googles recent statements about the selling of text links as they do not approve if they are purchased for the sole purpose of influencing search results (which most if not all are).

Google has come out and said that no follow tags should be placed on these links and also asked for webmasters to report sites that are selling links. This tells me that they are getting desperate to stop “the purchase links for rank” sites.

So is buying links a good thing or not?. Well Google is against it, however if it’s done correctly and not abused like some have, it’s a win-win for blog owners and business owners.

Like most SEO it should not be the only method of getting links, however it could be used well by those with a reasonable budget and long term business plan. I don’t pass judgment on whether I agree or disagree or whether it is the right thing to do or not.  The type of links and how to buy is a whole other article.

Author:  Paul Easton is a self confessed online marketing nut- who helps from an “in the trenches, doing it” point of view. Search engines and linking for long term traffic a speciality. Working out of New Zealand, he focuses on Niche US markets. Get a Plan for free web Traffic here: http://www.SEOTrainingLive.com/

Google Adwords Top Tips – Part 3

By Dave McEvoy in Featured

Welcome to part 3 of this 5 part series on Google Adwords.Google AdWords is one of the best advertising tools on the Internet, but only if you know how to implement Adwords properly to achieve maximum potential. So here are the next ten tips to ensure that you get the best possible results from using Google Adwords.

1. Keep a close eye on your competitors

There shouldn’t be any need for this if you are running a highly organised AdWords account that is using statistics, facts and tracking rather than guessing! If you are doing all of this it is you they need to be worried about.

2. Do not duplicate your keywords in other Ad Groups

Google only shows one keyword per advertiser so there is absolutely no need to go and put the same keyword across all your ad groups.

3. Keep keywords relevant to your site to maximise profits

You can waste a lot of money by putting up keywords that are not particularly relevant to your site in the hope that it might get you a sale. For example, if someone is looking for the Toronto Blue Jays and your ad pops up saying ‘Toronto Blue Jays right here’ and your site is selling baseball equipment, it’s is as pointless as piles. It’s more than likely they’ll click off your site to try and find out whatever it was about the Blue Jays they were trying to find. Be relevant and the click throughs you receive will be more fruitful.

4. Take advantage of keyword matching options

With some keywords, you will get more ad impressions. With others, you will get fewer impressions, but potentially more clicks. By strategically using keyword matching options, you can reach the most appropriate prospects, potentially reduce your actual CPC or CPM, and increase your ROI. For example, use negative keywords to reduce irrelevant ad impressions and increase your quality score.

5. Don’t get emotionally attached to keywords

Judge every keyword on its conversions. If your boss says “we need to be number 1 for widgets” show him the data on the cost and return. Coming further down will make sure you are shown more regularly throughout the day for less; wider exposure at a cheaper price.

6. Download AdWords Editor to make mass changes quickly and easily

It really is as simple as that, visit: http://www.google.com/adwordseditor/ if you are following this guide then AdWords Editor is essential. Using it will change your life!

7. Install Google Analytics

It’s free and it can tell you a great deal about your site. This is particularly useful when it comes to finding out what people are doing when they get to your landing page(s).

8. Use capital letters wisely

Capitalize the first letter of each word of your ad. Also try to include words that people will love in your ad, or even in the URL, whenever possible. Try to use words like: Free, Special, Strong and Quality, and aim to capitalise them every time. I call these trigger words because they make people more likely to click your ad.

9. Use numbers in your Ad

An easy trick. Numbers like 10% off or from $19.99 catch the eye.

10. Use the dynamic keyword feature

This handy feature will allow you to get your keywords into the ad title. This has the great effect of making people more likely to click your ads! However, be sure to add some alternative text in case the search term exceeds the maximum headline length. Google allow for ads, or the ad will be shown without a heading. Not good! Instructions for use of this feature can be found by typing ‘keyword insertion’ into Google.

Watch out for more Google Adwords Top Tips Part 4

Author:  Dave McEvoy is an Adwords expert with years of experience in ppc management. For more information please come and visit our site.

