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How to Optimize for Google – Part 1 of 3

By Scott Van Achte in Featured

In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.

In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.

The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.

Tips On Generating Traffic With Squidoo

By admin in Featured

A good way to market any business is though a Squidoo lens. This site is a social networking site like many others around but this one for me is unique in a way.

You can advertise on this site without the worry of getting penalized for it. Most social networking sites won’t let you advertise your products that is a big NO with other social websites.

The Lens

A lens is basically a portal to advertise on it is a unique template that allows you to put pictures on there video’s and products. You can make as many lenses as you want out of as many categories as you like.

Use the lenses to drive traffic to your main business site and create more and more sales for yourself.

How To Use Squidoo

Keywords are most important when using a lens. Lenses are WebPages and therefore get ranked in the search engines, just like your internet business gets ranked.

When you choose a url for your lens make sure that you include your primary keyword in this url, this url is going to be used to link you to other pages.

Long tail keywords are being used like crazy these days because they are so popular, use the Squidoo wizard to setup your lens.

One of the things I really like about the lens pages when your filling out the wizard is it gives you the opportunity to put your RSS Feed into the lens page, and search engines loves fresh daily content.

Update your lens three times a week at least modify it in some way but the RSS Feeds will help you do this as well.

Keep adding new content to your lens. Squidoo recommends that you make many lenses, but what there actually saying is use your long tail keywords for your lenses that you make based on your particular niche.

Start domination your niche by making yours unique, lets say your niche is about affiliate marketing, and you wrote about affiliate marketing handbooks, this would make your niche stand out from the rest because your writing about not just affiliate marketing but affiliate marketing handbooks which would be different from your competitors.

When you make your lenses and you have few up your sleeve link them together this is very powerful when it comes to search engine optimizing having all your pages linked together will bring more visitors to your business site.

The way you have to look at your lens is just pretend its your blog and link to your legitimate home business sites with it.

If you get high ranking lenses on Squidoo then you will receive all that traffic to your main business site. This technique is so powerful yet so easy to accomplish.

You have to remember that Squidoo is a social network site for adults so get involved with other peoples lenses and comment on what you see, ,make your comment truthful and to the point, this will give you more one way links to your website.

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Charles Goldie 2009 Charlie is currently living in Vallejo, CA, and he is attending college studying for his associates degree. In his spare time he writes artilces. Charlis also maintains a blog on a regular basis. To See More Articles From Charles Click Here

Internet Shopping Cart: Make More Money With Reports and Bundles

By Michael A Jones in Featured

Most internet shopping cart software packages come with a host of features. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the potential of your shopping cart. This article examines how to use reports and bundle offers so you don’t run the risk of leaving money on the table with each customer who engages the shopping cart process.

First off, let’s see how internet shopping cart reports can save you money and make you money.

Here are three examples:

Filter Sales By Customer

If your shopping cart software allows you to filter the database according to client, you will be able to see where most of your sales are coming from.

You need to extract from the report the volume of sales for each client so you can target this group of customers with special discounts for bulk orders or something similiar.

Filter Sales By Date

Use this feature to see if there are specific times in the year when sales volume dramatically increases. You may have a general idea and know which month(s) are the peak sales months.

However, by using a Sales By Date feature you can pinpoint specific times in the year you may not be aware of where sales volume is higher than normal, especially if those times are spread over just one or two weeks. Increase advertising dollars and promotions accordingly at those times and bring in even more sales.

Filter Sales By Credit Card

Do you know which credit cards most of your customers are using? Probably Visa or Mastercard. What about other credit cards such as Discover, American Express, Diner’s Club, Delta? What are your merchant account charges for those other cards?

By checking on Sales By Credit Card you will see whether it is economically viable to continue offering those cards as an option relative to the number of sales you get. If it’s not, drop the uneconomical ones and save money.

Surely this underscores the importance of getting internet shopping cart software that provides a robust reporting feature.

Now we will turn our attention to another way you can increase sales and make more money from your internet shopping cart. It involves bundle offers.

An internet shopping cart setup can learn much from the bricks and mortar world. The Happy Meal by McDonalds is an example. Travel agents do it with their package deals. What are we talking about?

