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By Chip Cooper in Featured

You’re offering a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution to the corporate market. You’ve developed your standard form SaaS agreement (sometimes referred to as a “hosted software services agreement”). And you’ve presented your agreement to your corporate prospect’s representative.

Are you prepared for the issues you’re most likely to be confronted with by a SaaS-savvy corporate user – or do you flunk the test?

Two Approaches to SaaS Contracting

There are two basic approaches to SaaS agreements with end-user customers:

* the click-wrapped agreement approach – a “take it or leave it” online agreement that’s presented electronically during your site’s registration process with an “I Agree” button, and;

* the traditional paper-based, signed agreement approach – an agreement that’s presented with the expectation that it will be negotiated and eventually (you hope) accepted and signed by the user.

Since the click-wrapped approach is not subject to negotiation, that’s not the subject of this article. What we’re concerned with here, is whether you’re prepared to negotiate the cutting edge issues of a traditional paper-based, signed agreement with a corporate user – and a SaaS-savvy one at that.

The single, most significant driver of your prospect’s questions and concerns with your traditional paper-based, signed SaaS agreement is the fact that your prospect is considering surrendering its valuable and sensitive data to you – transferring it into the “cloud.” Your prospect will test you with questions and concerns regarding the privacy and security if its data. How you respond will determine, in most transactions, whether you’ll get the business.

Are you ready for the test?

Your Data Center

If you’re typical, you’ve outsourced your data center to an outside hosting service provider, and your prospect knows that. So the prospect is considering a transaction where its data is being outsourced not once, but twice. This raises questions and concerns regarding privacy and security.

Some of the key questions and concerns are:

* Who is your hosting service provider? What’s their reputation in the field and financial viability? Is it permissible to visit the data center for purposes of evaluation?

* Where are the servers located? Will servers be required to be located only in the United States?

* Security audits – does the hosting service provider provide SAS 70 reports periodically (Type 1 or Type 2)?

* Changes to a successor data center – will the prospect insist on approval of any change to another hosting service provider?

* Privacy and security agreements – are satisfactory privacy and security agreements in place between you and the hosting service provider?

* Responsibility – will you be responsible for the acts and omissions of the hosting service provider as if the acts and omissions were yours?

* Disaster recovery – what’s the level of support?

* Redundancy – if there is a problem with the active server, does a mirrored server kick in?

* Backups – what’s the frequency of data backups?

* Access to data – who at the hosting service provider has access to data in the server?

Your Customer’s Access to its Data

Although the data resides in servers located at your hosting service provider’s facility, your customer may have a need to access this data from time to time.

Some of the key questions and concerns are:

* Data requests – how will the customer’s requests for data be handled, including responses to legal discovery (eDiscovery) requests, search warrants, and subpoenas?

* Return of data – when the SaaS relationship ends, how will the data be returned and will the hosting service provider retain data, such as in its backup system?

Are You an Insurer for Data Security Breach?

Do you give an indemnity for any and all security breaches that affect your customer’s data? This is a key question. If you do, you need to be sure that you’ve added an additional fee to your pricing to cover this significant risk.

Think about it. It’s a fact that there’s no system currently known to man that is guaranteed to be absolutely safe and secure from outside hacks. So, if you guarantee data security with a general indemnity, you’re providing a guarantee over which you have no control and which you’ll be expected to honor financially in the future with some of your customers. Count on it. In essence, you’ll be providing an insurance policy, and you had better be charging an insurance “premium” to cover the risk.

One way to deal with the issue is to agree to a standard for data security that you’ll be responsible to satisfy. The standard may be general in nature, such as compliance with reasonable data security measures that are generally followed in the industry. Or, the standard may be more specific, such as standards set by the EU Safe Harbor or the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or a very specific negotiated standard. In any case, once the standard is agreed upon, you might agree to be responsible for a security breach only if it’s enabled by your failure to comply with the standard. If the breach is not enabled by your breach of the standard, you’re not responsible.