Five Reasons Why Blogging Is The New Internet Marketing Tool

By Matt W in Featured

Blogging is a concept which started in the late 90s. It used to be a way to comment upon an existing webpage, an opportunity for visitors and readers to react or express their opinion on the said page. What started as a single-sentence commentary has evolved into pages of personal take on just about anything and everything under the sun. As it continues to move forward, online advertising has tapped into the blog’s potential. Here are 5 reasons why you should use blogging as an Internet marketing tool.

1. Blogging is simple.
The simplest way to get your piece on the net is through blogging. No skills are necessary… an average adult can read and type, or at least click a mouse. It’s like having a virtual piece of paper and you just write your ideas, experiences, new products, and hope that the truth behind your articles comes out and thus entices your reader to try your product. If you have a PC and an Internet connection (who doesn’t?) then you can blog and advertise.

2. Blogging is authentic.
In this day and age where advertising saturates our lives, we question the credibility of promoters’ claims. However, in blogs, real people share their real-life experiences, unscathed by paid advertising. Reading blogs about first-hand product use is like talking to people about their first-hand experience. You definitely want to buy a tried and tested product.

3. Blogging is free.
Because blogging is yet to be proven as a mainstream online advertising media, most sites see it as something to augment current marketing tools and thus offer it for free. Any opportunity for free webtime is definitely a bonus especially to businesses that are starting up. Needless to say, paid blog pages can generate more income for your seriously growing business.

4. Blogging builds credibility.
As you get more and more into writing your experiences on a particular product or industry, your readers come to realize that they can depend on your posts for their own information needs. As such, you become an expert on it; as a consequence, more readers visit your site and more bloggers link to your blogs. As companies and professional organizations notice the growth of your readership base, they may soon get in touch with you for advertising on your blog page, or make you an affiliate, which pays for every referral generated from your blog site.

5. Blogging builds your market.
Unless you are a Hollywood star, chances are, only your Mom reads your posts. Mom has a lot of friends, so she lets her friends know how interesting your blog site is. But you need not depend on Mom to increase your readership base. Look into the following ways to build your market through blogging:

-By using your e-mail. Today, blogging is overcoming e-mail popularity in quickly and effectively reaching and expanding a market. In this age of speed and quick access, logging in and downloading e-mail is simply taking longer than clicking into a blog site. Let them explore your site by using a short e-mail message as a teaser to your blog site. If your e-mail is on an entirely different subject, use your e-mail signature to give a link to the site.

-By using subscription. An easy way to get your readers e-mail is to give them an opportunity to subscribe to your blogsite. Keep some exclusive information for your subscribers to entice readers to subscribe and give their e-mail address. Just be responsible in using their e-mail address, as the last thing you want is a comment on your blog that you are a spammer.

-By understanding your readers. Conduct a simple survey for your readers to understand their profile and advertising preferences. Ask consumers to give you feedback on a post, an ad link, or a trial that you shared. In this way, it is like interviewing your readers without the commitment and intrusion of a face-to-face interview.

-By joining a blog network –A network of blogs maybe a collection of blog sites that share the same industry, interest, readership base, payment mode, etc. Consumers find credibility and convenience in clicking one link to several real bloggers about a single subject. Clearly, more bloggers are better than one.

-By using RSS. RSS is the fastest growing technology on the Internet today. As such, having RSS feeds to your blog is definitely another means of generating awareness for your readership base. Having a variety of feeds can add interest to your blog site.

Give your business a boost by effectively using blogging as an Internet marketing tool.

Author:  Article by Matt W http://www.tried-tested-proven.com and http://www.onestopbuyandsell.com

Article Services and Search Engine SEO

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

Article services and search engine SEO can be used together to provide a powerful means of attracting a high volume of traffic to your website – if you know how to do it.

It is not possible to provide a course in SEO or in article marketing or writing in an article such as this, but you can get the rudiments from appropriate web pages on the internet that are interested in showing you how. Initially, however, here are a few tips on how to make a start in combining these two powerful facets of internet marketing to your advantage. To make it work you have to get up and do it, and not expect it to come to you.