Bundle offers or the upsell – an amazingly simple way to increase sales value and revenue yet so under-developed in many internet shopping carts.

Once a customer has already committed themselves to buying you simply add on related items and increase the value.

If for example you are selling exercise equipment, exercise clothing, or body care products could be put together with the original purchase at a discount price to make a Bundle Offer.

Good internet shopping cart software packages should have this feature included with simple setup instructions. Once the client gets to the page that reviews the contents of the shopping cart, the Bundle Offer can appear. The client can then add the bonus items with just one mouse click.

Push Without Being Pushy

Carefully choose the wording when describing the Bundle Offer to avoid coming over too pushy which may turn clients off. Don’t just make a slashed price offer. Be sure to emphasise the benefits to the user as well.

For example, “Enjoy a refreshing, invigorating shower after your workout with our exercise equipment, with the all natural, herbal shower gel (brand name). For an additional $x you can have a pack of 5 sent with your order.”

When choosing an internet shopping cart, make sure you have this facility so you don’t leave money on the table.

The beauty of this is that bundle offers don’t really require much extra effort yet they can produce substantial sales over the months. The customer is already in the buy mode, having committed to the first purchase. The second purchase is much easier!

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See an actual demonstration of an online shopping cart optimized for good sales by visiting Michael’s site here: http://www.net-vault.com/online-shopping-cart

Articles Important for More than Backlinks

By Mel Strocen in Featured

The benefits of article marketing have been espoused for years and the trend shows no sign of abating anytime soon.  Now a national study by Opinion Research Corporation and sponsored by Adfusion has indicated that consumers are much more likely to read and act upon ads embedded in articles than on other types of ads such as banner ads, pop-up ads, email offers or sponsored links. Just one more benefit to be touted by article marketing gurus.

Of those surveyed, the breakdown of their likely favorable response to various types of advertising was as follows:

Articles that include brand information – 51%   -  Email offers – 47%  -  Sponsored search engine links – 39%  -  Banner ads – 25%  -  Pop-up ads – 13%

A more detailed summary of the study can be found at: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=102592

88% of Marketers Now Using Social Media

By Mel Strocen in Featured

It’s not just hype anymore – marketers are migrating in greater numbers to social media venues although 72% have only been at it for a few months or less. Currently, Twitter is the favorite social media site for marketers but blogs, Facebook and Linkedin are running a close second.

64% of marketers use social media for five or more hours per week and 39% for 10 or more hours. The majority of marketers using social media fall in the 20 – 39 age range.

Stats were compiled in a social media study done by Michael Stelzner for the Social Media Success Summit 2009. For a full copy of the study, visit: http://www.whitepapersource.com/socialmediamarketing/report/

Advanced Twitter Use – Setup Your Twitter & Automate Your Message 

By Darren Dunner in Featured

Currently in twitter you can post tweets and respond to tweets with the goal of developing a dialogue. The point is to be able to introduce yourself and make your services and products known to your target audience. The chances that your message will actually be read by your followers is pretty slim because active users are looking for the same exposure and are not paying attention to all the 100′s of tweets posted on an hourly basis.

Because of this, you need a way to connect with your new followers and actually get them interested in your message.  Your window of opportunity is short and you only have one chance to do this. Before you can even get them to follow you and present this opportunity, you need to lay the groundwork to ensure that you have all of your details in place:

How To Write An Article With A Powerful Title So You Get A Flood Of Traffic To Your Website

By B Hopkins in Featured

If you want an effective method of getting targeted traffic to your website, then writing articles and publishing them is the way to do it. This method is also very cost effective way to driving traffic to your web site. Article marketing is a great way of letting people know more about you as well as a powerful branding method as well. However, publishing your articles to all corners of the Internet isn’t enough; you have to write an article enticing enough to get people to actually read your article and go to your web site.

The main purpose of the title is to draw people into reading your article. What draws people into reading your article are titles that are catchy, stand out, and indicate what the reader will get out of reading the article. Take this article for instance. The title tells you exactly what you will get by reading this article. If that is of interest to anyone (and if you are reading this sentence, it is of interest to you as well), then they will read this article. A powerful title that draws the reader in answers some very specific questions right in the title. These answers will create a headline that “hooks” the reader into reading your article.