One of the issues regarding your scope of responsibility for a data breach is who is responsible (or the extent that the responsibility may be shared) for notifying the persons affected by the data breach as required by the patchwork quilt of state laws dealing with breach notification.

Conclusion

Did you pass the test?

If you’re not prepared to discuss these questions and concerns competently, then you’ve flunked the test.

If you’re not sure about how to handle these issues, you’re advised to seek competent legal counsel who’s familiar with them.

The ultimate questions are whether you:

* understand and adequately provide for the risk allocation inherent in your SaaS agreement, and;

* provide a satisfactory response to your prospects’ questions and concerns regarding privacy and security.

Leading Internet, IP and software lawyer Chip Cooper has automated drafting your SaaS Agreement www.digicontracts.com/saas.aspx with his DigiContracts.com SaaS Agreement Form Generator. Use his free online tool — Website Documents Determinator — to determine which documents your website really needs. Discover how quick, easy, and cost-effective it is to draft your website legal forms at DigiContracts.com.

By Derek Vaughan in Featured

dedicated serverI recently read with interest an article on pcmag.com which gave advice on what to look for when buying a server. The comments were well thought through for those purchasing their own server – perhaps for installation into an on-site corporate data center. For those who need to rent a dedicated server from an external hosting provider, there are a few other important items to consider. The following is a list to refer to when contemplating selecting and using a dedicated server provider. Thanks go out to dedicated server provider 34SP.com for contributing expertise to this piece.

Security – A top priority for those outsourcing their servers is security. The data and processes that are most frequently running on dedicated servers are mission-critical to businesses or contain highly sensitive corporate or consumer information. There are specific security requirements for the most sensitive data such as credit card transactions. For example, it is well known that to process credit cards one needs a secure certificate often referred to as an SSL certificate. Any hosting provider can accommodate this requirement, however, you will also want a hosting provider to be PCI compliant as well. You can read all the details on PCI compliance on the website of the PCI Security Standards Council. You can visit the TrustWave website if you need to buy an SSL certificate.

The other important security issues are based around malicious activity – someone hacking your server. No hosting provider or server will ever be completely immune to malicious activity. There are simply too many exploits, worms, DDOS attacks and brute force password hacks to thwart them all 100 percent of the time. That being said, you should select a dedicated server provider that is hyper vigilant to the security of your server and will jump in very quickly to resolve any issues. You can assess the company’s security preparedness by asking for an outline of their security practices and what steps they take in the event of an incident.

Backups and Recovery – In the unfortunate event that your server is compromised at some point you will need to recover your data and processes quickly to minimize the damage. While every hosting provider touts their ability to backup and recover data, it is well worth your time to investigate these processes thoroughly. For example, how often are backups made? Also important – look for a company that has off site backups. This is important in the event of a facility emergency such as fire or flood. Your server and or hard drives may be damaged and if the backups are sitting right next to the server in the data center – then the backups may become corrupt as well. Then you are stuck. If the data is backed up off site then there is a much better chance that the initial disaster will not effect your ability to get your server back up quickly. Of course you will also want to create your own backups of your critical data and only rely on the hosting provider as a last resort. This gives you an added layer of redundancy.

Connectivity and Reliability – If you have your own corporate data center, then all the myriad issues of Internet connectivity and reliability are covered. With an external dedicated server provider, however, the reliability of the server hardware is only as good as the reliability of the network and connectivity. That is – if your server is unable to connect to the Internet for any reason then your server will be down. Any decent dedicated server provider will use capable hardware and switches, so it is usually how the network is configured and traffic routing that makes a difference. There is also an issue of multiple redundant bandwidth providers, and the ability to switch seamlessly between them in the event of a connectivity disruption. To judge a service provider on this metric, look for third party independent measurements of uptime and reliability such as Netcraft.com. The company publishes a list of the most reliable websites each month as rated by connectivity failures from a network of collector sites distributed around the globe. You can also view a real-time list of hosting providers network performance. Be certain to select a dedicated server provider with a low failure rate for the network – otherwise your server will be subject to unwanted downtime.