Achieve Nothing by Doing Nothing

My father used to say to me that nothing will ever be achieved by doing nothing but thinking about it. He said that when he was fighting on the destroyers in the Russian convoys protecting the merchant ships attempting to maintain supplies to the Russians in Archangel in 1942 it would have been easier to do nothing, but a job had to be done and they all did it by knuckling down and getting on with it, no matter what it cost.

Compared to that I find spending a few hours on a website simple and trouble free, and I have never forgotten the lesson he taught me. I work the hours I need to complete a task: the clock does not exist. The failures in internet marketing are those that give up too early. If you haven’t finished your day’s work by midnight, then stay up till you have finished – whether it is 2 am or later. OK, you might have the day job in the morning but nobody said it was easy, unless you believed the guys who offered you to get rich quick.

My dad didn’t help supply the Russians by bunking down at midnight. You won’t make a success of your new internet business by doing the same. That’s the reality of it. However, if you do knuckle down, and if you do apply the effort, then you will succeed since all it takes is the hard work then the rest will happen if you do as you are advised. Do what the winners do and you will join them.

Get Writing: Or Get Me Writing

If you can write then start writing. Write at least two articles a week on the subject of your website. More if possible. If you can write 50 then do that, but you will get success with just two. I have proved that to myself. If you can’t write, get a ghost writer. If you can’t afford a ghost writer contact me and I will help you if I have the spare time of the 24 hours I have each day.

You must also have more than one website, so get yourself two at least. The more the better, but two will do to start with. If you can’t afford two web hosts, then get one that allows unlimited subdomains and you can have as many independent websites as you want. eMail me for info on parked subdomains if you don’t know how to use them.

Optimize each page on each website as well as you can, and link one to the other. The topics or niches should be complementary, so that one is relevant to the other. Optimize the links between the pages on each of your sites to maximize your internal Google PageRank, and design the sites logically. If you use classic search engine SEO techniques, and tie them up with good internal and external linking strategies, you should soon start to see your traffic steadily increasing.

Build Up Your Website

There are several offsite actions you can take to improve the chances of your web pages appearing high in the Google listings for the keywords each page is optimized on. You should have at least 10 pages on each site, preferably more. It is easy to keep adding pages if you design one page to use as a template for the others, and add all the links to it that you want to have on every page.

Then all you need do to add a page is to change the article content, page heading, page title and graphics Alt text. The change the keywords, description and title meta tags and you are all set. You can do it in 10 minutes. Imagine: a new web page every 10 minutes!

Now write articles on the topic of each new page on your site and submit them to as many article directories as you can. You will get an initial page rank rush, or at least a rush of clicks to your site, until Google starts to take note of all the duplication of your article on multiple web pages (article directories). It will then begin to penalize these in the Google listings but not, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, not from the directories because Google cannot decide what content article directories hold. Your articles will remain on each directory until it decides to remove it – that could be years hence.

Do the Hard Work and Reap the Benefits

These are the basics of how to use article services and search engine SEO. The hard work is the writing and generating of the websites and web pages. However, if you are like my dad, and get on with the job even though your hands are frozen solid to the breach block of a five inch gun of a destroyer in the Arctic Ocean at 3 am on a cold February morning, then you will succeed. Work will get you there, not paying hundreds of dollars for software that does it all for you – it never does. Get the right guy to point you and you should be OK.

Author:  For more information on how to use articles and search engine SEO to make it in your online business venture, check out Pete’s websites SEO and Article Marketing and Article Services.

Google Adwords Top Tips – Part 2

By Dave McEvoy in Featured

Welcome to part 2 of this 5 part series on Google Adwords.Google AdWords is one of the best advertising tools on the Internet, but only if you know how to implement Adwords properly to achieve maximum potential. So here are the next ten tips to ensure that you get the best possible results from using Google Adwords.

1. Organise your campaigns by topic

You don’t want to have your health supplements in with your running shoes now do you? Each campaign should be for a unique topic. If you sell one type of product then keep to one campaign unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. It will be easier to manage this way.