The first thing your article title must answer for the reader is the benefit they receive by reading your article?” This alone is worth reading the article. I have seen many article titles that really detract from the power of the article because the title did not draw me in. For example, let us take an article that talks about some of the things that real estate investors overlook when they are considering investing in a property. You can have 2 different titles to that article. One could say:

“Real estate investors overlook some things when investing in property” or “The 5 things that real estate investors overlook in property investment that can cost them thousands of dollars per deal”

Both titles can be on top of the same article but which one draws you in more? If you are interested in not losing thousands of dollars when you are investing in property, then you will be more likely to read the article with the 2nd title. The 2nd title lists a clear benefit of reading the article and that is how to save thousands of dollars. The first title tells you what the article is about, but it doesn’t tell you what you will walk away with other than knowing some things that you need to remember. Some practice may be required and writing powerful titles that draw the reader in and are also within a specific number of characters because some article directory sites limit the number of characters of your article title.

When writing an article, it is important to create a title that “draws” the reader into reading your article. It is very important that your article actually be about what is in the title or you will quickly lose credibility with your reader. The whole goal is to get them to click on your links at the end of your article. This is just one tip that will increase the number of visitors to your website, and there are three other tips that will help you create powerful article titles as well.

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If you want to know the other tips that will help you create an article that drives traffic to your web site, join this how to write articles membership site that teaches you how to write articles that bring traffic to your web site.

Keyword Strategies: Increase Your Keyword Rankings

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

Keywords are ground zero. They are essential to your online success. You must get your keywords right or it’s game over before you even get started. Mainly because keywords are the most important element of your online marketing.

It can’t be emphasized enough, especially to beginning online webmasters or marketers, choosing the right profitable keywords will largely determine whether or not you succeed with your online endeavors. You simply must get this element right or your marketing will be in big trouble.

What Are Keywords?

Lets start at the very beginning, keywords are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they’re looking for on the web. Some keywords are valuable/profitable, while others are virtually worthless.

Profitable keywords are the ones that convert into a sale, a lead or potential client/customer for your company or product. These are the words someone is searching in order to buy a product or hire a service. Someone searching for “honeymoon vacation packages” is probably in the market to book a honeymoon vacation and could turn out to be very profitable for the right website or business.

Profitable keywords are the ones where the searcher is in the right “mind-set” or frame of mind to buy what they’re searching for on the web. Tailor your online marketing to target these profitable keywords and it can spell success.

So what’s the whole process for finding or choosing profitable keywords to use in your marketing? Lets look at some ways to proceed…

Number of Keyword Searches Made?

You need to find out how many searches are made for your chosen keywords each month. Simply use WordTracker or a site like SEOBook. These will give you a preliminary number of searches made each month for your keyword. Highly popular, well-searched keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches each month will be extremely hard to rank for because you will have stiff competition from major companies with limitless resources.

I like to pick less popular keywords that get only a couple of hundred of searches each day because my chances of getting on the first page greatly increases. But don’t get fixated on the number of searches, some keyword phrases that only get four or five searches daily, can still be very profitable.

For serious keyword research in a particular niche market I like to use Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite which is professionally designed software that makes all your keyword research so much easier. But there are plenty of free keyword tools you can use. One handy keyword tool is Google Adwords external suggestion tool which will help you find valuable keywords.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Commercial Intent of Keywords?

But how do you know if a keyword is profitable? Well, one convenient tool is from MSN which helps you with “Detecting Online Commercial Intention” of keywords. Just type in a keyword and it will give you a percentage or probability your keyword query has commercial benefit or intent.

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

Conversion Rate of Keywords?

Once you have your chosen keywords in place, next you want to have a landing page that converts those keywords or traffic from those keywords into buyers or leads for your online business. This is another crucial element of your online marketing – you must have a landing page or content/site that converts into a sale or you obviously won’t make any revenue.

