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By admin in Featured

Using Back Links to Improve Your Website SEO Put simply, back links are inward-bound links to a particular internet site or page. What this means is that the other site has a hyperlink “pointing” directly to your website. Regarding search engine optimisation, you want as many back links pointing to your site as you possibly can, even more so if the site is directly related to your area of interest.

As the number one goal of a website is to achieve traffic, i.e. people actually looking at the site, it follows that you must make the website visible. Generally speaking, to make your website visible, people must be able to find it when they search for keywords directly related to your product, niche, service or whatever else your website represents. Individuals tend to be seeking such information via the big search engines, whose operators have rather complicated algorithms to help them decide whether a certain website is applicable to the searcher’s request, or not.

Although they will not divulge exactly how they go about composing these algorithms, the search engine operators do assure us that relevancy, as viewed by others, is most important. If they see that you have a back link or a number of back links from other websites that have some relevancy to yours, this is a plus. In addition, if the site linking to you has a fairly high “page rank”, this helps as well. Page rank is Google’s proprietary method of allocating a number (zero being lowest and moving up to ten) indicating how important a site is within its particular niche of operations.

There are a number of ways to achieve back links for your site:

ARTICLE MARKETING

As Bill Gates once said, “content is king”. Article marketing is known as one of the most solid Internet marketing methods. By writing highly relevant and informative articles and submitting them to high profile article directories you do several things, not the least important of which is to help establish you or your site as an expert in your niche. Within your article, published in the article directory, is a resource box which contains your details – who you are and what you do, and a link back to your site, the all important Back Link.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

There are many hundreds of social bookmarking sites, and their primary motive is basically to provide a way of informing people about the existence of content related to any niche or interest in a very manageable format. You can sign up and initiate a process of notifying social bookmarking sites about fresh content, including back links in many cases. You should note at this stage that some webmasters apply a “no follow” tag which can void the effect of a back link, as the tag instructs the search engine spider not to give you points, or what’s called “link love”.

SOCIAL MEDIA – TWITTER

Whilst Twitter and other similar sites are becoming increasingly more powerful in marketing terms, you should know that to include links within your “tweets” or in your URL profile box is not a powerful back linking strategy, as these are all allocated the dreaded no follow tag. However, you may find that it is possible to link within a bio box and get some link love this way. Also, if you syndicate, your Twitter feeds are updated via the RSS aggregators, earning you back links.

BLOG COMMENTING

First of all, you will have to locate blogs or forums that are relevant to your area of expertise. This is fairly simple to accomplish as a straightforward and pertinent search will locate hosts. Once you find these blogs you can sign up and create a profile. Often you will be allowed to create what is called a “signature”, and within that signature you incorporate your links. Note, you should check to see if there are any no follow tags, as these will appear occasionally.

Enter into the spirit of the place by interacting with other members and making entries and posting comments that are relevant, useful and educational. As well as a back link being displayed each time you post a comment, you’ll also create a potentially profitable bond with other members – and this has the potential to lead to all kinds of new possiblities.

Back link building remains one of the most important SEO strategies to adopt.

Michelle Dale is CEO of Virtual Miss Friday, an adept and highly-proficient Virtual Assistant Service which works closely with enterprising people who really want to succeed in their chosen field. If you’d like to learn more about online business building success strategies that are tailored to your needs, Contact VMF Today at=> http://www.virtualmissfriday.com

By Merle in Featured

googleWhen it comes to “cool tools”, Google is the master inventor. Say what you want about Google, but they know what they’re doing when it comes to giving the public what they want and need. Take the telephone for instance. An old invention that now has been given a new twist with “Google Voice” (G.V.) [http://www.google.com/voice]. Hold onto your chair as I’m about to tell you how to have a lot more fun with Ma Bell.

Google is giving you the ability to manage all your phones with one centralized number. At the time of this writing, it’s only available to those in the U.S., and by invitation only. Upon registration, you’ll be given your own phone number that you connect to any existing phone number. When someone calls the Google Voice number, it rings the phone number that you specified. The option of selecting a word for your personalized number is also given.

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

Of all the article marketing tips I could give you, writing articles for free advertising online is likely the most beneficial to you if you currently spend money on advertising your website. There are several reasons for this, but the major reasons why article writing can bring you better results than expensive pay per click (PPC) adverts or taking a chance with reciprocal links are detailed below.