Server Maintenance – There are two types of server administrators: hands-on and hands-off. You should know which category you fall into. Your server will require patches and updates from time to time. The server will undoubtedly need rebooting occasionally. There will be rogue processes which need chasing down and correcting. Also as mentioned above, someone needs to be hyper vigilant regarding server security. If you are hands-on them you will be fine with an unmanaged server. The unmanaged server saves money in that the responsibility for the admin tasks lies squarely on the user. If you are hands-off then you need a managed server provider who will conduct the server tasks necessary for the proper maintenance of the server for you. With a managed server the monthly service fees may be slightly higher to account for an engineer’s time to maintain your server, however this frees you up to do other important tasks for your business. So in the end the costs are really not that different.

Service and Support - The cornerstone of all the above considerations are the service and support provided by the Linux dedicated server provider. You are resting the future of your business in the hands of your hosting provider. You need to be confidant that they will come through for you during an emergency – and there will be an emergency. In fact, there will be many emergencies over the life of your server – some small and some more serious. It is imperative that the service and support are of the highest order. Look for having a 24 x 7 x 365 dedicated server engineer on call for your server at the other end of a phone call. You can assess the capabilities through online forums such as webhostingtalk.com or search for a provider’s name on Google or use a Twitter real-time search for the brand name.

Derek Vaughan is a web hosting industry veteran and expert. Mr. Vaughan has architected the marketing growth of several prominent web hosting success stories leading to acquisition including Affinity Internet, Inc., Aplus.Net and HostMySite.com. Prior to his entry into the web hosting industry, Mr. Vaughan was responsible for online marketing at The Walt Disney Company where he marketed ecommerce for the ESPN.com and NASCAR.com brands. Mr. Vaughan received his M.B.A. from Vanderbilt University and is currently serves on the HostingCon Advisory Board.

By Eric K Frey in Featured

marketingWhen someone speaks about viral marketing or viral advertising they are referring to marketing techniques that use a variety of social networks or similar vehicles to increase product awareness and sales. In effect, modern methods of promotion on the Internet are really just updated versions of old fashioned word of mouth advertising. However, the wide variety of methods available, combined with the huge amount of activity on the Internet, make this form of advertising extremely powerful.

Viral Marketing can be a very effective and inexpensive way to create exponential growth and quickly increase visibility. If implemented properly, a viral advertising campaign can reach tremendous numbers of potential customers at a low cost and in a short period of time. As the name implies, it relies on spreading information among people who interact with each other.

The primary concept behind viral promotion entails delivering subject matter concerning your specific campaign to a portion of a group of persons who can in turn relay the message to other people in that same group. To put it differently, the primary desire here is to have his promotional material become contagious in a manner that it will be circulated to other people by those it originally was introduced to. In this process, the marketer will be able to reach a broader number of people without enduring the price related to contacting every last one of those people individually.

This operation commences by directing a message to those with a degree of social networking potential. These are the people who frequently spend time in parts of the Internet where acquired data is commonly shared with others who get together there. The most elementary instances would be the assorted social networking sites like FaceBook or Twitter.

After content which people find notable is put up on these sites, it is then plausible to circulate it to other people throughout the same system.

In the ideal situation, the following group of those receiving the content will pass it to more people who might forward it on once more. As this advances, an extensive total of viable purchasers could see the information that was shown to a comparatively modest percentage of the population of that particular social network. It is likewise possible for an ad of striking interest to be put across to yet some other network, speeding up the viral outcome to an even greater extent.

Most commonly, viral advertising is introduced in the form of text messages at social networking sites such as MySpace, Digg or Twitter. In some cases the same effect can be gained by simple emails that request the receiver to forward the message on to others. However, some of the advertising campaigns have become very sophisticated and take the form of videos, interactive games or software applications.

The basic requirement to any effective viral effort of every kind embodies distributing something that is sufficiently fascinating to cause consumers to mention it to other people that they expect might also be curious about that specific content. Attempting to distribute items which are old or too common is seldom effectual in viral selling. A product or service that is recent or singular will experience a better probability of being commented about and referred through people in that system to additional prospects. Items that are excessively common are merely ignored.