Keep in mind, if you’re into affiliate marketing, you main goal is not to sell but to “pre-sell” your products or services. One effective way I have found to do this is to give potential customers/clients valuable information they can use in making their final purchasing choice. Comparison sites do well, as do review sites, top ten sites… potential customers use the Internet and keywords to not only find products but more so, to find information on those products. Your goal should be to provide this valuable information to make their task a little bit easier for them and they will reward you with a sale.

What are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-Tail keywords are simply that: long three or four word phrases that searchers use to find what they’re looking for on the web. Because they are highly specific, long-tail keywords have proven to have better conversion rates than general keywords. This is also just common sense, someone searching for a “2005 ford mustang convertible” may just be in the right mind-set to buy such a vehicle; as compared to someone searching for a more general keyword phrase such as “sports cars.”

Study your website traffic logs religiously to find long-tail keywords that turn into a sale. Target these long-tail keywords in your marketing. Even buy PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in the three major search engines – Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing and MicroSoft AdCenter – for these valuable/profitable keywords.

And build higher rankings in organic search for these long-tail keyword phrases. It’s really not that difficult for long phrases, especially if they’re related to your site; many times you can reach the top spot in a matter of days, especially in Google.

How To Rank High For Your Chosen Profitable Keywords?

Of course, the million dollar question is: HOW do you rank in the top spot for your chosen keywords? I believe the key to ranking high in the search engines (especially Google) is to be persistent in building your rankings for your keywords. Take a long-term view or approach, sometimes it may take months, even years, to rank in the top Five for your highly competitive keywords.

The best strategy is to “stick to it” and keep building relevant links to your keyword landing page. Create related blogs with valuable content linking back to your keywords. Write keyword related articles and distribute them all over the web. Create Google Alerts for your keywords and them place comments/links in the newly formed pages on the web that Google is indexing.

Be pro-active, download the SEOQuake toolbar and find your main keyword competitors. Check out their links and then go out and get the same links. Write better higher quality content than your main competitors because Google always rewards great content. Plus, use the free http://www.Addthis.com button and let your visitors bookmark your great content in all the social bookmark sites and build your keyword links for you.

Do keyworded Press Releases with your embedded links and spread them all over the web. Get these Press Releases into Google news and other important places on the web. http://www.PRWeb.com is really a great place for your press releases since you can embed your keywords in your links.

If you can try to get your most important keywords in your domain name. Many SEO experts argue the merits of this but from my own experience and marketing – it is much easier to rank high for your keywords if you have them in the domain name. Again, it is just common sense, if you have your main keyword in the domain, this keyword is obviously telling the search engines this is what your site is all about. I have even bought domains and created sites specifically around certain keywords just to rank high.

Always remember, you have to be persistent, I have been fighting some keyword battles for over four or five years! For really profitable keywords, it can be a constant struggle to remain on the first page, but the trick is not to give up, just keep fighting away at your competitors. Persistence usually pays off in the end and those profitable keywords will have your links in the top spot. Make ranking high for those profitable keywords your number one marketing strategy. Concentrate all your marketing efforts towards getting plenty of quality traffic for those keywords and you will succeed online.

About The Author:

Titus Hoskins – The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Marketing Tools. If you liked the article above, why not try this Free 7-Day Marketing Course here: Internet Marketing Tools

SEO Dependency – Do Your Rankings Rely Too Much on The Home Page?

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

Are your search engine rankings depending too much on one page (like your homepage) or one sub folder of your website? If so, here are a few tips to spread the link flow around to hedge your SEO efforts. Chances are, unless you are employing a tiered SEO strategy that you are overly dependent on your websites home page or similar pages in your website.

Link flow pools into different pages of a website and learning how to harness this ebb and flow is crucial for long term and short term ranking objectives. The most common cause of this is excessive linking to a page without using a “nofollow” tag within the structure of the link.

Search Engine Optimizing your WordPress installation

By Ryan Edmunds in Featured

If you’re obsessive about SEO you likely already have a domain name that contains one relevant keyword, an entire keyword phrase or even a targeted search term. This is a great practice if you have a website that is highly targeted to one topic or set of keywords, but there is a lot more you can do that will help to boost your search engine ranking position (SERP) and possibly outrank the sites that DO have your keyword in their domain name.