Keep in mind that Google is not keen on reciprocal links unless the page you are reciprocating with relates to the page on your website that the link points to, and the link is no good to you in any case if it is one of many others on a ‘links’ or ‘partners’ page created predominantly for such links. You only get a share of the PR of the page your link is on, not that of the ‘site’, and even that is shared between all the other links on the page.

Being one of 5 links on a page with a PR of 1 is better than one of 50 on a page with a PR of 8. If you take these article marketing tips, writing articles can offer you a form of free advertising online that Google itself provides willingly, and that can work for you for many years to come. Here is how to go about writing articles to get you the benefits that free online advertising has to offer:

  1. 1. Write an article about your niche, using a conversational style as if you were explaining what you are writing if talking to somebody face to face – just as I am doing now in fact. Offer interesting information that anybody involved or interested in your niche would find useful. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering news, but what you write must be factual and show that you have a firm grasp of your subject. You want people to continue reading once they have started.
  2. 2. At the end of your article, provide a link to your website. You can say something about yourself if relevant, such as a brief word about your qualifications and experience if the topic warrants it, or do as I do and simply offer a link to your site for more information. You can use more than one link if relevant. When writing articles for free advertising online you should keep in mind:
    1. You should never include a live link within the body of the article. Directories do not like these (more on article directories shortly).
    2. Only use multiple links in your resource if relevant. Thus, I include a link to my product and also one to my Article Services website that is focused on writing articles and my own ghostwriting services. c) Most article directories offer a special box for your link and other details (known as the ‘author’s resource’), but if not then you should add it to the end of your article. Never write an article without a link back to your website. That’s what gets you the free advertising.
  3. Having finished writing your article, the power of writing articles and article marketing now comes into play to get you a ton of free advertising. You get that by submitting your articles to article directories. This can be done in a number of ways, the most common being:
    1. Manual Submissions You should choose a number of the top article directories, register with them and then submit your articles manually. This will take you about 5 minutes per directory. Your articles should be submitted in plain text format, so if you have written them in Microsoft Word, copy the Word text and paste it into a text editor such as Notepad. A Google search for ‘article directories’ will give you lists of the top directories.
    2. Software Submissions You can use software to make the submissions for you. Most of these work whereby you enter each part of your into a box provided for it: Title, Summary, Article body, Keyword list, Resource – parts of these will be in plain text and HTML, particularly the resource. You then scroll down a list of directories loaded into the software, click on those to which you want to submit, and the article submission is made automatically. You have to provide the software with your login details for each directory, where relevant (no all directories need a login), or log in to each individually.
    3. Article Submission Services You can use a paid article submission service that will submit your articles to a number of directories for a fee – either paid individually or monthly. I use all three of these methods for my submissions for maximum exposure and best results.
    4. Don’t worry about duplicate content when you submit the same article to loads of directories and ezines. That will take a few months to come into play and you can make up for it by writing an article each week.

Using these article marketing tips on writing articles will get you free advertising online in the following ways:

  • Your article will be published on a number of article directories. If you use the right directories, these will further syndicate your articles to other directories and ezines and so on. It is viral, your articles being distributed around the internet. You get a back link to the pages stated in your author’s resource from every directory and ezine that publishes your article. That link is valuable in attaining you a high search engine listing position.
  • People read your articles on the directories. This is fact, irrespective what others say. If you have done the job properly, these readers will possibly click on your link to visit your website for more information. Make sure that your link leads them to a web page related to the title of your article.
  • An article published on a directory page is a single web page, just like any other. It can therefore be listed on Google or any other search engine. I have literally tens of dozens of articles scattered around search engines on various topics, optimized for specific keywords. That’s what free advertising is, and writing articles can achieve that for you if you take these article marketing tips.
  • Many people will copy your article as content for their own website: to do that they must retain your resource containing your link. Writing articles just got you even more free advertising!

These are just some of the ways in which writing articles can get you free advertising online, and if you take these article marketing tips seriously then you could save yourself a lot of money on advertising costs, and get better results by doing so!

Pete is an article ghost writer operating from his website Article Services For details on how you can become expert in using article marketing to get free advertising and a lot more, check out Article Czar and get a free writing course plus other gifts.