As with every other kind of World Wide Web marketing, viral advertising should be employed with sophistication. When it is submitted well, it could significantly grow traffic to an Internet site by being transmitted from computer to computer. It should be utilized cautiously, because, as with conventional word of mouth promoting, whenever it is done badly it could estrange buyers and impact the reputation of the entire enterprise.

If you want to learn how to use the power of viral advertising, then you should look up Viral Traffic Python. Many reviews can tell you about how successful it is and that its the new marketing tool. Viral ads can generate many unique visits to your website. Start getting viral traffic today. Visit us at viraltrafficpython.com.

By Kashish Arora in Featured

linkbuildingYou have finally set up your own site & are eagerly waiting for your business to flourish. But have you given a thought to how users online will know a site like yours exists? Well, if no one knows your site exists how would you sell your product or get more clients? The entire e-business world relies on one simple thing to gain visibility and get more profit. Yes, search engines like Yahoo, Google and Bing determine which sites are visible and which are not. And for a search engine to place your website at the top, you need to have good backlinks.

The high page rank that you crave for is attainable only if you have done your homework and set up good backlinks. Making your site appear in the top pages of a search engine requires a great deal of backlinks which will ultimately ensure that you have traffic in your website. And the procedure is simple. There are many legal ways to create backlinks to your site. First you have to learn how to create a backlink. An anchor text is all you need. It should look something like this:

<a href=”your” website url>Your keywords here</a>

Now let’s take a look at the various ways you can create backlinks to your website-

• Submitting articles to directories:
This is one of the most trusted methods of getting great backlinks to your site. All you have to do is write an article with good content and submit it to the many online article submission directories. While you are at it here are some points to look out for-
1. Add Variety: Content is king. So make sure that you don’t just submit the same articles to every directory. Chances are there that the search engines will mark them as ‘duplicate content’ and all your hard work will prove futile. So have good content and variety in your articles.
2. Submit Manually: True time is money, but to save time don’t get lured by the many ‘automatic ‘submission software. Instead submit the articles manually and only to the relevant directories where you know the search engines will look first.
3. Always Link To Your Site: Make sure that your backlinks contain your own website URL and also throw in a keyword that which in turn links to that specific keyword related page in your site.

• Using Social Media:
Make use of social media like Facebook & Twitter to spread the word. Upload videos of your site and add them to YouTube channels. Or you can also use your articles in an innovative way by converting them to slideshows which can be submitted to many websites. Also posting to forums in communities helps spread the word. It’ll surely generate more traffic to your site.

• Posting to Blogs & Sites:
With the huge no. of blogs that are being created every minute, you can surely link back to your site by submitting the backlinks to the blog with keywords that matches with yours. Use the many blogs and websites that allow you to submit your articles too and thus give you good backlinks in return. You can even make use of Google keywords alert that will alert you whenever a new blog comes up that has keywords useful for your site.

• Link Exchange sites:
If time isn’t what you have in plenty then worry not. Many link exchange sites have now come up that assure you a higher page rank when you submit your links to them. But make sure you opt for sites that have a good PR & are relevant to your keywords. And of course you need to shell out a few bucks too for this service.

• Using Comments Effectively:
A simple yet tricky method to link back to your site is to effectively use the comments section that you find in many blogs & websites. All you have to do is give a good comment and add the anchor text to it and now you have another backlink! But be careful not to end up marked as spam. Make sure that the site or blog is closely related to your comments & link. Don’t just go about commenting on home loans when the blog is about culinary skills!

So now that you have successfully added backlinks everywhere, watch the traffic flow to your site & get a better page rank. But don’t rest for too long as you need to keep updating and adding more links to ensure the PR stays good. Keep abreast of the latest changes so you wouldn’t lag behind when it comes to popularizing your site.

Is your website getting enough targeted visitors? If your answer is ‘NO’ we can help you. Kashish Arora is CEO at Kashco Consulting a SEO Company. We helps businesses to get their website higher in major search engines. Contact me today for SEO Services & SEO Consulting.

