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WordPress Themes: Publicizer 1.6

08 2008 Monday

By admin in Featured

Thanks to our team of designers and coders we now have available to you our new WordPress Theme “Publicizer 1.2″. This theme is made available to you from SiteProNews.

DEMO: Click to View Demo of Publicizer 1.6

DOWNLOAD: Download Publicizer 1.6

Versions: Works for Version 2.6 of WordPress and Earlier

Here are some key features:

Web 2.0 Look and feel
3 Column design with plenty of space in the 2nd and 3rd columns for putting ads or additional information
Top Navigation to manage the “pages” section of wordpress
RSS Subscribe Button and Search Features that stand out to all your readers

Social Media: It’s More Than Facebook

08 2008 Monday

By Steve Baldwin in Featured

A CONSENSUS SEEMS TO BE emerging that the real marketing significance of social media may lie beyond the opportunity to display targeted media against individuals and groups. Instead, social media’s real power lies in its ability to function as a recommendation engine in which real people praise or pillory products. These opinions may be honest, informed, and impartial –or inaccurate, biased, and vengeful — but it’s clear that they are exerting influence on shoppers as they roll through (or are derailed from) the purchase funnel. This phenomenon hasn’t escaped the attention of SEO types, who have attempted to reinvent themselves as SMO (social media optimization) specialists. Nor has it gone unnoticed by corporate America, whose efforts to “manage” conversations have occasionally resulted in spectacular PR fiascos such as those which embroiled Wal-Mart and Edelman, its PR agency, over “WalMartingAcrossAmerica.com” or Sony and its agency over “AllIWantForChristmasIsAPSP.com.” Like “black hat” SEO tricks, such tactics are risky; and while they might work very well for a while, heads will roll if you’re caught.

Fortunately, there are plenty of things that marketers can do to make better use of the growing body of opinion-based information that don’t have any risk associated with them. Here are some observations and recommendations on how this may be done:

1. Forums are where products are discussed. Too many of us in this business associate the phrase “social media” with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al. But these huge sites are more about socializing than exchanging information about products. Do a series of product searches on Google or the other engines and you’ll see that the majority of opinions about products occur on good old fashioned forum pages, the kind that have been up on the Web for more than a decade. Every product vertical you can think of (including photography, autos, movies, household appliances, and a ton of others) likely has several specialized sites associated with important products within these verticals. While a fair number of the people reading such opinions are regular users of such sites, many or most of the accesses to this content come through search engines, where users are conducting long-tail queries such as “Nikon D50 scope mount, “Audi transmission problem,” “koss headphones lightweight” and the like — and discussion forums often turn up in high positions for such long-tail queries.

2. Contextual is king on forum sites. A large number of these product-oriented forums are AdSense or other contextual network publishers, which means that you might consider reaching their users through targeted contextual ads, instead of duking it out with deep-pocketed competitors vying for space on SERPS. Google and the other engines have taken steps to make their contextual networks more attractive by rolling out more precise targeting criteria (including demographic targeting), and just last week Google announced that it will be serving a DoubleClick cookie through this network, which adds frequency capping, plus more advanced reporting. While contextual ads are much cheaper than pure-search ads, only testing can establish whether moving budget to contextual provides similar ROI. Don’t ignore the possibility that your contextual efforts may draw a unique (and possibly more attractive) population of users who might not have responded to a similar (but more expensive) text ad placed a SERP.

3. Move your content with care. After performing a number of product-oriented long-tail searches on several popular sites with forum areas, I was struck by the number of instances in which links embedded in opinion posts yielded Error 404 (broken link) messages. Usually, the broken link pointed to a formerly active URL within a manufacturer/retailer’s site which had drifted with time. Manufacturers and retailers cannot be expected to never move or delete their product URLs, but at the very least they should install appropriate redirects — so that these clicks don’t dead-end in a 404. Just because a product may have been superseded or even discontinued doesn’t mean that people aren’t still talking about it somewhere and following links to investigate a possible purchase. Why destroy a path that may be delivering you customers (and PageRank) right now?

Bottom line: you don’t have to wait for Facebook and its brethren to come up with a new generation of ad units or targeting options to begin harnessing the power of social media. Just find out where everybody’s talking (for good or for ill) about your product, investigate how to reach such people in a cost-effective, non-intrusive, contextually sensitive manner, and do your utmost to make sure that the links that these people have already created still work.