By B Hopkins in Featured

Web sites for most businesses can perform many of the same basic functions that off-line systems can; sales, market research, branding, customer service, etc. Very few businesses will use their web site for more than 1 or 2 of these functions. Even fewer businesses will create their web site with an exit strategy in design when using their website for sales, market research, etc. When an exit strategy is left out of the equation, a lot of money could be left on the table.

What is an exit strategy? In this case it is the way in which you are going to end the ownership of your website. Will you just close your web site down or will you get your investment back and sell it? Most business owners just close their web site down when they are done with it and fail to realize that they could be flushing a valuable asset down the drain. It would be similar to walking away from your store and leaving the inventory, customer list and all of your trade secrets behind for who ever is clever enough to come by and salvage what is possible.

If you have your web site for several years, over that time you have developed a following, traffic, content, gained a lot of knowledge about your niche based upon customer buying patters, or visitor traffic patterns, and so much more. You don’t realize that it is an asset. If you can determine how much your web site makes per month, you can know how much you can sell it for. If you have a sizable email list, you have an asset that a smart email marketer can make use of to generate even more income on a monthly basis.

If you get considerable traffic to your website, and your website is not branded to who you are (such as oprah.com), then you should create an exit strategy based on how much you can get from your web site when you decide to sell it. If your are going to sell off your business, your web site will add that much more to the value of your business when you sell it. How can you know how much to sell your web site for? There are some websites out there that will give you an estimate of how much your web site is worth. Some of the factors these sites take into account include:

  • The amount of traffic your website gets
  • The number of Inbound links your website has
  • It’s popularity in the Web 2.0 Space
  • How much it comes up in the search engines.
  • Domain Name

How many directories your website is included in

When building and marketing your web site, you will want to incorporate as many of these factors as you can. Be sure to build your web site so you can easily add content, and always add new links pointing to your web site as well through the numerous linking strategies that are available. You want to create your website with as much value as possible. If you create your website with the mindset that you will sell it, you will end up with a web site that has much more value in a few years than if you just put one up as an online brochure.

B. Hopkins creates strategies for low maintenance, high profit websites that will allow you to earn more revenue on a month to month basis. Sign up for one of B.’s Internet Sales Training Denver programs and discover what it takes to create an Internet presence that will generate business for you.

By Ron Knight in Featured

twitterTwitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140 characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

By Catharine P. Taylor in Featured

Given the heavy topics I’ve dealt with lately in this column, writing about VitaminWater’s crowdsourcing of its next flavor on Facebook seems pretty prosaic. And yet, as one of my favorite topics — and yours — is the role of focus groups in a world where there is much richer data about consumers than ever before, it’s worth pondering how successful crowdsourced products will be — and what the role of crowdsourcing will be in marketing going forward.

Before we begin with our deep thoughts about flavored water, here’s a brief rundown of the crowdsourcing program: The brand has added a “flavorcreator” tab to its Facebook page (which currently has almost 475,000 fans), allowing people to vote for the next VitaminWater flavor, the ten finalists having already been determined. (A cloud and a ranking list within the app shows what flavors are currently the most talked about. At this writing, green apple and mint were running one and two.)

A series of games help determine which vitamins people need and most want to be part of the new beverage. There’s the obligatory discussion group (which for some reason seems to be mostly devoted to LeBron vs. Kobe, which are not prospective VitaminWater flavors), a section in which people can submit a user-generated label for the beverage, and a widget. In other words, there’s not much here we haven’t seen before, which isn’t meant as criticism. It’s more that as apps evolve, there are certain baseline expectations that need to be fulfilled, which the VitaminWater app certainly does. I’m a little confused about why ultimate decision-making goes to 50 Cent (a company investor) and Carrie Underwood. Shouldn’t the winner be the one most people voted for?

But I digress. Obviously, the alleged wisdom of the crowd will have the most bearing on what VitaminWater’s next flavor is — so where this gets interesting is when the new flavor hits the shelves. How well will the crowdsourced flavor, and the user-generated label, sell? Will it be of interest only to those who participated in the program, while the rest of us continue to quaff “Dragonfruit” and “Endurance”? Does keeping users informed about what flavor is winning at any given time skew the results?

These questions are where the rubber meets the road on crowdsourcing. Though I firmly believe that social media in some ways will replace focus groups, right now there’s an element of trendiness to these initiatives. It’s another element in the same continuum that made digital marketers so crazy about Flash at one point, and user-generated commercial contests at another. As valid as some of these programs are, you can also picture marketing execs at a meeting where someone stands up and shouts, “Hey everyone, let’s find something to crowdsource!”