By Neil Holley-Williams in Featured

linkbuilding2So you’ve got yourself a website and are all excited about it. You tell your friends, colleagues and business contacts and the first thing they say is ” Oooh.. that’s great, you can link to mine and I’ll link to yours”… and everybody involved thinks this is a great idea because hey, the more links you have the more popular your site is with Google.

Now this is all very well if you are talking about a few links between ‘networking businesses’, but in the bigger picture, exchanging reciprocal links is not a good way to ingratiate your site with Google.

Be wary of joining Link Exchange Schemes or you could catch a nasty cold!

If reaching Page 1 were that easy, all we’d have to do is put a couple of hundred (or a thousand) links from our web pages to other pages and ask them to do the same. Websites would immediately become ‘huge link banks’ rather than sources of information which is essentially what they should be in every case, even commercial sites.

Google views 1 to 1 reciprocal linking very, very low in importance, for just that reason.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do your friends a favor and they not do the same for you, but just think about what Google thinks is important or you might just experience a long-term negative impact.

By John Sylvester in Featured

In Babbage’s column this week, Virtual Lemmings, he argues that humans are a gregarious lot, which gives rise to herd mentality, while Will Self writes of superficial advances that provide us with more disposable time we just fill it up fiddling with iPhones.

First, let’s look glance through a few headlines in today’s Mashable. One talks about how many texts an average teenager sends per month, another that Obama was answering tweets during a town hall event and, one that caught some sense of my imagination, was by Jessica Faye Carter on why Twitter influences cross-cultural engagement.

In Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter (no relation of Del Boy) was known for his studies on the herd instinct, which he outlined in two papers in 1908. Trotter argued that gregariousness was an instinct in line with bees, sheep and packs of wolves, while William James proposed a little earlier that the impulse of an instinct is of such  axiomatically obviousness that any idea of discussing its basis is ultimately foolish.

Elaborating upon this, Professor Lloyd Morgan defined instinctive behaviour as: “that which is on its first occurrence independent of prior experience; which tends to be to the well-being of the individual and the preservation of the race; which is similarly performed by all the members of the same more or less restricted group of animals; and which may be subject to subsequent modification under the guidance of experience.” Social media would not quite fit this criterion, perhaps.

But it’s to this millennium I turn and who better than “The Madness of Crowds: Gadgets”, by Will Self. In his column he talks about how he often succumbs to: “one of the great delusions of the modern world: namely that a gadget or device will allow me to do something I’ve been doing for years faster and more efficiently, thereby gifting me more of the kind of time I so desperately need: down time.”

He describes in some detail about “gizmos” that do nothing for him and yet when confronted with an advert or hear some “Twittery spiel of some deranged early adopter”, he flies off into some imagined computer-generated fantasy of “techno-adequacy”, when really “we yearn to dabble for ever in the rock pools of juvenescence”.

Satnav, he argues, “has to be the ultimate useless gizmo when it comes to saving time. I’ve lost count of occasions I’ve had to deprogramme a minicab driver and persuade him that just possibly I know a better route across town than his dash-mounted white pebble, as I’ve lived here my entire life.”

But getting back to Jessica Faye Carter, she believes that” “We might be intrigued by a comment we see in the Trending Topics, and we visit the person’s profile to see if it’s someone we want to follow [herd mentality]. Or we see a Trending Topic we’ve never heard of and want to know what’s going on…

“But even without the third party apps, there is a universality of shared experience that underlies interactions on Twitter. Nancy Perez, CEO of Social Media Wired, sees Twitter as a place of shared human experience, noting that ‘the interests, behaviors, thought processes, speech patterns and daily commonalities of life translate [Twitter] conversations into the universal language of humankind.’” Or, how Will Self would have it: “How mad is that?”

In “The Dynamics of Crowd Conflict” it states: “As human beings, we have a natural tendency not to want to be alone in what we think. If we have a thought, opinion or view that we thought no one else had, we might compromise that view in order to fit in somewhere. Human beings are social creatures and fear nothing more than being alone. Adolescents get pinned with having more of a ‘herd mentality’ than adults, but I would argue that the bandwagon psychology is rampant even among the most mature adults.