2. Target the right languages and locations

I see this mistake over and over again. You run an ad that is selling blue widgets and you want to target the ad to the folks in Kentucky, then what happens? Because you have your settings wrong, Mr Wong goes onto Google China and sees your ad for Blue widgets.

You have targeted the wrong country, and the wrong language!

3. Make sure your Ad Groups are highly specific

As with your campaigns, each and every ad group should be aimed at a unique product or service. Example: Campaign 1 – Omega 3 Supplements Ad Groups – FISH OIL – all keywords relating to fish oil EPA – all keywords relating to EPA (the most important ingredient of fish oil) OMEGA 3 – All keywords relating to Omega-3 MIXED – Mixed terms relating to all above If you are very serious about maximising your profits and really giving AdWords good shot, you will need to do this for every product or service that you are advertising. Keep it organised, clean and laser targeted!

4. Optimise all of your Ad including your URL

Let’s say for example you were selling golf clubs. Think about which URL looks better: www.sportsshop.com/asp.369£0-/lop0-9823309877654/4/a/098665 or SportsShop.com/GolfClubs

You also need to remember that the ad copy is what is going to make people click through, so make sure it is keyword rich and appealing In a display URL on AdWords, the domain name (www.sportsshop.com) must exist, but the extension (/golfclubs) does not need to exist, so use it as another opportunity to state your keywords and tell your users that you have a whole section on this topic.

5. Avoid your home page as your landing page

The landing page is the page that the person who clicked on your ad will see when they come through to your site. Don’t use your homepage as your landing page unless it deals only with selling the product you’re advertising. For instance, if you’re selling posters, have a landing page for ‘flower’ posters and a landing page for ‘car’. You can even go one better and have a landing page for each poster – so you’ll have a page for ‘sunflower posters’ and ‘bmw 5 series posters’.

Land people in the relevant place.

6. Track conversions

This could actually be the biggest key to helping you increase your AdWord profits, if you don’t know which words are turning into conversions then you are on a loser right from the word go! Just because an ad has a high CTR doesn’t mean that it is making you money! How would you know if you are not tracking it? You can use Google’s own conversion tracking codes, or you can use your own software. Use Googles as it will be easier! You need to know which keywords are performing so you can put more money there and switch off words that are not getting you conversions and are wasting your money.

7. Work out your cost per sale

Why is this important? If it is costing you $20 to gain a sale and the profit on that sale is only $15, then you are losing money! Tracking your cost per sale is easy if you have the Google tracking code inserted on your site as Google work this out for you and display the result in the cost/conversion box on your account.

8. Don’t enter into bidding wars

It is easy to get into bidding wars with your competitors. You want to be number one and so does your competitor. The best thing to do is to take a step back, ten deep breaths and consider how important it really is to be in the number one spot. If you can justify it, fine but otherwise: let your competitor be number one, sit in the number two slot and wait. If you have a better product, your click-through rate will get you to the top – and you’ll still be paying the same as you were in the second position.

More and more people are using automated bidding software. This software will update at a set interval to keep the ad in the desired position. Doing battle with this kind of software is even more frustrating and less rewarding than trying to outbid a competitor. Bidding software that targets a certain position can waste a lot of money. You can be cleverer than that by working out your ROI and therefore your optimum bid price.

9. Use GeoTargeting for local campaigns

If you are running an Ad Campaign targeting certain geographical areas for example ‘golf course repairs in Florida’, make sure you use the GeoTargeting option. This will save you a lot of money on useless clicks and help speed your progress toward successful conversions and, ultimately, sales.

10. Double-up when GeoTargeting

When running GeoTargeting, always mirror the campaign with a non-GeoTargeted equivalent with place names in the keywords. For example, for a Manchester-based IT company, run ‘IT Company’ as a keyword in a campaign targeted to Manchester, and run a country-wide campaign including the keyword ‘IT Company Manchester’.

More Google Adwords Top Tips coming up in Part 3

Author:  Dave McEvoy is an Adwords expert with years of experience in ppc management. For more information please come and visit our site.