The keyword appearing in the URL is important, but more important than that is the keyword appearing in the title tag. Somewhere in between or just underneath is something called the H1 (which is not surprisingly followed in importance by H2). Naturally your keywords should also appear in the content here and there (not everywhere). If you write about your keywords on a daily basis you are probably already on top of your SEO situation, but if your blog is more relaxed topically and you like to drift and touch on anything you like, then you may benefit from doing a few SEO best practices for WordPress.

1) Title Tags

The title tags are the most important thing. It may not be most important to the Search Engines, but it certainly is to the reader. Even if something is the #1 result in Google, a reader wont likely click on a title that has nothing to do with what they are searching for. That is why it is good to serve your post headline in the title tag instead of just the blog name.

You can do this by editing your header.php to include the appropriate WordPress template tags within the HTML Title tag. This may also mean using an IF statement to determine what type of page is displaying and what tags to use.

2) The H1 Tag

There is a high degree of confusion circulating the web on the proper use of h1 tags with WordPress. The basic purpose of h1 is to let the search engine know what a page is about. The last thing you want is more than one h1 on a page. This confuses the heck out of search bots and, as a result, drops your SEO score.

The typical belief is that serving your blog title in the H1 tag is proper. This makes sense because you have your keywords in your blog title, but what about the individual posts? Aren’t the post titles more relevant than the name of your blog?

If you have a post on your blog about “99 Ways to skin a cat” isn’t that particular page about skinning cats rather than your blog’s title, which may be “catskinners.org”?   The solution here is that you want to have your post titles on the single post page inside the H1 tags. Since there shouldn’t be more than one H1 per page, this means you need your title or logo inside a div.

If you have more than one post on your homepage (which most people do) then you should place your post titles’ inside of H2 tags and your logo in an H1. This tells the SE’s that your homepage is about whatever your title is, and the post headlines are the next most important thing. Once a user clicks through to a single post the most important thing becomes the title of that post.

3)Inbound/Outbound links

A huge part of blogging is sharing the link love and creating conversations between one blog to the next. It is typical in the blogosphere to see someone quote a post from another blog, add their own 2 cents and then link the blog where the topic started. This is a fine thing to do and it will even help you gain a few links yourself as your own sharing attitude encourages others to share. You just have to be careful not to have too many links out and balance it with your links from your blog pointing to your own blog.

People often forget that a link to your blog from your blog still counts as a link to your blog (how was THAT for a sentence?). Since one of the best things you can have linking to your blog is some good relevant anchor text that contains your keywords, why not go ahead and link any of those words within your posts back to your homepage?

Here are some more things you can do to make the best use of your internal links:

• Linking from your posts to older posts (when relevant)
• Linking from your posts to your homepage (whenever possible)
• Keep your navigation consistent across the whole site
• Link every page to your homepage at least once (more is ok too)
• Use a sitemap template that includes all your single posts and pages as well as the date and category archives

4) Anchor Text and Keywords

You probably already know at this point that one of your main goals in offsite SEO is to get links with your keywords in the anchor text (the text that makes up the active link). This is one of the single most important factors to both your SE for your determined keywords and your PR. The more links you have, the better your PR. The more links you have containing your keywords, the better your SERPs for those keywords are. It is healthy to mix them up and use different combinations of your keywords to help monopolize your grip on a given topic.

We’re almost finished. There is one more important spot we need to place our keywords. If I were a keyword where would I be? In this blog post! You can have all the SEO you want on your WordPress template but it isn’t going to matter much if you don’t talk about your keywords in your blog posts. You obviously don’t want to come off as a spammer so be wary not to simply randomly throw in long and short-tail keywords in every single sentence. However, there is nothing wrong with using your full keyword search term whenever the opportunity arises. For instance, if you have the option to use a pronoun or the actual keywords you should choose the keyword.

You can optimize your WordPress for search engine rankings quite simply by sticking to some of the concepts we’ve covered here. It can be done over time or all in one shot. However, it would be handy to come back to this little guide each time you are setting up a new installation of WordPress. Remember that not all WordPress themes are search engine optimized so you may have to get your hands dirty and shine up the code of each template you use on your blog.  A good start is making sure the markup is semantic and Google recommended.

Written by Ryan Edmunds from Needless Productions

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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