“The bandwagon psychology, or the ‘herd mentality’, is the process of a person joining a group of people that believe in something, even though that person might not believe in it themselves…Human beings are more connected than they think according to the bandwagon psychology.”

The has been weighted to be typically cynical, so I’ll introduce James Surowiecki, who thinks us lemmings are in fact “often better than could have been made by any single member of the group”. In the “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations”, he breaks down the advantages he sees in disorganised decisions into three main types, which he classifies as cognition (thinking and information processing); coordination of behaviour, which alludes to optimising the utilisation of a popular bar and not colliding in moving traffic flows; and cooperation (how groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behaviour or directly enforcing their compliance.

Surowiecki also studies “rational bubbles” in which the crowd produces very bad judgements, and argues that in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because “the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently”.

“Crowds collectively swayed by a persuasive speaker, is the main reason that the reason why groups of people intellectually conform when that system for decision-making has a systematic flaw.” And he asserts that this can lead to “fragile social outcomes”. Also, emotional factors, such as a feeling of belonging, can lead to peer pressure, herd instinct and, in extreme cases, collective hysteria.

In the Economist, Dr Reed-Tsochas and Dr Onnela are quoted as having “duly discovered that the social networkers’ herd mentality was intact, with popular apps doing best, and the trendiest reaching stratospheric levels…What did come as something of a surprise, though, was that our inner lemming only kicked in once the app had breached a clear threshold rate of about 55 installations a day. Any fewer than that and users seemed oblivious to their friends’ preferences.”

At some level then, virtual lemmings as described, we all seem to be.

V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

By James Druman in Featured

marketing3Successful online businesses don’t come easy or we’d all have one—right? It is a hard game, and there are plenty of people who never make it, but the ones who do make it have a pretty good life indeed. And if you’re the type who was inspired by the Four Hour Workweek and loved Tim Ferris’s idea of tramping around the globe and leveraging currency differences in some of the best place son Earth, it doesn’t take all that much money for a good internet marketing business to set you free.

So what does it take to create a successful online business then?

1. Ridiculous Work Ethic

Cast your assumptions aside – internet marketing success takes A LOT of hard, hard work – at least in the beginning. Most big-timers have put in massive amounts of time and energy to get their businesses where they are today. Sure, now they may be coasting now – although many learn to love the grind and just keep creating – but most have paid their dues.

Be prepared to put in 120% effort, as they say, and work while your friends and family are sleeping. Keep your eye on your dream, and push on.

2. Money to Invest

While it is possible to start successful online businesses from scratch, in most cases, it will take some money to get going along the way. Now, most costs, like web hosting, a domain name, and a quality autoresponder program, are quite cheap, but there are other costs you may not be taking into account until you get your feet wet.

I’d say a major one is skills. Learning things like graphics design, web design, and marketing itself – these things cost time and money. You can hire a quality freelancer to do some of them, and I recommend that with the most important ones, but if you want quality, be prepared to pay.

Another thing that costs is knowledge. You can find anything you want for free – or come up with them through your own through processes – but unless you want to grind away for years at this craft, it’s better to find someone highly successful to emulate, in which case you’ll likely need to pay for their knowledge.

Finally, if you don’t want to do all this while working a full-time job, you’d better have some money saved up – to last a good chunk of time. I highly recommend freelancing as a way to fund your internet marketing journey.

3. The Ability to Learn

Do you have the ability to learn new skills and the energy to keep after them until you have achieved mastery? In many cases, that’s what it takes, and while everyone says they can learn and love to do it, true learning is rare in our culture. Just look how often the people around you have made actual changes in their life if you don’t believe me.

4. Unrealistic Goals

Like any successful entrepreneur, you need to be somewhat of a dreamer. And the ability to stand behind those big dreams when no one else has faith in you is even more important in this business because all your friends and family will be there telling you it’s a sham.