The Dark Art Of Search Engine Optimization

By Dave Davies in Featured

The title of this article is designed to illustrate the point of this article. Today we won’t be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics. Admittedly, I’ve toyed with them in a “know your enemy” kind of way but I’m no expert on advanced cloaking techniques nor effective link sp@mming tactics. What we’re going to cover here are the hidden (i.e. dark) areas of effective optimization strategy.

I’ve written numerous times in past articles and blog posts that using tricks to rank your site highly is, in the end, ineffective as tricks imply a manipulation of the ranking formula and will eventually become obsolete as the search engines work to advance their algorithms and shut down such possible abuses. But here I’m going to illustrate some of the tricks we use to drive traffic to our site. Is this a conflict? Not really; these “tricks” aren’t so much directed at search engines as they are website owners and visitors. These are marketing tricks, not SEO tricks – they just happen to help you with your rankings.

Before we begin let’s review an important point about Google. When most people think of Google they think of the dominant search engine (and in that they would be right) HOWEVER if Google was primarily a search engine they would be much smaller than they are now. No, they are an advertising company and the world’s largest at that. To this end they need traffic, market share, and clicks. They need you to love Google.com, visit it often, visit their other properties and offerings such as Gmail. If you do this, the odds of you clicking on one of the paid ads increases and their primary function is fulfilled. It is driven by this purpose that Google has developed the most complex search algorithm that has ever existed. Their search is their primary source of traffic. The better their results, the more you will return, the greater the likelihood you will click an ad, the more revenue they generate (thus leading to their continued increases in reported revenue quarter-after-quarter). Why is this important? Because this is the driving force of their current algorithm and will be for the foreseeable future we can assume that any action that increases relevant traffic to your site, increases the stickiness of your site and/or increases the number of links from relevant sites to yours will help your rankings and it will help Google keep their visitors loyal.

Let’s also recall the purpose of this article. This is NOT an article about black-hat search engine optimization tactics, it’s about the hidden aspects of SEO that are often overlooked. And so, without further ado, let’s get down to the meat – what are the dark tactics that you can use to boost your website rankings.

Building A Sticky Site

A point I’ve made in past articles that I will reinforce here as opposed to “contradicting” will be that of the importance of a sticky site. Of course, monitoring your statistics to assess your visitors’ behavior is an important practice for the conversions on your site however it’s importance from a search engine optimization perspective is often overlooked. I’ve mentioned before and I’ll mention again, the search engines have the ability to monitor the length of time a visitor spends between visits to that engine. If you are on Google, enter “seo services” into it and visit the Beanstalk site but only spend 5 seconds there before hitting the back button Google can infer that the site was not what you were looking for. If it was 5 or 10 minutes before you returned back to Google they could thus infer that you found content you found useful to your query.

So let’s put that more obviously, having a site on which visitors find what they’re looking for quickly, easily, and in a visually pleasing way will increase their time on your site which will thus increase the assumption by the search engines that you are relevant for the phrase the searcher has queried. This will reinforce that your site does indeed belong among the top site. As a disclaimer: this works on a mass scale so don’t go running off and clicking through to you competitors and quickly hitting the back button. First, it’s unethical (like clicking their paid links) and second, it doesn’t work like that (how big a hole would THAT be in the algorithm) so it would only be a waste of your time.

The how to of building a sticky site I will leave to designers (being an SEO – my skills lie more in understanding mathematical formula).

Clickability Counts

The engines know when your site appears in a set of search results and they further know how often your site was click on when it appeared. The more often your site is selected when presented in a set of results the more relevant it is assumed to be and thus, the more entrenched it becomes in that set of results (assuming your stickiness issues are dealt with).

What this means is that your title and description matter, not just as part of the classical search engine optimization tactics we’ve used them for since the 90’s but also to draw visitors to your site. Fortunately the end goal of the engines closely matches what your own end goal should be for your site – maximizing traffic. Let’s take a look at two example titles that the Beanstalk site could have:

An old-school over-optimized title: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Company | Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning | SEO Services, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Consulting, Training & Copywriting

Our current title: Expert SEO Services by Beanstalk

Can you see the different? While our title changes periodically as we test new titles for clickthroughs we always keep it short, easily read, and always such that the whole title will appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Our clickthroughs are much higher with shorter titles than longer and we have seen the same results with client sites.