It’s also hard to figure out whether those using the flavorcreator app mean anything about the brand’s broader customer base. As it was with user-generated commercials and Flash, crowdsourcing will find its rightful place in the digital marketing pantheon, though I’d have to believe it will be a more substantive role than some of the more flash-in-the-pan things that have come before. The question here, and one that we should look to VitaminWater to help answer, is how the crowd on the one hand, and the carefully selected focus group on the other, align.

Initiatives such as this will also help us define what exactly crowdsourcing is, and I think that’s a work in progress. Some would define it as a completely unfettered opportunity for consumers to put forth their ideas and suggestions (think SXSW Interactive’s crowdsourcing of the agenda); others — and this appears to be what VitaminWater is doing — are doing it in a more controlled way.

As the contest continues, make sure to watch this app.

Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years. Contact her here.

By Eric Gruber in Featured

I’m going to let you in on a very dirty secret:

There is one question that is being dodged by experts in EVERY market. Answer that question and you’ll corner the market, be worshipped forever and get more customers and sales.

If it was that easy, why aren’t other experts answering these questions?

It’s because they fear an informed audience. That’s outright silly! But, we’re not going to tell them that. While your competitors run scared, you’ll be getting more sales since you’re going to follow the steps I outline in the article below. You will educate your targeted audiences, get more website traffic, teach people how to buy from you and increase your sales.

Now, are you ready?

Step 1: Find the questions that are being dodged by other experts in your industry.

I can’t tell you what these questions are. It will vary from industry to industry. . So, how do you find these golden questions to answer?

  • Go to Yahoo Answers and type in your keyword. Examine the questions carefully and see which ones keep popping up. If people are asking the same questions, that means that people have the same questions. There’s a need that’s NOT being fulfilled.
  • Go to forums and watch what your audience is discussing
  • Survey your clients, customers and list of prospects

Step 2: Answer the questions in as many formats as possible

For each question create a blog post. Do NOT date these blog posts – you will see why later on. Once you create your blog post, expand it into an article. Then, turn your article into a video, special report, podcast and audio interview. You should also create online press releases. If you need help with writing your articles and blog postings, I have templates that will help you write your articles in 30 minutes or less. Just go to http://www.StartWritingArticlesFaster.com

Step 3: Answer the Questions in As Many Places As Possible

  • You should submit your blog posts to as many RSS feeds as possible
  • You should bookmark your blog posts using Digg, Technorati and De.li.cious
  • You should submit your articles to the top websites, ezines and article directories that accept article submissions. We can do this for you at http://www.IWantMoreProspects.com
  • You should submit your videos to YouTube and Viddler. You may even want to think about investing in the TrafficGeyser.com video submission service
  • You should post links to your blog, articles and videos on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Linked In.
  • You should post your articles on social marketing websites sites like Scribd and Squidoo
  • You should submit your press releases through PR Web or Webwire. If you use Webwire.com, all you have to pay is $20. But, I do suggest comparing the two services and see which one matches your needs.
  • Videos teaching people how to buy from you or how to use your product should be on your website.
  • When people opt-in for your special reports, ebooks or other free offering, you should have an auto-responder series that gets people to go back to your blog or website. If you have lots of blog postings that answers your prospects’ top questions – all you have to do is create a summary for each blog posting and send people back to your blog every day. This way each blog posting will get the visibility it deserves. And, by not showing the date, these postings become evergreen.

Follow these steps and you will increase website traffic and get more sales, because you’ll be educating your prospects, answering their questions and teaching them how to buy from you.

About the Author:

Article Marketing Expert Eric Gruber uses the power of articles to create online opportunities for Internet marketers, small business owners, authors, entrepreneurs and speakers who want more publicity, prospects and profits. Now, you can get his instant article writing templates that will help you write your articles in 30 minutes or less. Get 3 of his favorite article writing templates for free at: http://www.TryMyFreeArticleTemplates.com

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

So they say size doesn’t matter. Well tell that to Google. They’ve just practically doubled the size of the search field on their home page. They’ve also increased the size of the “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons. If you conducted more than one search at Google.com on Wednesday, you might have noticed the change take effect live as the tweak was rolled out across the various datacenters.

The search box is now thicker and much longer than before. The character limit appears to be unchanged at around 96 characters but the text you type in is much larger. The two buttons beneath the search box are about 30% larger than before and have square rather than round, corners.