5. Guidance

Finally, nothing is so valuable as solid guidance in the internet marketing world. It is hard to find someone you can put your faith in, but if you don’t find someone then you will find yourself running down one path after another, never staying on one long enough to get results.

I highly encourage you to find one person who you respect and trust that is doing very well for themselves, and follow them. Once you’ve mastered what they are teaching and begun making money, then you can begin to study someone else and keep building on your knowledge-base to emulate the successful online businesses that are already out there.

Click on the link now to download my free report: 10 Successful Lies About Success at www.LiesAboutSuccess.com. Jim Rohn once said, “My suggestion would be to walk away from the 90% who don’t and join the 10% who do.” Are you ready to get results in your business?

By Forrest Yingling in Featured

SEOptimizationWhen someone has a question, many times these days the first thing they turn to for an answer is the Internet.  Just about anything and everything can be found online.  From the most basic answer to the simplest question to in depth research about complex topics — it’s all available on the Internet.

As a business owner, the Internet can be a valuable tool for you to utilize in your marketing efforts.  You need to make sure that when people type in a search phrase related to your business that your website comes up on the results pages.  The process of search engine optimization (SEO) enhances your website to make it more appealing to the search engine spiders that crawl your site and when done properly, improves your website as a whole.

SEO as a Business Strategy
The top three search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo so these are the sites that you should target in your SEO efforts.  Since Google is undoubtedly the leader in the search engine industry, they set the standards and they are the site to target with your SEO efforts.

If your business is not optimized for the search engines and your competition’s website is then they will rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERP) and thus people will more likely click through to their site and do business with them.  The higher you rank on Google and the other search engines, the more traffic your site will receive and if you have a good website, the more conversions you will make and your profits will increase.

Editing Your Website For SEO Purposes
In order to properly optimize your website for the search engines, you will need to perform some basic tasks.

First, you need to make sure you pick around 10-15 keywords that you should use as the meta tags for your website and focus on 3-5 as your main keywords.  Meta tags consist of the title of the page, the description of the page and the keywords of the page.

Search engines use the meta description tag as the description of your website in the SERPs.  The keywords are used as search terms or phrases so that when someone searches for those terms, your website appears as a result.

You want your site to be as friendly to the search engines as possible in order to rank higher for your targeted keywords.  You want to repeat your keywords but not too much.  You need to keep the keyword density to  no more than 1 keyword per 100 words of text.

Being at the top of the results pages for targeted keywords is an extremely important part of business in today’s world.  Making your website both user-friendly and search engine friendly by performing website editing tasks like regular content updates and the use of meta tags.

Forrest Yingling is the Marketing Director for Easy WebContent, the premier website editing tool.  Easy WebContent is the most powerful HTML editor on the market and makes updating your website easier than ever before!

By Craig Breeze in Featured

webtrafficMaybe the idea of rewriting content around keywords doesn’t sound like your cup of tea. That’s fine – you can still load Private Label Rights content up on your website or blog and pull traffic in like crazy.

How?

By “bookmarking” your site (with appropriate tags and/or in appropriate categories) on the most popular social bookmarking sites. The end result is that you probably won’t get traffic from the search engines but you WILL be pulling in traffic from the high-traffic Web 2.0 sites.

But this type of marketing does not come without a catch

You can’t just bookmark bland content and expect people to visit. What you want your visitors to do is get excited and tell their friends – and in the case of social bookmarking, that means you want your visitors to bookmark and rate your site.

What this means you need to choose your best Private Label Rights content to post to your website or blog. If the content reads like every other article , people won’t bookmark it. But if you use the content that’s well-written or even a little edgy, you’ll have traffic bookmarking and rating your site like crazy!

Bookmarking Tips

To make your social-bookmarking efforts even more effective, be sure to add the social bookmarking buttons on your web pages, so that your visitors can quickly and easily bookmark your site. This will improve your rankings on these sites, meaning more people will visit …and more will bookmark it.

While there are plenty of social bookmarking sites online, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the most popular and high-traffic sites.