The same applies to your description tag but the rules are a bit different. With your description tag you want to make sure to include your targeted keywords and make the copy compelling to a searcher. The reason for this is that when searched keywords are including in your description, is is typically the description that appears in the SERPs. This give you an opportunity to determine how your ad to the world appears. You write your title, you write your description – write both well and your clickthroughs will increase. And when your clickthroughs go up, the implied relevancy the engines will assume your site has to that phrase will increase with it and thus, so too will your rankings for that phrase.

Getting People To Link To You

We’re not going to bother discussing reciprocal link building, directory submissions or the other usual suspects. There are countless articles out there on those topics; what we’re going to focus on here are the tactics for getting articles picked up widely the resources you want to get them onto (and if you’re reading this – you know it works) as well as ways to get the links that both you and the search engines will love the most – the ones you don’t ask for or work for outside of creating a great site with useful content. The best part of these links is that they not only work to boost your link popularity but they also tend to drive great traffic to your site. Let’s begin with articles.

When you’re working to publish an article there are two main audience members: the readers and, more importantly, the editors (I say more importantly as they’re the ones that determine if you have any readers at all). There are some tactics for increasing both:

1. Write a compelling title. This gets back to the point I was making in the first paragraph. Everyone is interested in black hat search engine optimization, even those of us who don’t practice it. Readers will be drawn to it as it receives relatively low coverage and editors like to publishing something that they feel may draw some controversy. While this article doesn’t get into black hat tactics as some editors may have hoped, it will draw them in and get their attention.
2. Find quality related resources and get the article published there. I generally use a tool like PR PR Prowlerr to find good, quality resources to submit articles to. You can do it manually through a search engine, PR Prowler just speeds up the process so much that after its first use it’s paid for itself. You want the places you submit to, to be related to your industry and you want them to provide a link back. If you can setup that link as anchor text instead of your URL – all the better.
3. Keep a list and add to it. If you’re going to publish multiple articles don’t start from scratch every time. Keep a list and try to add a few sites to it with each submission. This will keep your list growing and get you more exposure/links as time goes on.
4. Keep a good relationship with the editors. They are the end-all-be-all of whether this tactic will work or not as a link and traffic building tactic. Make sure you’re polite and don’t write nasty emails if you get declined. Read what they say and make sure to take it into account with future articles.

But what if you don’t want to build links with articles, what if you want to get links the old fashioned way (and I’m talking about the old old old way – you know, before there was any SEO value to it). What if you would like to get people to link to you simply because they like your content (I know, shocking but it actually happens !!!) There are a few different factors that you need to take into account to accomplish this. Here are a few important rules to follow:

1. You’ll need to create content that others will want to link to. This is an art in-and-of-itself. I wrote about some of the basic rules involved with this in a past article “Building Link Bait” and so I won’t repeat it here.
2. Get the bait into social bookmarking sites. This will get people interested in your topic aware of it. If it’s good, they may link to it. Don’t just focus on Digg and the other majors, look around for some industry-specific bookmarking sites. For example, when this article is complete I’ll work to get it into Sphinn, an SEO bookmarking site.
3. Get the bait into forums and/or blogs. I’m not talking about blog sp@mming here, I’m talking about finding blogs and forums that are RELATED to your topic and who’s visitors could be genuinely helped by the tool, information, etc. that you’re providing. Don’t worry if the blog has rel=”nofollow” on the links. The purpose is webmaster awareness, not getting links from the blogs (I’ll leave that to a different article).
4. Promote the bait on your site. Use banners, links, your blog, etc. to build awareness.
5. Provide the code to link to your bait. The easier you make it for people to link to you, the more of them will. Provide the code with a text and banner option and you’ll increase the number of people who will link to you.
6. Put out a press release. If it’s big enough news, put out a press release. If the media grabs it you’ve won the lottery both in publicity and in high valued links.
7. If the topic of your bait is searched on the engines, rank it.