These low-key tactics might not get you a speaking engagement at a high-profile social media conference, but they’ll sure come in handy when it comes time to justify your salary.

Steve Baldwin is editor-in-chief at Didit, an agency for search engine marketing and auctioned media management based in New York. You can reach Steve at steve.baldwin@didit.com.

Why SEO Should Never Be An Afterthought

08 2008 Monday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

SEO should never be an afterthought, there are essentially two ways to rank (1) as a result of clear planning with deliberate intent and a master game plan developed over time or (2) hey is it too late to fix this site and eek some performance out of it?

How many times have you ever thought, if I only knew what I know now years ago (when you first started your website) and wished you could simply turn back the clock and start fresh, then you are not alone.In case you ever wondered how to essentially rank for everything in your niche, then you could take a few pages from the SEO play book of the site we stumbled across earlier today. In fact, it was so inspiring, I had to write about it to commend them on a job well done.

Search engine optimization is constantly evolving and with it the semblance of design, content and site architecture are fusing into “the ideal delivery system” to entice traffic, user engagement, viral marketing and conversion.

This mutation / new generation of hybrid sites (part e-commerce, part blog, part affiliate site) are emerging frequently and blazing a trail to the top 10 of multiple industries. Webmasters (much like scientists) understand that when you properly combine the right elements and streamline content, links and information architecture for a common goal, the result is an authority site designed with a distinct purpose that gains momentum daily.

You can learn a great deal from looking beneath the hood of other websites (to see which layers are worthy of emulating or modifying from other SEO’s or web developers). Here is an example of a site that is truly a masterpiece built to virtually dominate its industry through layers of overlapping optimization, content development and site architecture.

The site, www.like.com holds top ranking positions for thousands of brands, has millions of pages indexed, hundreds of thousands of links and yet has a cool demeanor and impeccable design with a strong visual call to action. All of the components were so balanced, that I simply could not shake the sites blueprint after observing the amount of thoughtful planning and advanced SEO tactics that went into developing and maintaining such a pristine web creation.

This is clearly an example of SEO done right. If anyone ever told you that a theme cannot be modified to encapsulate multiple product lines within a broad market category, then this site is an excellent case study, not to mention, it has style to boot.

The fact is, acquiring positioning for each and every keyword is a task unto itself. Each page should be treated as its own site (then again you never know how many sites were 301 redirected into this one). In any case, it is important for a site to constantly utilize the mechanisms of self-referral (internal linking) to cement relevance from within.

This when combined with an optimized CMS (content management system), the proper use of titles and tags and links results in a ranking juggernaut that expresses itself like a dynamic time-released capsule through SERP (search engine result page) domination.

Each page that is created is another asset to the site as a whole, over time when each page ages, it gains its own authority which then reciprocates back to strengthen the whole, which strengthens the page again and so on and so fourth. This cyclical momentum is the secret to ranking for multiple keywords.

The real challenge is, to get over the hump and systematically create relevance through the proper balance of (1) chronology of content through themed content development, (2) the appropriate balance of internal to external links per page and to the root domain (3) the proper use of interlinking the sub folders to create dynamism as a whole for all of the topical categories.

The whole reason this rant about SEO being the starting point rather than an afterthought is, if you have a clear objective, understand the amount of work involved and can scale the workload, then it is possible to rank for any competitive term with the right tactic, link popularity, structure and proper content. Hats’ off to the team who put that site together as well as those who maintain and keep such a finely-tuned machine in perfect working order.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

Don’t Spend a Fortune on SEO. Be Your Own SEO Guru!

08 2008 Monday

By Scott Jason in Featured

SEO has been around for almost as long as search engines have. And for good reason. Everyone wants free advertising. But a lot has changed over the past thirteen years and with SEO gurus charging upwards of $1,000 per month, to small startups, just for maintenance you really can’t call it “free advertising” anymore.

Why is SEO so expensive? Because it’s worth it. Back in the day, you could get top ranking for just about any search term you wanted just by using tricks like keyword stuffing, invisible text and cloaking. Try any of that today and Google will kick you to the curb.