You will need to do your homework here, as there are better sites then others to place your article, be sure to include a link to your site or affiliate program with in your article.

As you are only getting your article bookmarked, links will be your key to getting traffic to your site, and unlike submitting to article sites you will be able to included your links here.

As you can see there are many was to get traffic to your site and this is just one of them but be sure to keep track on more of my articles in the coming weeks as we will be including more and more tips to drive that all important traffic and customers to your site.

Just touching on a point we made before please make sure the content you are looking to bookmark is fresh and new and not just copied and pasted, as you want something new that will keep your reader interested, I can not stress just how important this is to your online success.

To learn more about the benefits of Private Label Rights go to www.profit-with-plr.com Here you will find a complete mentoring program that you can follow at your own pace with nothing left to chance.

By Lyn Miles in Featured

social networksThe buzz words continue to be Social Media, SMO, and everything to do with Social Networking, so it is not surprising that we are constantly bombarded via all media outlets with “Are You?” or “Why Aren’t You?” on Facebook and Twitter (and all the many others social media sites). Therefore, I wonder, is our society about to reach Social Media overload? I do believe some people go over-the-top with the amount of time spent on these sites, but they ARE, and I will repeat ARE, extremely necessary in today’s business environment and YOU SHOULD have an account on both sites to actively pursue your businesses opportunities!!!

Since their inception a few years back, membership stats for both have exceeded even that of MySpace, which had become a phenom in itself for kids and musicians. It appears that MySpace has been replaced by Facebook [thanks in part to college students (the GenXers) and recent explosive interest by the Baby Boomers] as the GO TO place for social interaction with friends, family, and business opportunities. Heck, everyone has a Facebook page these days! My point exactly!! Everyone has a page, so as a business person you should be pursuing all your Friends and Family members to become a “Fan” and “Like It – Friend for your company”, thus their Friends and Family members become your potential customers/clients too.

Same goes with Twitter. Reaching out to those who use Twitter for information, news, opportunities, etc. You can definitely reach a younger audience and there are many Twitter apps that allow you to setup Tweets in advance and send them out an a scheduled release. A huge time saver! TechCrunch listed several on their site…

Twitpic – an app that lets users share photos on Twitter, took the top spot with 1,236,828 unique visitors in January. Tweetdeck - which came in second with 285,864 monthly visits, is a Twitter app that streamlines notifications and tweets. Third place went to Digsby (with 233,472 monthly visitors), an application that centralizes e-mail, IM and social networking accounts into one desktop program. With 149,812 visits, the fourth most popular app, Twitterfeed – offers to automatically tweet posts published on a user’s blog using RSS. A Twitter user ranking site, Twitterholic – is the fifth most popular application, with 147,164 people visiting monthly. Read more: techcrunch.com/2009/02/19/the-top-20-twitter-applications/#ixzz0n4qbY9Oa.

If you don’t have these accounts setup, it is pretty easy to do. For Facebook, first creative a personal account. Once you have created your personal page, on the left hand column under Ads and Pages, you can create a page for your business. This is a great place to provide information about your business, news, promos, sales, create an ad, post your blog, announce specials or sales events….whatever you want to promote…here is your FREE (the magic word here is – FREE) opportunity to get the word out at the same time keeping your personal page separate from the world to see.

For Twitter, you should have a personal account and/or a business account. Larger organizations’ employees should have employee business accounts – all tweeting and providing business news and insights, as well. Again, all this just opens more doors, creates additional ways to get your company name on the Internet, and more content for your web site. Your accounts can be added to a web page providing real-time updates, follow me buttons or sign up for streaming.

Use any one or all of the above applications to further promote your website, blog, press releases, business products, sales & promotions. You can schedule in advance and incorporate into your overall marketing plan. Take the time to set up your business with all the tools necessary to succeed and then when someone asks you, “Are you on Facebook?” you will be able to reply with a “YES!”

Lyn is a business marketing and social media professional. She has worked for corporations and Internet startups as a marketing consultant and community manager for social media and business relations.

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