Conclusion

So these are the darker arts we’re talking about. Not black-hat, just overlooked more often than not. Add these to your repertoire of thoughts as you optimize and link building for your site and you’ve given yourself a one-up over most if not all of your competition.

Author:  Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning.  Beanstalk offers guaranteed search engine optimization services as well as consulting, training, link building, and copywriting.  For do-it-yourselfers they provide free SEO tools as well as frequently publish to their SEO blog to keep you up-to date with the latest goings-on the the search engine optimization world.

4 Steps to Combat Website Plagiarism

By Kelly Sims in Featured

Publishing your website can be one of the most exciting times for a business owner. After all of your hard work and persistence, the whole world now has access to your products or services. You have either paid hundreds of dollars to have someone write your site content for you, or you have put your heart and soul (not to mention hour upon hour of hard work) into creating content of which you can be proud. In either case, you’ve invested time and/or money into your website copy. Now that it is out there for the whole world to see, it may be a target for all kinds of unscrupulous individuals.

Copyright infringement is a very common occurrence on the World Wide Web. How do you protect yourself? And, what can you do if someone steals your content?

It’s important for you to know that anything you have written is copyrighted. You can register a copyright, but you don’t need to in order for it to be illegal for someone to copy or reproduce your work without your permission. Any written text, painting, drawing, musical composition, photograph or computer program, be they published or not is protected by copyright law. Unfortunately, just because your work is copyrighted doesn’t mean it is safe. Some individuals don’t know that copyright laws apply to the internet, and others simply don’t care.

With millions of websites out there, it’s difficult to know if your website has been targeted by thieves. A great tool to use in the protection of your website content is www.copyscape.com. Simply enter your website URL and it will scan the web for you. This is a free service, but if you have been a frequent victim of copyright infringement, you might want to consider their paid service, which automatically scans the web regularly for any duplicates of your content.

What do you do if you are one of the unfortunate victims of copyright infringement? How can you deal with the offender and avoid the high cost of litigation? The following are some simple steps that you can take to ensure that the infringer removes your material from their website.

1. Contact the offender. You can usually visit the “contact” page of the offender’s website to obtain their contact information. If for some reason you can’t find their coordinates that way, you can perform a search for “who is” to find many sites that can provide information about the website owner by simply entering their URL. The website owner’s contact information should be posted here, but if not, their website host will be and you should contact them. Keep your first contact civil. Calling or emailing the responsible individual with a stern, yet professional demeanor will be much more effective than yelling or name calling. Remember that the owner of the site isn’t necessarily the writer, and if they are, then being nasty may not have the desired effect and in fact may create more problems for you in the long run.

2. Send a cease and desist order. If your initial contact didn’t get the desired results, your next step should be to send a cease and desist order. You do not need to hire a lawyer to create one for you. A simple search for “cease and desist order templates” should give you an order that can be altered to meet your needs. Send one copy by email and one copy by registered mail and make it look as official as possible. Include a date by which the material should be removed. You want the offender to know that you mean business.

3. If action is still not taken, send a cease and desist order to the offending party’s web host. Again, the host information is available by performing a search for “who is”. The majority of hosts will take action by temporarily removing the offender’s site until the copied material is removed.

4. The situation should be resolved at step 3, but one more step that can be taken is to notify search engines of the infringement. Performing a search for the “DMCA” or “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” policies for each search engine will provide the information you need to contact each of them in order to request that the offender’s website be removed.

Finally, it’s always advisable to protect yourself by keeping records of the dates your content was placed on your site. This ensures that the other party can be proven wrong it they claim to have posted their content first.

Placing your website and it’s content on the internet for the world to see is a proud moment. It’s nearly impossible for you to be able to prevent the theft of its content, but the next best thing is knowing what to do if it does happen.

Author:  Kelly Sims is a Virtual Assistant and Owner of Virtually There VA Services. To find out more about virtual assistance and how using a Virtual Assistant can simplify your life and increase your profitability, visit her website at => http://www.virtuallythereva.com. While you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for her free monthly newsletter providing useful information that enhances and simplifies the lives of busy entrepreneurs.