Compare the original search box with the new search box.

The change went mostly unnoticed until a blog post on Mashable went viral on Twitter, closely followed by a TechCrunch post on the subject.

The motivation for the change was initially unclear, but I assumed it to be a design usability issue, possibly in response to Bing’s clean search interface.

Google Vice President of User E Melissa Mayer finally confirmed the usability aspect later in the day with her post about the tweak :

“Starting today, you’ll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we’re excited about it – because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use. The new, larger Google search box features larger text when you type so you can see your query more clearly. It also uses a larger text size for the suggestions below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements.”

The tweak is now live on most of Google’s datacenters and regional sites.

By admin in Featured

seoI read a lot of articles and postings regarding Internet marketing, SEO and the like. One frequently recurring theme is the distinction between black hat, grey hat and white hat methods. Interlaced with the use and abuse of these terms is the notion of what is “ethical” and what is not. It seems to be generally assumed that anything black hat is somehow unethical. More disconcerting yet, anything that Google frowns upon is often deemed unethical as well. I would like to clear the air about these terms which seem to mean all things to all men.

First of all, let’s put to one side for a moment the recently coined terms which euphemistically refer to SEO techniques under hats of various colors. These are not dictionary terms, and anyone can make them mean whatever they want. However, the words “ethical” and “unethical” have very strict meanings, have had for generations and their misuse can call into question the personal integrity of individuals. So what does ethical mean anyway? According to dictionary.com (http://dictionary.com/):

By Donna Gunter in Featured

I often get asked the question, “How do I get more followers on Twitter?” Many of my clients want to pay a sum of money for the latest scheme to get them 10,000 new followers in 24 hours or some such nonsense as that. As in all marketing strategies, it’s not the number that counts. Rather, it’s the quality in the numbers that really matters. So, 10,000 followers who are not members of your target market are fairly useless to you. Of much greater value would be a smaller list of 1000 followers who are all members of your target market.

All in all, online social networking is not that vastly different from face-to-face networking. Some basic networking principles still apply, regardless of the platform:

To be interesting, you have to be interested (in others). Try to be a resource and give first before asking for anything.

I’m not particularly a social person, nor do I like to waste time making chit-chat with my followers. It’s just not my style. I realize I lose some major networking points because of this personality trait, although I will comment on something of a personal nature or add to a discussion on occasion.

However, what I do well is educate and provide useful information that people want and need, so that’s the strategy I use in my social networking. Quite frankly, that’s the primary reason I pay attention to only a small select group of people on Twitter — they consistently provide me with great information of use to my business, and many times it is this same information that I’ll retweet to my followers. Understandably, it’s probably taken me longer to build a following than someone who spends more time on this than I do, but in the long run, you have to determine what works best for you and set a finite amount of time each day to devote to social networking so that it doesn’t become all-consuming.

Here are the 7 ways you can become follow-worthy on Twitter:

  1. Distribute your ezine. My ezine is chock-full of useful info each week, and it’s connected to both Facebook and Twitter. So, every time I publish an issue, all my Facebook and Twitter followers receive it.
  2. Distribute blog posts. My blog is also connected to both Facebook and Twitter, so every time a post is made, all my Facebook and Twitter followers receive it. My more popular articles will be retweeted at least 10 times by different followers on my list because they felt the content was valuable for their network.
  3. Distribute your articles. My EzineArticles.com account is connected to Twitter, so every time they accept an article for publication, it goes out to my Twitter and Facebook followers.
  4. Retweet the posts of others. I’m regularly retweeting the posts of people I follow that I find useful and think that my followers will find useful as well. In fact, I am regularly cited as someone to follow because I provide great information to my followers.
  5. Create a tips hashtag campaign. I’ve got a tips series that I publish on Twitter where I regularly publish tips on traffic generation for my followers. Many of these have been retweeted over time.
  6. Comment on other people’s posts. If I have something pertient to add, I’ll comment or reply to a small number of posts each week. 7. Be interested in your followers. Ask and answer questions, make referrals, take suggestions, provide support, and do many of the thing you would normally do if you were in a room of people.

Use your information and knowledge to build your following on Twitter. Your followers will pass your useful information to their networks, and slowly but surely, your number of followers will increase, as well.

Online Business Coach and Internet Marketing Strategist Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online businesses that they love. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

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